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2013
A group of medical historians and paleographers has teamed up informally to create a "Medicine in the Long 12th Century Working Group." More than 500 extant manuscripts from this period have been identified as containing Latin medical texts. Adding in citations from 12th-century catalogs, we have at least 650 witnesses to the “common library” that made up learned medical knowledge throughout Europe in the long 12th century: around 150 different texts in circulation, in some cases found in a single copy but in others in several dozens. A revolution in medicine did indeed happen in this period. But it was not a “revolution” based on wholesale absorption of new work made suddenly available in Latin from Arabic. Nor was it a "revolution" based entirely at the southern Italian city of Salerno, which has long been centrally featured in narratives about medicine in this period. This project aims to use the collected expertise of the contributors, and the ever-growing availability of digitized manuscripts (many made freely available on the Internet by their holding libraries), to create a comprehensive picture of medicine in this crucial period of change. Our hope is that many subsidiary projects will emerge out of this, whether they be studies of individual texts, centers for copying manuscripts or studying medicine, or larger questions about the modes or impacts of programs of medical and scientific translations.
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2008, La ‘Collectio Salernitana’ di Salvatore De Renzi, ed. Danielle Jacquart and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, Edizione Nazionale ‘La Scuola medica Salernitana’, 3 (Florence: SISMEL/Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2008)
"Salvatore De Renzi’s mid-19th century, five volume work, Collectio Salernitana ossia documenti inediti, e trattati di medicina appartenenti alla scuola medica salernitana, 5 vols, Naples 1852-1859, has stood for 150 years as the foundation for most understandings of what “Salernitan” medicine was in the 12th century. Yet that study was based on an essentially random survey of extant manuscripts (MSS) that had come to the notice of De Renzi or his collaborators. In many instances, no early MSS were known or consulted. This study presents preliminary results from a survey of all extant MSS dating from the “long” twelfth century (c. 1075-c. 1225) that contain Latin medical texts. Surveying the 375 MSS identified as of 2008, it is argued that four different corpora can be discerned. These largely circulated in separate patterns, which suggests that they came out of and reflected different centers of genesis. These were: (1) the early medieval corpus: this includes texts of late antique and early medieval origin, including various epistulae ascribed to Hippocrates, works coming out of late antique North Africa (like Theodorus Priscianus, Vindician, Muscio), and Alexander of Tralles. These MSS tended to come out of peripheral centers (France, Germany, etc.). (2) The “eleventh-century Renaissance corpus”: under this rubric I put both new translations from the Greek (Paul of Aegina, Philaretus, Theophilus) and substantial re-editing of older Latin material (the Dioscorides alphabeticus, the adaptations of the old gynecological corpus as well as the new, abbreviated editions of the Metrodora text, De passionibus mulierum, and Gariopontus’s mid-11th century Passionarius). MSS including these texts seemed only rarely to incorporate any of the older materials. (3) The Constantinian corpus: most of Constantine’s corpus enjoyed fairly wide circulation in the 12th century, making it all the more notable that the Salernitans’ embrace of him seems to have been late and slow. Although readily placed amid other texts of the 11th-century Renaissance, Constantine’s works never seemed to be found with Salernitan texts until the end of the 12th century. (4) The Salernitan corpus: I differentiated between theoretical works (under which heading I mostly put the Articella commentaries), which circulate early and broadly, and the works of praxis, which almost universally show up only late in the century and then usually only in N. French and English copies. Exceptions to this pattern are the Practica of Bartholomeus and the Chirurgia of Roger Frugardi (which, I argue, is indeed associated with Salerno). I argue that these findings throw into question the traditional tendency to connect all medical production of the central Middle Ages with Salerno. Of the 11th-century corpus, only Gariopontus’s and Alfanus’s works are demonstrably Salernitan. Moreover, I suggested that the still inadequately studied Antidotarium magnum was not necessarily of Salernitan origin but may have come from elsewhere in southern Italy. Finally, I concluded that other 11th- and 12th-century productions also merited analysis, including the anatomical and cautery series that resurfaced around this time, and such recent works as the ‘Macer floridus’, De viribus herbarum. I also noted what was not on the list: any copies of Gerard of Cremona’s (d. 1187) substantial medical output from Toledo, save for one copy of the Urtext of the Liber ad Almansorem (which might not be Gerard’s work) and one copy of Avicenna’s Canon. A Table was included listing all Salernitan texts whose earliest extant copies or attestations seemed to come from Anglo-Norman areas."
2019
In 2000, I first laid plans for a comprehensive database on Latin medicine in the "long 12th century," the period ca. 1075 to ca. 1225 when medicine in western Europe was transformed by, among other things, the infusion of new medical texts from the Islamicate world. In 2004, during my Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, I started in earnest to collect materials, and in 2009 I created a Blackboard site to gather all these materials on my university's internal server. In 2019, my university decided to terminate their contract with Blackboard, so I have to take down all the materials I collected. I am therefore sharing draft versions of some of these files, so that other users can make use of them until a permanent home for the database is found.
2007, Form & Content of Instruction in Anglo-Saxon England in Light of Contemporary Manuscript Evidence, ed. Patrizia Lendinara, Maria Amalia D’Aronco, et al., «Textes et études du moyen âge, no. 39», (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007)
2019
This is a revised version of my description of the *Antidotarium magnum*, a collection of over 1000 medical recipes produced at Monte Cassino by (or under the direction of) the Tunisian immigrant monk, Constantine the African (d. before 1098/1099). This is the first Latin work of pharmaceutics to incorporate the new materia medica of the Islamicate world. Unlike Constantine's other works (which were all translations of Arabic texts into Latin), the *Antidotarium magnum* seems to be a genuine effort to integrate traditional recipes from the Greek and Latin ancient and late antique traditions, with the newer approaches to pharmacy that Constantine brought to Italy from the other side of the Mediterranean. Included is a complete list of extant manuscripts, as well as a bibliography of studies published to date.
2009
Hitherto peripheral (if not outright ignored) in general medieval historiography, medieval medical history is now a vibrant subdiscipline, one that is rightly attracting more and more attention from ‘mainstream’ historians and other students of cultural history. It does, however, have its particular characteristics, and understanding its source materials, methods, and analytical limitations may help those not trained in the field better navigate, explore and potentially contribute to its possibilities for illuminating the intersections of medicine and health with other aspects of medieval culture. Although this article focuses primarily on western Europe, many of its observations are also relevant to the Islamic world and Byzantium precisely because all three cultures shared many of the same intellectual traditions and social structures. The attached bibliography serves as a general introduction to the current state of the field.
