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REVIEWS 198 that implies a more hands-on experience with the oral and practical culture of Salernitan women’s medicine. On the first page of her Introduction, Green explains her approach to the material she has edited in a thoughtful passage worthy of quotation: Rather than looking through the lens of modern biology, a history of medicine —and not merely of disease—tries to explore medical systems of the past on their own terms. These societies saw a different body than we do, not necessarily because the physical body itself differed significantly, but because their intellectual structures of explanation and their social objectives in controlling the body differed. The task of the history of medicine is to reconstruct an image of the world that they saw, a sensation of the body as they experienced it. This admirable approach is apparent throughout the volume, and is paired with a responsible desire to avoid the kind of wishful thinking that has too often marred feminist scholarship. Rather than attempting to prove that medieval women controlled their own medical and biological destinies, Green notes the exceptional nature of Trota as a female medical author and explores the way in which, to quote her 1996 Duke Magazine interview, “women’s knowledge comes to be men’s knowledge” during the Middle Ages. The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine furnishes students and scholars with an invaluable reference. Backed by more than twenty years of scrupulous research and publication, as well as an insightful methodology , it also provides them with an object of inspiration. Green’s work is a remarkable example of scholarship at its best. ANDREA JONES, English, UCLA Martin Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours: History and Society in the Sixth Century, trans. Christopher Carroll (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001) xii + 235pp., bibliography, 2 indices. Gregory of Tours is the new English translation of Martin Heinzelmann’s 1994 German monograph, Gregor von Tours (538–594): Zehn Bücher Geschichte, Historiographie und Gesellschaftskonzept im 6.Jarhundert (Darmstadt: Wissenschafliche Buchgesellschaft 1994). This book reinterprets the writings of Gregory, bishop of Tours—particularly the Ten Books of History—in response to the standard scholarship on the Merovingian chronicler, scholarship which Heinzelmann considers rather short-sighted. For instance, Gregory is usually considered indiscriminate, unorganized, and “gullible” in his use of materials for his Ten Books of History; nevertheless, this work is constantly mined for information about the rise of the Frankish kingdoms in sixth-century Gaul. Heinzelmann’s purpose is to uncover Gregory’s purpose in writing this important historical source, which is one of the most detailed—not to mention one of the only—sources for the history of Gaul at this time. Heinzelmann concludes that Gregory did not intend to write a history of the Franks, as is commonly believed, nor to write a biography for himself and his family interspersed with local history, but to write a history of the ecclesia, the universal church, of which sixth-century Gaul was only a part. REVIEWS 199 I will not here discuss the merits of the translation from German into English , but rather will outline the main points, organization, and overall impression of the book itself. However, I should call attention to one point of translation : that of the book’s subtitle. The German “Historiographie und Gesellschaftskonzept ” is more literally and, I think, more accurately translated as “Historiography and the Concept of Society.” This may not seem so different from “History and Society,” but it is a difference that makes the English subtitle rather misleading. Heinzelmann’s book is not an exposition of Merovingian social history in the sixth century, nor does it ever purport to be. When the English subtitle omits the first part of the German subtitle, “Zehn Bücher Geschichte,” or “Ten Books of History,”20 it leaves out reference to Gregory’s major historical work, which also happens to be the main focus of the monograph . By connecting Gregory, his Ten Books of History, and his ideas about history and society, the original German title provides a more thorough synopsis of the themes of the book. One of the main themes is history and how Gregory conceived it. Included in the Ten Books...

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