The Women of Salerno

The medical school at Salerno in southern Italy was the leading centre of medical learning in Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and one of the first places where Arabic medical texts were translated into Latin. Among its products is a group of texts on women's medicine known collectively as the Trotula.

The texts cover conditions in pregnancy and childbirth, menstrual disorders, contraception, infertility, and cosmetics. They are practical, organised by complaint, and they circulated widely. Manuscripts survive in the hundreds, across most of Europe, for several centuries. This was a standard reference.

The collection is three separate works of different origins. One of them, the Treatments for Women, is attributed to a woman named Trota or Trocta, understood to have been a practitioner at Salerno.

Her existence has been argued about since the sixteenth century, and the argument has a shape. A 1544 printed edition removed the attribution and assigned the material elsewhere. Subsequent scholarship proposed that Trotula was a corruption, a male author's name misread, a title rather than a person, or an invention. The default assumption in each case was that a woman had not written it.

The modern scholarly work, principally Monica Green's, has established the composite nature of the collection, identified which portions belong to which source, and supported the existence of Trota as a real practitioner with an independent surviving work, the Practica secundum Trotam.

So the position now is roughly the position before the sixteenth century, arrived at again after four hundred years of doubt that was not driven by new evidence.

That is the mechanism this entry is about, and it is distinct from the others in this series. Nothing was destroyed or restricted. An attribution was withdrawn, on no documentary basis, because it was implausible to the people handling the manuscripts, and the withdrawal then had to be undone by exactly the kind of patient textual work that established it should never have happened.

The Salerno case also illustrates something about the visibility of practice. There is scattered evidence of women licensed to practise medicine in medieval southern Italy, and considerably more evidence of women practising without licence everywhere. The licensed cases enter the record because licensing generates documents. The rest is nearly invisible, and its invisibility is a property of the documentation rather than of the practice.

This is the general problem with reconstructing anything from institutional records. They record what institutions did. Work performed outside the institution, which is where most of women's medical practice happened, generates paper only when it goes wrong or when somebody prosecutes it.

Which means the archive available on this subject is largely a record of complaints, and a record of complaints is a poor basis for estimating how much work was being done.