Textual Healing, Essays in Medieval and Early Modern Medicine, ed. Elizabeth Lane Furdell. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2005)
2009, Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England, c. 1100-c. 1500, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, with Carolyn Collette, Maryanne Kowaleski, Linne Mooney, Ad Putter and David Trotter (York: York Medieval Press, 2009), 220-31
Now that a fair amount of Anglo-Norman medical literature has been edited (most of it by the Oxford scholar, Tony Hunt), it is possible to give some assessment of the genesis of this unusually early corpus of vernacular medical writing. Like the Anglo-Saxon medical corpus before it, the Anglo-Norman corpus makes a fundamentally Mediterranean system of medicine accessible to readers (and auditors) in the north. In fact, England was one of the biggest markets for southern Italian medicine in the 12th and 13th centuries: of all the Latin medical works circulating in this period, whether new compositions and translations or old classics, England had copies of well over half. Therefore, it becomes of interest to see which of those many works were chosen for translation into the vernacular. Although works of basic therapeutic utility like Roger of Frugardi’s *Chirurgia* and Johannes Platearius’s *Practica brevis* are known in unique copies, the field most represented in Anglo-Norman medical literature is women’s medicine: gynecology and cosmetics. The gynecological texts are all translations of some form or another of the so-called *Trotula* text, which came out of 12th-century Salerno, specifically the *Liber de sinthomatibus mulierum* (Book on Women’s Conditions). Likewise, the two known cosmetics works have clear signs of derivation from southern Italian practices. I hypothesize that these works may have been commissioned by women, who knew of the medical lore coming out of southern Italy through a variety of Norman contacts. Just how new works in “the French of England” interacted with older Anglo-Saxon terminology is an issue still in need of investigation.
2019
In 2000, I first laid plans for a comprehensive database on Latin medicine in the "long 12th century," the period ca. 1075 to ca. 1225 when medicine in western Europe was transformed by, among other things, the infusion of new medical texts from the Islamicate world. In 2004, during my Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, I started in earnest to collect materials, and in 2009 I created a Blackboard site to gather all these materials on my university's internal server. In 2019, my employing institution at the time decided to terminate their contract with Blackboard, so I had to take down all the materials I collected. I therefore decided to share draft versions of some of these files, so that other users can make use of them until a permanent home for the database is found. The Articella is the term we use to refer to a collection of introductory Latin texts used to teach medicine. First compiled at the end of the 11th century, in one form or another the collection was used in European universities until the 16th century. Here are its (earliest) component parts (not all components appear in all MSS, nor is the order fixed): 1) Hunayn ibn Ishaq (Johannitius), Isagoge (trans. from the Arabic by Constantinus Africanus [CA]) 2) Hippocratic Aphorisms (anon. trans. from Greek) 3) Hippocratic Prognostics (trans. CA) 4) Galen, Tegni (anon. trans. from Greek) 5) Philaretus on pulses (anon. trans. from Greek) 6) Theophilus on urines (anon. trans. from Greek) 7) Hippocratic Regimen in Acute Diseases (trans. CA) Feel free to contact me with any questions: monica.h.green@gmail.com.
The basis of presentations at the Toronto-Cologne Graduate Students' Colloquium (Toronto, 2016) and the 52nd Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies conference on Editorial Problems (Toronto, 2017)
2011, Between Text and Patient: The Medical Enterprise in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Micrologus’ Library, 30 (Florence: SISMEL/Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2011)
Abstract: This essay examines the circulation of Gerard of Cremona's twelfth-century Latin translation of the Surgery of al-Zahrawi (Albucasis), a work composed in Arabic in Umayyad Spain around the year 1000. Entirely invisible for the first half century after its translation, the work began to circulate about the second quarter of the thirteenth century, first in the company of other translations by Gerard, then among other works on surgery, and then on its own. Whereas other surgical texts circulated quite widely in western Europe, up until the fifteenth century Albucasis's work was copied only in Italy and, to a lesser extent, in southern France. This limited circulation connects, I argue, to the particular uses of this text that were at once academic, practical, and 'popular'. Already heavily illustrated in Arabic, the Latin Surgery elicited even more material and labor investment as Italian and French copyists developed its iconographic character further. At least some of that pictorial investment shows the Surgery being exploited because it contained material found in no other Latin surgical text: detailed instructions on gynecological and obstetrical surgery, a field in which learned male practitioners were increasingly involved from the late thirteenth century on. Keywords: Albucasis (al-Zahrawi); surgery; obstetrics; medical illustrations, elite patronage
2010
Scholarly work on all aspects of women, gender, and medicine has exploded in the past 30 years, largely due to the influences of women's and gender studies. Texts on women's medicine, in Latin as well as the medieval vernaculars, have been edited, and new discoveries have been made about women as medical practitioners as well as the care women received as patients. This bibliography comprises all the entries that appeared in the bibliography on “Women and Medicine” that I published periodically in the Medieval Feminist Forum (formerly, Medieval Feminist Newsletter) from 1990 to 2004. The previously published entries have been merged into a single alphabetical list by author, and some editorial commentary has been updated or modified. I have added items that were previously overlooked or that date before the original dates covered, and I have added new material published up through 2009, including a few items that cross over into the early modern period since they carry forward issues that began in the late Middle Ages. At the end, I have added a summary listing of all those works that include edited primary sources (noting English translations where they are included); these will be especially useful for teaching purposes. This bibliography is intended for free use, but please note that the editorial commentary should be properly credited if cited elsewhere.
