The Book of Women's Love and Jewish Medieval Medical Literature on Women, Sefer Ahavat Nashim (review)

The Book of Women's Love is a possibly late thirteenth-century anonymous Hebrew compilation of practices and recipes for the care and preservation of the health and beauty of the human body, particularly the female body. Its three sections treat magic (especially love magic); sexuality (recipes to assist coitus and to copulate well); and a combination of cosmetics (depilation, epilation; bleaching of hair, facial hair, and teeth; teeth maintenance and oral hygiene; sweat control; diminishing large breasts), gynecology, and obstetrics (mainly recipes arranged from head to toe concerning conditions and diseases of the female reproductive organs, conception, pregnancy, and menstruation). The compilation was naturally aimed at women, though the language (the use of masculine pronouns) and specific chapters suggest that they were not its intended readers exclusively. It may well have targeted male practitioners who, treating women, were expected to supply practical answers to women's problems. The text contains significant parallels with the Catalan version of the Trotula and the French work known as Des aides de la maire et de ses medicines, and it is also interspersed with Catalan words transliterated into Hebrew—both of which render plausible a Catalan or Provençal provenance.

This edition of The Book of Women's Love is based on the only surviving manuscript from late fifteenth-century Catalunya or Provence. It provides the reader with a bilingual version of the text (Hebrew with English translation) accompanied by a commentary, a detailed introduction that places the text in its cultural and historical contexts, and useful English-Hebrew-English glossaries of key terms appearing in the recipes. A helpful analytical index seals this volume.

I collated the Hebrew edition with the microfilm of the manuscript and found the transcription and the translation marvelously accurate and reliable. The author's good command of the Hebrew, combined with her perfect knowledge of the Iberian languages, dramatically improves our understanding of the Hebrew text, which is interspersed with Catalan words and terms. Minor errors of transcription appear (p. 41: Maimonides' title should be De regimine sanitatis; note 97 on p. 71 reappears as note 157;p. 119 p. 137 p. 139 p. 143 p. 147 p. 167 p. 173 p. 175: table 2, second line left should be g), but being largely typographical errors they neither damage the English translation nor harm the soundness and validity of this fine edition. The Hebrew abbreviations are inconsistently spelled out, an editorial flaw that highlights the absence of a list of these abbreviations.

Carmen Caballero-Navas shows the extent to which ideas about the female body and its care in Greco-Arab medical tradition influenced the Hebrew text. She demonstrates how closely Jewish practices and those of the surrounding society were linked. Some real gems are hidden in the text—such as the allusion to the presence of same-sex relationships in Jewish medieval society, and hence the need to provide women with magic formulas to break men's bonds of intimate friendship. This is another indication that medieval Jewish society was not unfamiliar with sexual diversity. The author's openly feminist approach may not be to every reader's taste, yet here it has led not to major explanatory distortions but to broad and interesting discussions of women's literacy, and of the consequences of the imposition of obligatory heterosexuality on women for medical discourse about them.

Caballero-Navas illuminates women's matters but also sheds light on the complex process whereby medical terminology is created when knowledge is transferred from one linguistic space (medieval Catalan or Provençal) to another (Hebrew). Her philological approach provides a treasure trove of information on the influence of Romance languages on the Hebrew text...