Medieval Woman’s Guide to Health: The First English Gynecological Handbook by Beryl Rowland

Abstract

R E V IE W S Medieval Woman’s Guide to Health: The First English Gynecological Hand­ book, Middle English Text, with introduction and modem English transla­ tion by Beryl Rowland (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1981). xvii, 192. $17.50 How did ordinary women in the Middle Ages cope with day-to-day sickness and problems of childbirth? Medieval Woman’s Guide to Health: The First English Gynecological Handbook translated into modem English by Beryl Rowland, Professor of English at York University, provides an answer not to be found elsewhere. Remarkably, the fifteenth-century hand-written manuscript that is the basis of this book is actually addressed to women. The unknown writer voices the reluctance of women to disclose their ailments to “discourteous men” and states that the text has been written so that “one woman may help another in her sickness.” What follows is a do-it-yourself medical manual, accompanied by instructions for treatment and copious recipes using fruit, vegetables, parts of trees, herbs, minerals, wine, and even burnt feathers. A considerable section is devoted to childbirth, a subject that traditionally was only given brief, theoretical consideration by medieval physicians. Here, for the first time, is an attempt at practical obstetrics. Sixteen diagrams on difficult births are provided, and the midwife is in­ structed on methods of correcting the position of the fetus before delivery. Exceptional in a misogynistic age is the overall tone, which is sympathetic to women, especially when questions of abortion, miscarriage, and moral issues in general arise. The manuscript is ascribed to Trotula, a legendary woman physician of Salerno, Italy, which had a flourishing medical school from the eleventh to the thirteenth century. Already circulating in Latin for several centuries were two Latin treatises attributed to her, one on the diseases of women and another on cosmetics. The Salernitan school made an outstanding con­ tribution to medicine by insisting that a physician should be a learned per­ son, not just a craftsman. It focussed on treatment of symptoms and on E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , x, i , March 198 4 preventative medicine and, remarkable at the time, avoided supernatural cures. The major treatise that bears the name of Trotula, De passionibus mulierum, is a notable achievement in its period, but Professor Rowland somewhat reluctantly admits that there is no firm evidence for Trotula’s existence. The name Trotula, she believes, is simply a variation of Trot, the name widely applied to the medieval procuress: A trot was a vieille [an old woman]. She trotted for a living. Deprived of physical attractions by age, she had the wisdom of a sorceress, and in her business as procuress, she taught her protegees the tricks of the trade. Besoing fait vielle troter [the old woman must trot] was an old French proverb. Old Trot was the stock joke of popular literature — the old woman who still wished to associate herself with sexual pleasures. .. . Some of the recipes attributed to Trotula in the Latin texts such as “on the manner of tightening the vulva so that even a woman who has been seduced may appear a virgin” (xxxv) and “on adornment and whitening of the face” (lxi), are the same as those which the stereotyped vieille (vekke, vecchia, vetula, annicula) passed on to young women. Traditionally, the vieille gave instruction on feminine personal appearance, hygiene, eating, and drinking as part of her advice on how to ensnare men. Although her own hideous appearance was a cure for the kind of love she had inspired as a young woman, she was knowledgeable in matters of contraception and abortion and had some repute as a midwife. Much to the horror of medieval moralists she was even called medica and thereby associated with an estimable profession. (P. 4) But if Trotula is a mythic figure, who was the writer of the English treatise? Its content differs substantially from that of the Latin manuscripts, and the compassionate voice in the Preface might well be that of a woman: If women are sick, men despise them and fail to realize how much sickness women have before they...