2008, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies
1996, Revue d’Histoire des Textes
This essay offers the philological background to the edition of the Trotula standardized ensemble that was published (with a facing-page English translation) by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2001. As demonstrated in full detail here, the Trotula ensemble is actually a grouping of three different texts, each of separate authorship, that were likely produced in the southern Italian town of Salerno in the 12th century. Each of these three texts—the Liber de sinthomatibus mulierum (Book on the Conditions of Women), the De curis mulierum (On Treatments for Women), and the De ornatu mulierum (On Women’s Cosmetics)—circulated independently and each is found in two or more different versions. By the late 12th century, the three works were combined and then this ensemble went through its own textual development; I identify at least six distinct versions. The essay surveys all 122 Latin manuscripts of the texts that were known to me at the time. It also builds on the findings of John F. Benton, who was the first to show that the Renaissance editor of the Trotula thoroughly rearranged the text, erasing any last traces that there were three component works (and three authors). Hence, the Renaissance edition fixed for the next 400 years a false understanding of these works and their possible associations with a female author. In a final section of this study, I describe the medieval vernacular translations and Latin re-writings in relation to the Latin tradition. For fuller information on the Latin Trotula manuscripts, see Monica H. Green, “A Handlist of the Latin and Vernacular Manuscripts of the So-Called Trotula Texts. Part I: The Latin Manuscripts,” Scriptorium 50 (1996), 137-175. For the vernacular manuscripts, see Monica H. Green, “A Handlist of the Latin and Vernacular Manuscripts of the So-Called Trotula Texts. Part II: The Vernacular Texts and Latin Re-Writings,” Scriptorium 51 (1997), 80-104. For further information on the historic female writer and medical practitioner Trota of Salerno (who is only to be associated with the De curis mulierum text), see Monica H. Green, “Reconstructing the Oeuvre of Trota of Salerno,” in La Scuola medica Salernitana: Gli autori e i testi, ed. Danielle Jacquart and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, Edizione Nazionale ‘La Scuola medica Salernitana’, 1 (Florence: SISMEL/Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2007), 183-233; and chapter 1 of Monica H. Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
“From ‘Diseases of Women’ to ‘Secrets of Women’: The Transformation of Gynecological Literature in the Later Middle Ages,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30 (2000), 5-39 – Abstract This study documents a subtle but highly illuminating change that occurred in texts on women’s medicine over the course of the later Middle Ages: a change in title. Whereas all texts addressing the particular medical conditions of women’s bodies that circulated in the early and central Middle Ages had simple descriptive titles like “On the Conditions of Women” or “On the Sufferings of Women,” from the 13th century on we begin to see the word “secret” in the titles and in other rhetorical elements of these texts. It is argued that the language of secrecy comes particularly into play when the focus of such texts narrows from gynecological and obstetrical topics in their full range, to a more limited concentration on fertility and generation. This development is particularly interesting since, in earlier centuries, the topics of generation (i.e., the theoretical aspects) and gynecology and obstetrics (the practical descriptions of diseases and their cures) had been addressed in separate texts. Also addressed is the way texts on women’s medicine became juxtaposed to works on “generation,” or incorporated into codicological contexts that suggested that the works were being read for reasons other than therapeutics. A final sort of intervention was actual adaptation of texts on women’s medicine, omitting sections on, for example, uterine diseases and focusing only on reproduction. Latin was the main language used for medical writing in the early Middle Ages, but from the late 12th century on, first Hebrew and then various European vernacular languages produce writings on women’s medicine, and these follow some of the same shifts seen in Latin works. (Languages covered include Hebrew, French, English, Dutch, Italian, and German.) The study is based on direct consultation of manuscripts in various languages from across Europe, including New York Academy of Medicine, MS SAFE; Oxford, Pembroke College, MS 21; and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 399. In addition, medieval library inventories are surveyed, including those of the Sorbonne and St-Victor in Paris. The Trotula texts make up the bulk of material surveyed, though there is also incorporation of other texts on women’s medicine.
1999
Despite centuries of debate about the medieval medical writers Trota of Salerno and Hildegard of Bingen, there still remain widely disparate views of them in both popular and scholarly discourses. Their alternate dismissal or romanticization is not due to a simple contest between antifeminist and feminist tendencies. Rather, issues of gender have intersected in varying ways with other agendas (intellectual, nationalist, etc.). Recent philological researches have helped not only to clarify why these earlier interpretations were created in the first place, but also to raise our understanding of these women and their work to a new, higher level.
Paper delivered at the the conference "The ‘Missing Link’: medicine in late antiquity and the early middle ages", King’s College, Cambridge, Saturday 8 March 2008
2013, Oxford Handbook of Medieval Women and Gender, ed. Judith Bennett and Ruth Mazo Karras (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)
Every interaction with the human body is mediated by culture, and here we see the value of approaching the history of medicine and health from the perspective of gender. We also see the value of approaching the history of gender through the history of health and health-seeking behaviors since it inevitably touched on all other aspects of medieval life. This essay looks first at several medical and surgical interventions on and into female bodies having to do with pregnancy and childbirth, and examines changing expectations of the gender and specialized knowledge of those who interacted with them. The essay then looks more speculatively at how questions of intercultural interaction might be used to explore the ways in which maleness was constructed or preserved by medical practitioners, including the question of whether the intersexed were seen as needing medical intervention. The field of history of health is still rapidly expanding, and the perspectives of gender analysis are a major part of what is driving that expansion forward. Keywords: medicine; healthcare; literacy; midwifery; gynecology; obstetrics; fertility; childbirth; law; inheritance; Caesarean section; surgery; hermaphrodites; eunuchs; diseases of the breasts; cosmetics; Christian religion; Islamic world; Jewish communities http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199582174.do#.Ul7iHyTFZ0s
These are the handouts to accompany the workshops held at the Harvard Medical School Library on Thursday, 26 February 2015. The first lists the medical books found in the libraries of • “Johannes,” Italian medical scholar (late 12th century) • Richard de Fournival, French cleric and physician (d. 1260) • Astruc de Sestiers, Jewish physician in Aix (d. 1439) The second document lists all the books in the Harvard and Boston Medical Library collections that were examined for the workshops. I've included links to digitized versions (or individual photos online) in those cases where they were available.
2008, Sismel Edizioni del Galluzzo
Questo Convegno internazionale, promosso dalla Edizione Nazionale La Scuola Medica Salernitana, ha inteso sottomettere la monumentale Collectio Salernitana ad una revisione storiografica, tanto più necessaria in quanto la Edizione Nazionale sta procedendo ad una riedizione critica dei testi salernitani. Monica Green presenta uno studio complessivo sulla prima diffusione dei manoscriti salernitani. Romana Martorelli Vico, Florence Eliza Glaze e Mireille Ausécache, propongono uno studio, rispettivamente, delle Anatomie salernitane, del Passionarius di Garioponto e delle opere del magister Salernus. Michael McVaugh offre una nuova datazione del Liber mitis e pone il problema della vera natura dei legami intrattenuti da Ruggero Frugardi con Salerno. Riesaminando il Carmen medicale del diacono Crispo, edito nel primo volume della Collectio Salernitana, Anna Bellettini illustra la medecina pre-salernitaina, tra il VI e il X secolo. Alejandro García González ricostruisce le tappe delle metamorfosi del lessico botanico-medico Alphita, edito dalla Edizione Nazionale. Iolanda Ventura presenta un ampio panorama dei testi farmacologici presenti nella Collectio Salernitana. Ad Antonio Garzya spetta il merito di aver dato alla Collectio Salernitana il suo spessore storico, indagando sulla ricca personalità del suo artefice.
