Female Authority in Translation

Abstract

This article addresses the entangled histories of translation and gendered medical authority in medieval Western Europe, exploring the vernacularization of medicine from the perspective of Catalan literature. Instead of focusing on authorship or on the authenticity of the medieval attributions, it explores how women were recognized as a source of medical knowledge and how female personal names were employed as a means of conveying notions of authority on women’s health. Latin medicine created its own celebrity around the acclaimed healer Trota of Salerno, although her original name was almost written out of the historical record in favor of Trotula and the label Trotula that flourished after her name. I study a wealth of traces showing that late medieval Catalan medicine retained a notion of female authority on women’s health through the use of her name and that both Trota and Trotula came to authorize a significant part of medieval women’s medicine in Catalan.