The Trotula: An English Translation of the Medieval Compendium of Women's Medicine

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Monica Helen Green
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002 - Health & Fitness - 227 pages

The Trotula was the most influential compendium of women's medicine in medieval Europe. Scholarly debate has long focused on the traditional attribution of the work to the mysterious Trotula, said to have been the first female professor of medicine in eleventh- or twelfth-century Salerno, just south of Naples, then the leading center of medical learning in Europe. Yet as Monica H. Green reveals in her introduction to the first English translation ever based upon a medieval form of the text, the Trotula is not a single treatise but an ensemble of three independent works, each by a different author. To varying degrees, these three works reflect the synthesis of indigenous practices of southern Italians with the new theories, practices, and medicinal substances coming out of the Arabic world.

Green here presents a complete English translation of the so-called standardized Trotula ensemble, a composite form of the texts that was produced in the midthirteenth century and circulated widely in learned circles. The work is now accessible to a broad audience of readers interested in medieval history, women's studies, and premodern systems of medical thought and practice.

 

Contents

Introduction
1
Salerno
3
Womens Medicine
14
The Fate of the Trotula
51
Note on This Translation
62
Book on the Conditions of Women
65
On Treatments for Women
89
On Womens Cosmetics
113
Compound Medicines Employed in the Trotula Ensemble
125
Materia Medica Employed in the Trotula
137
Notes
165
Bibliography
209
Index
221
Copyright

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About the author (2002)

Monica H. Green is Professor of History at Arizona State University. Her dual-language critical edition of the Trotula is also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

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