Starting from the two major authorities (auctoritates) of Ancient and Medieval pharmacology, Dioscorides and Galen, my paper provides an overview of the systems of classification of medicamina simplicia derived from plants, animals, metals, and precious stones as recorded in the Latin pharmacological literature from Late Antiquity until the middle of the 12th century, including its intellectual and philosophical background as it determines the rational criteria that regulate the acquisition of knowledge and the systematic ordering and structuring of such medicamina according to their nature, their effect, and their therapeutical properties. In three chronologically structured paragraphs, the paper first examines the two main pharmacological texts written during the Antiquity, viz. Dioscorides' De materia medica and Galen's De simplicium medicamentorum temperamentis et facultatibus. From there, it moves on to the main types of pharmacological collections produced in the Late Antiquity, the so-called Antibalomena, Dynamidia, and Quid pro quo lists. The period of transition from Late Antiquity to the first centuries of the Middle Ages was marked by the redaction of some well known herbals that will dominate over the Latin pharmacological literature until at least the end of the 12th century, viz. the spurious Alphabetum Galeni, the Herbarium attributed to the Pseudo-Apuleius, and the medical poem De viribus herbarum written by Odo of Meung, but better known under the title of 'Macer floridus'. The main contribution to the perception and classification of natural elements provided by those works lied in the criteria of structuring and ordering nature according to its relevance and use in medicine. In contrast, the Arabic-Latin pharmacological literature reaching the Western world thanks to Con-stantine the African's translations of Al-Majusi's Pantegni and Ibn al-Jazzar's Liber de gradibus provided medieval Latin medicine and pharmacology with a deeper and stronger theoretical background that gave contemporary physicians and medical authors belonging, among others, to the Medical School of Salerno, the chance to reason about the rational criteria and elements of recognition and classification of the nature of medicamina, their qualities, and their effects. The 'theoretical turn' initiated by Constantine's translations and further developed by the authors belonging to, or connected with, the Medical School of Salerno (Bartholomew of Salerno, Platearius, the Magister Salernus, John of Saint-Paul) played therefore a decisive role in the history of rational pharmacology, and will be the object of a long discussion in the third paragraph. My overview ends in the same section with what can be considered the most impressive and influential account of rational pharmacology pro-102 Iolanda Ventura duced and read during the Middle Ages, viz. the first treatise of the second book of Avicenna's Liber canonis, which represented, with the discussion of its long sections on the acquisition of pharmacological knowledge per experimentum and per ratioci-nationem, the most complete, the deepest, and the most problematic and debated pharmacological manual of the Late Middle Ages, whose reception and meaning in Medieval universities was exemplified, among others, by John of Saint-Amand and his pharmacological works. Article published in: Classification from Antiquity to Modern Times, ed T. Pommerening and W. Bisang, Berlin-New York 2017
1994
1987, Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies
A work on women's medicine was attributed to Constantine the African (d. before 1098/99) by his 12th-century biographers, but there are reasons to believe that the work that was printed under Constantine's name in the 16th century was not by him. This study surveys the evidence for the attribution, and presents a completely different text--an excerpt on the anatomy of the reproductive organs--that clearly was the work of Constantine. An edition of the latter text (De genitalibus membris et primum de matrice [On the genital members, and first, on the womb]) is included. This essay was reprinted as "Essay III" in 2000 in my volume of collected essays: Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts. There I noted the following updates: passim: For further information on the origins of the early medieval De passionibus mulierum and its relation to the Greek text attributed to Metrodora, see the Appendix [i.e., to the Women's Healthcare volume]. p. 310, n. 42: On the method by which an anonymous compiler assembled a "full" text of Constantinus Africanus' Pantegni, Practica, see my essay "The Re-Creation of Pantegni, Practica, Book VIII", in Constantine the African and ‘Alī ibn al-’Abbās al-Maǧūsī: The `Pantegni' and Related Texts, ed. Charles Burnett and Danielle Jacquart (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994), pp. 121-60. Addendum 2021: more recent researches have brought to light yet another text on women's medicine associated with Constantine. Look for more details in the future.
2015
The Latin Gynaecia (Genecia) associated with Cleopatra’s name has never been edited. As I established in 1987, the Genecia Cleopatre was woven into a composite treatise in 1566, the Harmonia gynaeciorum by Caspar Wolff, which jumbled together the Genecia Cleopatre, the De passionibus mulierum A and B, and portions of Muscio’s Pessaria. The Harmonia was published within the larger Gynaeciorum collection in Basel, 1566; Basel, 1586-88; and Strasbourg, 1597. It remains the only printed version of the text, and even though several scholars have announced plans to edit the work, the Genecia Cleopatre remains neglected. (I examined it in extenso in my 1985 PhD dissertation.) In its original form, the Genecia Cleopatre is a late antique text in 43 chapters covering a variety of gynecological topics. Pessaries are frequently employed, several of which are named and described in detail. The preface (whose text is obviously corrupt) suggests that this work was addressed to her daughter by Theodote, who was medica to Cleopatra and her sister Arsenoe. Later garblings of the text led to suggestions that the work was by Cleopatra herself. In the later 11th century, a “short form” comes into view. The text was pared down to about two-thirds its original size. These are my working notes on the *Genecia Cleopatre*. They describe the different forms of the text, summarize my descriptions of the text and its circulation from my previous publications, and present an updated list of known manuscripts of the different forms of the work. As working notes, they are still under revision. However, I have now (2019) published an overview study about the rediscovery of late ancient gynecology in the 11th century, at the (male) monastery of Monte Cassino. See Monica H. Green, “Recovering ‘Ancient’ Gynaecology: The Humanist Rediscovery of the Eleventh-Century Gynaecological Corpus,” in Transmission of Knowledge in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Outi Merisalo, Miika Kuha, and Susanna Niiranen (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019), pp. 45-54. I welcome corrections and addenda; I can be contacted at: monica.h.green@gmail.com.
This paper gives an introductory analysis to a group of manuscripts which deal with questions of female health and human procreation. It discusses to what extent practical knowledge on aiding conception and controlling fecundity were embedded in these texts. It uses close textual analysis of three manuscripts dealing with remedies and medicine for women to identify changes, which occurred during transmission, leading to a loss of material. The content of Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3519 offers new evidence of both the cultural shift towards promoting fertility and how Latin texts were altered during the translation process.
2017
The treatise on gynecology and obstetrics composed in the 5th or 6th century by an otherwise unknown North African writer called Muscio (or Mustio) was surprisingly influential in medieval Europe. The original work was accompanied by a diagram of the uterus and a series of images meant to show the various ways the fetus could malpresent at birth. Advocating what was known as the "Methodist" system of medicine (which he drew from his main Greek source, Soranus of Ephesus), Muscio's Gynecology was no longer fully comprehensible when it was retrieved for new scrutiny in the later 11th century. Abbreviated versions of the text eliminated most of what was distinctive about the Methodist approach, leaving only simplified instructions for birth attendance, etc. The images, in turn, were extracted from the text and began to circulate separately in the 13th century, first being attached to the Surgery of al-Zahrawi (Albucasis) and then, in the 15th century, absorbed several times into new Latin or vernacular compendia on fertility and women's medicine. These brief notes summarize the general trajectories of the text and images of Muscio over a 1000+ year period. Also included are links to those manuscripts of Muscio (including the fetal images) that have thus far been digitized and made publicly available.
2020
This is the 2020 edition of my "cheat sheet" of info on Trota/the Trotula. Note that there is a more recent version, from 2023 (https://www.academia.edu/97430512/). 'Trotula' is a title, not a woman's name. The 'Trotula' is the title of a group of three separate works on women's medicine and cosmetics, each of different authorship. (Two of them are likely of male authorship.) Trota is the name of a documentable female medical practitioner who lived in the early 12th century. She was not a "professor" at the University of Salerno; no such institution existed at the time. She may have had acolytes but she is never acknowledged by name by her male contemporaries. The title 'Trotula' was generated when the three Salernitan texts on medicine were fused into an ensemble; the ensemble is first documented in the late 12th century, and the title in the early 13th century. Ironically, this collapsing of three separate textual units caused the historic woman Trota to be forgotten and the textually fabricated 'Trotula' to take her place as an alleged authoress. If 'Trotula' and Trota are confused, however, we miss out on what is really interesting and unique about the creation of knowledge about women's medicine and the practices of female medical practitioners in the Middle Ages. That is because the "hands-off" practices of male practitioners (seen most clearly in the 1st Trotula text, Book on the Conditions of Women) were noticeably different from the "hands-on" practices of Trota. For more information on the unique "hands-on" knowledge reflected in Trota's work, see chapter 1 of Monica H. Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
2015
This project will produce a working edition of the Antidotarium magnum (“Large Antidotary,” hereafter AM), a late-eleventh-century Latin collection of as many as 1300 named medical recipes in alphabetical order. Composed around the time that the famed Arabic-into-Latin translator Constantine the African (d. before 1098) was working at Monte Cassino, the AM is largely unknown, as much to historians of medicine as to other scholars of medieval culture. Yet this work helped create a standard materia medica and pharmacology in the later Middle Ages, drawing European apothecaries and their clients into the same global networks of trade that tied together the rest of Eurasia as well as northern and eastern Africa. Although lacking a theory of drug action, it was part of an explosion of new work coming out of southern Italy that would lay the foundations for learned (and eventually university) medicine throughout western Europe. Because the AM was an inherently unstable text (it was constantly being added to or abbreviated), it is an ideal candidate for production as a digital-only edition, a format that will allow hypertext additions of variant readings and facilitate the future contributions of other scholars as further sources and parallels to its content are identified. http://www.slu.edu/x68617.xml#monica " Project Specialist: Kathleen Walker-Meikle completed her PhD at University College London. Her most recent appointment was as a Wellcome Trust research fellow at the University of York, working on animal bites and venoms in medieval medicine. Her field of interest is the history of animals in the Middle Ages, in particular the intersection between natural history and medicine. She can be reached at kathleen.walker-meikle@york.ac.uk. Posted here is a brief description of the Antidotarium magnum, which includes a complete list of the manuscripts we have identified to date. (Current version: 02 June 2015.) We would be happy to be apprised of additional copies; please contact Monica Green at monica.green@asu.edu.
1989, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
This essay critiques the idea--common in feminist historiography--that throughout the Middle Ages "women's health was women's business." Using the evidence of women as medical practitioners (which is minimal) and that of texts on women's medicine, I argue that the gendering of knowledge production and practice in the fields of women's healthcare was complicated. Women had no monopoly in the field. Indeed, it is questionable whether much of the written work on women's medicine was written for female readers. The present file includes the corrigenda and addenda, updated up through 2010, to Monica H. Green, “Women’s Medical Practice and Health Care in Medieval Europe,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14 (1988-1989), 434-73. This review essay, summarizing the state of the field in the late 1980s, was first reprinted with minor corrections in Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages, ed. J. Bennett, E. Clark, J. O’Barr, B. Vilen, and S. Westphal-Wihl (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 39-78. It was reprinted a second time (here from the Sisters and Workers version) in Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts, Variorum Collected Studies Series, CS680 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). In the last reprint, Corrigenda and Addenda were included. I have here updated the Corrigenda and Addenda by including references to works published between 1988 (when it was sent to press) and 2010. This essay was meant to capture the state of the field in the late 1980s. A lot has happened in the history of women and medicine since then. (Note that ALL the statements regarding the Middle English tradition of gynecological writings were superseded by my later work; see especially my publications in 1992, 2003, 2006, and 2008.) Readers are encouraged to refer both to my subsequent writings (especially my 2008 book, *Making Women's Medicine Masculine*) and to the 82-page bibliography, Monica H. Green, “Bibliography on Medieval Women, Gender, and Medicine (1980-2009),” available gratis at http://www.sciencia.cat/biblioteca/publicacionssc.htm, and here on my Academia.edu page. The original article can be found on JStor at this URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3174557, or by writing to me directly: monica.h.green@gmail.com.
In: Linda Kalof (ed.), A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Medieval Age. Oxford/New York: Berg, 2010, pp. 121-139, bibliography pp. 244-248.
Note to revised version (31.vii.2016) of "Constantine's De genecia Revisited." The original version of this document, which was presented at a session at the International Congress of Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo in May 2016, had a slide (#8) that I had originally created in 2014 and had used in previous public presentations. After I posted the initial version of the slides here, two former collaborators (who had seen all previous versions of the slide) objected to my public sharing of information on slide #8, which grew out of a joint project I had initiated in 2010 and drew on materials I have been collecting for over 30 years. In deference to their objections, I have deleted the slide. [The information on the deleted slide referred to findings about the scribes of medical MSS at Monte Cassino. That work can now be found published in: Medicine at Monte Cassino: Constantine the African and the Oldest Manuscript of his Pantegni (Brepols, 2019).] The remaining work in this presentation is my own, aided by the generosity of the colleagues and institutions noted in the Acknowledgements in the final slide. Original abstract: Most major collections of medical writing that circulated in western Europe in the 9th, 10th, and early 11th centuries had very little information on women's medicine. There were clusters here and there, but often, even when new compendia were assembled (such as Gariopontus' *Passionarius* of the mid-11th century), gynecology and obstetrics were nowhere to be found. In this presentation, I revisit work I did 30 years ago trying to unravel the trajectory of an explosion of new work in women's medicine in the late 11th century. I am especially looking forward to learned colleagues in women's history who can help me wrestle with the question of what motivated all this new concern for women’s medicine? Were there any particularly powerful or influential women (besides Empress Agnes, whose connections to Monte Cassino I note) who might have had direct ties to Monte Cassino, which was at the peak of its influence in this period? I have published a good deal of work on most of these texts before, and those earlier studies can be found posted here on Academia.edu.
2009, Medieval Italy: Texts in Translation
Included in the original publication are translations of the following texts: I. Biography of Constantine the African by Peter the Deacon (12th cent.) II. Trota (?), obstetrical excerpts from the Salernitan Compendium, On the Treatment of Diseases (12th cent.) III. Mattheus Platearius (attributed), Circa instans (12th cent.; excerpts) IV. Copho (attributed), Anatomy of the Pig (12th cent.) V. Medical Licenses from the Kingdom of Naples a) License for Bernard of Casale Santa Maria (1330) b) License to practice surgery for Maria Incarnata (1343)
2007, La Scuola medica Salernitana: Gli autori e i testi, ed. Danielle Jacquart and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, Edizione Nazionale ‘La Scuola medica Salernitana’, 1 (Florence: SISMEL/Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2007)
Picking up from where John F. Benton left off in his 1985 study announcing the discovery of the *Practica* of Trota of Salerno, the present investigation brings together all known evidence for the writings and precepts of this early 12th-century Salernitan healer, for whom we have no other contemporary evidence beyond these writings themselves. Using the evidence of the *Practica secundum Trotam* (“Practical Medicine According to Trota”) as well as the compendium *De egritudinum curatione* (a collection of excerpts from the works of seven Salernitan “masters,” including Trota) and the *De curis mulierum* (“On Treatments for Women”) and even an Anglo-Norman text which purports to record the teachings of Trota, I argue that collation of this evidence shows that Trota's oeuvre was probably much larger than previously suspected. Trota’s historicity was already established by Benton, and she can now be clearly distinguished from the textual fiction “Trotula,” which is in reality just the title of an ensemble of the *De curis mulierum* and two other, unrelated texts of likely male authorship. The present study offers further circumstantial evidence about the historic Trota, suggesting that it is possible to place her in the early 12th century. She was to some extent aware of and in dialogue with fellow male practitioners in Salerno, but she remained peripheral to the general trends toward theory and sophisticated pharmacopeia that characterized the work of her male contemporaries. The study includes editions and translations of excerpts of Trota’s authentic works and other *testimonia*.
2000, Monica H. Green, Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000)
This essay sprang out of a simple question: what evidence was there for medieval European women’s engagement as readers with the increasing abundance of medical literature in the High and later Middle Ages? I was working in the mid and later ’90s on my edition of the so-called Trotula texts (including surveys of the circulation and uses of both the Latin originals and their many vernacular reincarnations) and I wanted to be able to make a declarative statement: “The evidence for female audiences of the Trotula conform (or not) to evidence for women’s reading of other kinds of medical texts.” But I couldn’t make that statement because no survey of that question had yet been done. This comprehensive essay, therefore, represents my attempt to gather everything I could find to document that women (a) owned medical books or (b) had medical books dedicated to them (whether as individual readers or female audiences generally). The results were astonishingly meager: although women are now widely documented as readers of religious texts in the Middle Ages and, to a lesser extent, as readers of romances and histories, evidence for women engaging with the technically specific field of medicine is limited. In fact, that result is even more decisive for texts on women’s medicine, where female owners or addressees are notably rare. When women did own or serve as (intended) audiences of medical texts, these were often books of regimen (how to stay healthy), herbals, or recipe collections. French women (or at least those of the very highest social classes) were the most notable exception to this rule; of 27 women whose booklists had been published, a quarter of them were found to own medical books. Still, these are small numbers, especially considering that one of the most famous medical books addressed to a lay reader was Aldobrandino of Siena’s Regime du corps (Regimen for the Body), written before 1257 for Beatrix of Savoy (d. 1287), countess of Provence on the occasion of her visit to her four daughters: Marguerite, wife of Louis IX of France; Eleanor, wife of Henry Ill of England; Sanchia, wife of Richard of Cornwall; and Beatrix, wife of Charles of Anjou. Notably, of the 71 extant copies known at the time of writing, only 5 can be documented in women’s hands. Tables included in the study identify (1) Individual Female Owners of Medical Books (identifying 43 women in all); (2) Medical Texts Commissioned by and/or Addressed to Women (identifying 51 texts in all); and (3) A Comparison of Texts Owned by and Addressed to Women (divided according to language and medical genre). (For information on medical books owned by or associated with professional female practitioners and cloistered women, see my essay “Books as a Source of Medical Education for Women in the Middle Ages,” Dynamis: Acta Hispanica ad Medicinae Scientiarumque Historiam Illustrandam 20 (2000), 331-69; for further analysis of women’s relationships to the culture of literate medicine in high and late medieval Europe, see Monica H. Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).)
2005, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History,
Monica H. Green, “Bodies, Gender, Health, Disease: Recent Work on Medieval Women’s Medicine,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, 3rd series, vol. 2 (2005), 1-46. Abstract: This long essay review summarizes work in the field of History of Medicine as it relates to topics on women and gender in the medieval world—mostly focusing on western Europe but bringing in some comparative work. It supplements and expands upon two earlier reviews of the field that I did in 1989 and 1993. Topics include: (1) a review of edited texts (where I argue that “we have perhaps reached the point of critical mass, where enough work has been done to identify both the major continuities and the major novelties in the textual traditions of women’s medicine”); (2) “technologies of the body,” a term I have coined to refer to “a group of techniques, beliefs, and practices focused on intervening in the functioning of the body (including, but not limited to, the alleviation of pain)” and which I propose as a definition wider than “medicine” to capture the focus on cosmetics, promotion of fertility (rather than contraceptives), and even andrology in many medieval texts on women’s medicine; (3) sex differences as they were understood in medieval medical literature, which challenge Laqueur’s idea of a “one-sex body,” including beliefs in male menstruation, the emphasis on “provoking the menses” in texts on women’s medicine, and the impact of the “new Aristotle” starting in the 13th century, especially new interest in the nature of generation; (4) women as medical agents, a concept I develop here to circumvent the limiting vocabulary of medical professionalization and encompass women’s various engagements with healthcare, including as readers of medical texts and recipes, the lack of evidence for professionalized midwives before the 14th cent.; (5) childbirth as a female space, where I contest the assumption that childbirth was exclusively a female concern and show instead that there are a variety of ways pregnancy, childbirth, and wetnursing can be analyzed as gendered phenomena; and (6) future directions, where I explore topics and methodologies that might yet prove valuable. The essay draws on medical anthropology both for conceptual analyses of the workings of gender, but also (via ethnographies) as a source of comparative material. This review is 3rd in a series of 4 essays I have done reviewing literature on women, gender, and medicine in the medieval period. The others are: Monica H. Green, “Women’s Medical Practice and Health Care in Medieval Europe,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14 (1988-1989), 434-73; reprinted in Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages, ed. J. Bennett, E. Clark, J. O’Barr, B. Vilen, and S. Westphal-Wihl (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 39-78; reprinted again in Monica H. Green, with corrigenda in Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts, Variorum Collected Studies Series CS680 (Aldershot, 2000). Monica H. Green, “Recent Work on Women’s Medicine in Medieval Europe,” Society for Ancient Medicine Newsletter 21 (1993), 132–41. Monica H. Green, “Gendering the History of Women’s Healthcare,” Gender and History, Twentieth Anniversary Special Issue, 20, no. 3 (November 2008), 487-518; reprinted in Gender and Change: Agency, Chronology and Periodisation, ed. Alexandra Shepard and Garthine Walker (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 43-82. See also, for comprehensive bibliography up through 2009: Monica H. Green, “Bibliography on Medieval Women, Gender and Medicine, 1980-2009,” an 82-page cumulative annotated bibliography of over 375 items of European and North American scholarship published in the past 30 years, posted for free access on Sciencia.cat, http://www.sciencia.cat/english/libraryenglish/publicationssc.htm, posted 02 March 2010.
This short biographical entry on Constantine the African (d. before 1098/99) was published in 2005. The full citation for this is: Monica H. Green, “Constantine the African,” in Medieval Science, Technology and Medicine: An Encyclopedia, ed. Thomas F. Glick, Steven J. Livesey, and Faith Wallis (New York & London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 145-47. Since this essay appeared in 2005, scholarship on Constantine has progressed considerably. There is still very little scholarship on Constantine in English, and very few of his works have been critically edited. But that, too, is changing. See Monica H. Green and Brian Long, eds., Constantinus Africanus Blog, https://constantinusafricanus.com/. And for more, see the Constantinus Africanus tab here on my Academia.edu page: https://independentscholar.academia.edu/MonicaHGreen/Constantinus-Africanus.
2000, Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts
This list, published as an Appendix to my 2000 book, *Women's Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts*, provides a summary list of all texts on women's medicine that are known from medieval western Europe. All languages are surveyed: Arabic, Catalan, Dutch, English, French (including Anglo-Norman), German, Hebrew, Irish, Italian, Latin. Many of these texts have never been published; in those cases, all manuscript witnesses known are listed. Some new information has come to light since this was first published in 2000; please direct any queries to me at: monica.green@asu.edu.
Berechiah Ben Natronai Ha-Naqdan’s Works and Their Reception/ L’oeuvre de Berechiah Ben Natronai Ha-Naqdan et sa Réception, edited by Tamás Visi, Tovi Bibring And Daniel Soukup
This article summarizes recent progress in the search for the sources of the twelfth century Hebrew collection of scientific Questions (ספר השאלות), known as Dodi ve-nekhdi, by Berechiah ben Naṭronai ha-Naqdan. Its main source has long been known to be Questiones naturales by Adelard of Bath, but it includes alterations and additions, most of them still unexplained. The present article outlines possible directions of research and illustrates the problems involved in them by examining two Questions in detail: A question on the eye and vision, and the question on "melancholic" animals.
This essay was my first attempt to work systematically through the puzzling question of why, in the later Middle Ages, gynecological literature—and gynecological authorities—came to be seen as sources for misogynous views on women. I took as my theme the question of why the great Italian-French defender of women, Christine de Pizan (d. ca. 1430), had never mentioned the alleged female author “Trotula,” despite her evident fame among medical specialists at the time. (The fact that Christine’s own father had been a physician made this lacuna particularly puzzling.) But Christine does mention explicitly another treatise that actually overlapped with the Trotula in its later medieval circulation, and was at times even confused with it: the Secreta mulierum/Secres des dames. Christine’s opinion of this work is unambiguous: it is a traittié tout de mençonges, “a treatise composed of lies.” I argue here that Christine knew of the particularly peculiar French version of this text, and that, in condemning it, she was accurately reflecting the misogynous connotations that had indeed come to accrue around gynecological literature in this period. Yet I also point out that in simply condemning this text without critically assessing why texts on women’s bodies should be so perversely misused, “Christine foreclosed an opportunity to shift the debate about the female body in a new direction. Nowhere does this physician’s daughter draw on any natural philosophical (what we would call ‘scientific’) or medical arguments to claim the similar character of the male and female body, to assert the awesome generative properties of the womb, to plead, as the author of a contemporary English gynecological text did, that the alleged ‘defects’ of living women’s bodies are no different from those of women ‘who now are saints in heaven’.” The essay gives the first extensive description in English of the French Secrés des dames and examines other aspects of Christine de Pizan’s possible views on Aristotle’s authority and other aspects of natural-philosophical traditions. I also survey in detail the circulation and reputation of the Trotula texts in France, including evidence for Christine’s possible access to copies of the Trotula (or mentioning the authoress “Trotula”) at the royal library. Particularly, by going through the actual codicological context of both the Trotula manuscripts and those of the Secrés des dames, I show that in some instances the two texts were virtually interchangeable. Of the eight known copies of the Secrés des dames, for example, seven were found with surgical manuals. The equivalency becomes so extreme, in fact, that the Trotula takes on the title “Secrets of Women.” I then turn to assessing the ways in which the female figure “Trotula” may have been seen as a parallel to Heloise—both being defined by the intimate association between their sexuality and their learning (and both, I point out, linked together by Christine’s contemporary, Chaucer). My assessment: “Christine’s silence on ‘Trotula’ and the Trotula may, therefore, not be a matter of ignorance at all, but a deliberate silencing of a female authority who, like Heloise, represented a kind of learning about women that Christine could not condone.” For further discussion of this phenomenon as it applies to western Europe more broadly, see the end of Chapter 4 and all of Chapter 5 of Monica H. Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Also, note that the image of “Trotula” reproduced here in a quite defective black-and-white image can be found now, in full color, at this link: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Trotula_of_Salerno_Miscellanea_medica_XVIII_Early_14th_Century.jpg.
This is the first appendix to my 2008 monograph, *Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), ISBN: 978-0-19-921149-4. It collects as one comprehensive list all the evidence I found over the course of 20+ years of research for the owners of the *Trotula* texts, the three 12th-century Salernitan texts on women's medicine I had studied. The list includes both individual and institutional owners up to 1600. The list also includes Latin manuscripts as well as all the medieval vernacular translations I identified. Obviously, this lists only owners who can be identified. There must necessarily have been many others whose names are lost to us. Nevertheless, it is highly significant that only one (1) female owner can be identified in this approximately 350-year period. To eliminate the suspense, that one woman was Dorothea Susanna von der Pfalz, Duchess of Saxony-Weimar (1544–92), who had made for her own use a copy of Johannes Hartlieb’s paired German translations of the pseudo-Albertan *Secrets of Women* and *Das Buch Trotula*. (See p. 342.)
1994, Constantine the African and ‘Ali ibn al-’Abbas al-Magusi: The ‘Pantegni’ and Related Texts, ed. Charles Burnett and Danielle Jacquart (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994)
Stories conflict, but it seems like the Arabic encyclopedia of medicine that the medical translator Constantine the African (d. ante 1098/99) brought with him from what is modern-day Tunisia was partially damaged in transit. In its original, the Kamil as-Sina’a at-Tibbiya (The Whole Art of Medicine) was divided into two parts, each with ten books: the theoretical part that explained the basic components of the human body, its anatomy, and the basic kinds of disorders it could suffer; the practical part addressed how to keep the body in health or, failing that, how to treat it with drugs, regimen, or surgery. Although in one Renaissance edition we find a complete Pantegni (Constantine’s Hellenized version of “the whole art”), in manuscripts from the 12th century we find only the ten-part Theorica and a two- or three-part Practica. Focusing just on Book VIII, which addresses diseases of the reproductive organs and joints, this study examines how the missing books of the Practica were “re-created,” literally reconstructed from scratch out of excerpts from other works that Constantine translated from the Arabic, other works already available in Latin, and even, for some passages, some fragments of the original Practica that seem to have survived. The essay by Mary F. Wack in this same volume makes a similar argument with regard to Book II of the Practica (on materia medica), and work by Raphael Veit in 2006 extended the argument to Book III (on fevers).
2010
This essay examines the ways in which the physical body served to both carry and mark differences that played out in the social and political realms. The “unmarked” body seems the norm, unlimited in its potentiality; the body marked by “difference”—sex, age, debility—is limited in its potentiality. I argue here that the bodily difference most important to medieval society was sex. The physiology of the female body was decidedly different from that of the male body, and in some respects even more defining of “difference” than were the anatomical features that distinguished male from female. I take issue with the thesis of Thomas Laqueur that medieval Europe was characterized by a “one-sex body” notion, the idea that male and female were on a single (and potentially reversible) continuum. As noted, the physiological differences between male and female were understood to be profound, and they guided all basic concepts of medical thinking about basic gynecological disease. Rather, following suggestions by Katharine Park, I point out that adoption of the Galenic homological discourse by surgeons in particular (not physicians generally) was a way to make up for their relative lack of information on female pelvic anatomy. As surgeons began more and more to move into gynecological, and then obstetrical care, they analogized from male genital anatomy (which they knew well from many decades of increasingly sophisticated work on male hernias and other genital surgeries) to female anatomy. “To deliver on such claims [to have gynecological and obstetrical expertise], they had to act as if they knew what they were doing.” I also survey traditions of depicting the female body in medical contexts. I also discuss so-called “male menstruation” (which in some cases was seen a salubrious hemorrhoidal bleeding) and hermaphroditism. On the latter topic, I suggest that contrast between Islamic views and Christian ones is fruitful. So, too, is consideration of uterine anatomy, which was founded on the idea that the human uterus is multi-celled, with the central one believed capable of producing hermaphrodites. I then turn to paleopathology for assistance in assessing the ways in which physical debility—most importantly the classic disabling disease, leprosy—also “marked” individuals. Surprisingly, physical disability seems not to have been the most common means of distinguishing people. Still, in extreme situations, such distinction was done, a fact we see most striking in excavations from leprosaria, where the evidence suggests that those more severely (and visibly) affected by the disease were also those most like to be segregated. After a quick glance at physiognomy, the actual science of essential discernment based on physical characteristics, and chiromancy, which focused on the hands, I turn to the “markings” allowed by dress, which could more readily be taken on or cast aside at will.
The press release from the National Humanities Center (NHC) documented the findings of a major symposium held at Research Triangle Park, NC, in Fall 2010, "Excavating Medicine in a Digital Age: Paleography and the Medical Book in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance." An international gathering of paleographers and historians of medicine over the question of how to untangle numerous questions about the transformation of European medicine from a landscape of scattered survivals from late antiquity that presented no coherent view on medical thinking or practice, into a unified system grounded on the adoption of principles of Galenic medicine from Arabic sources. It had long been clear that these events happened over the course of the "long 12th century" (roughly 1075 to 1225 CE), but the precise events and influences remained to be determined, in large part because so much evidence -- the extant manuscripts themselves -- had been neither dated nor localized. A focal point of the symposium was works coming out of the monastery of Monte Cassino, where an immigrant translator, Constantinus Africanus (Constantine the African), worked in the last quarter of the 11th century, translating more than two dozen medical treatises from Arabic into Latin. In the course of the symposium, it was slowly realized that a manuscript now in the Hague (Koninklijke Bibliothek, MS 73 J 6) was very likely a direct product of Monte Cassino, copied while Constantine (d. before 1098/99) would have been working there. This press release was originally posted on the NHC webpage: https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/newsrel2010/prrevmedicine.htm. That link has now been broken, so I am posting the text of the original release here, for archival purposes.
2011
This is a bibliography of primary sources in translation prepared as a guide for students doing research projects for my undergraduate course, HST 362, on concepts of sex and gender in the Middle Ages. The version posted here was last revised in 2011.