Oct NOV Dec 13 2003 2004 2005 1 captures 13 Nov 04 - 13 Nov 04

Close Help

      In the catalogues of the mediaeval libraries as Canterbury and Dover are entries indicating that the monks once possessed copies of medical treatises attributed to Trotula, wise woman of the Salernitan School.1  Such works on the diseases of women were popular and their appearance in some extensive medical collections need not surprise us.  The authoress, who has been called “a medieval Lydia Pinkham,” enjoyed the reputation of being expert in feminine matters.  For several centuries De passionibus mulierum, De aegritudinibus mulierum, De curis mulierum, Trotula major, and Trotula were ascribed to her, and also works having to do with cosmetics and the care of the complexion, De ornatu mulierum and Trotula minor.  In addition to entire manuscripts, certain chapters under the titles Practica de secretis mulierum and Practica domine Trote ad prouocanda menstrua were often copied, their attraction being partly due, in the opinion of one critic, to their “pornographic character.”2  Christchurch library included the last named title; St. Augustine’s library Trotula maior de curis mulierum, Trotula minor, Trotule, and in the collection of John of London Trotula maior et minor; the library of Dover Priory owned Trotula maior de pas and Trotula maior.3

     Whether these libraries possessed the Latin treatises as has generally been assumed is, however, debatable.  At the Royal College of Surgeons, London, is a fifteenth-century manuscript 129a.i.5, written in English and headed by a distinctive red rubric: “hic incipit liber Trotularis.”  It is a gynecological text apparently copied from Sloane 249, part of a collection of medical treatises once owned by John Woot.  This Sloane manuscript, roughly written on poor parchment without elegance and without decoration, seems to have been extensively copied.  One lavish copy, Sloane 2463, on fine quality parchment with initials colored red or blue against a background of feather-like foliation, corrects some of its errors; the manuscript at the Royal College of Surgeons does not.

     The manuscript belongs to the group of Middle English treatises on child-birth and women’s diseases which are directed to women.  Some such treatises claim to have been written by women, and more than one such manuscript exhorts every learned woman to read it to those who are unlearned, and to help and advise them in their sicknesses, without showing their diseases to man.  The reason for providing the manuscript in the vernacular is often stated: “Because whomen of oure tonge donne bettyr rede and undyrstande thys langage than eny other, and euery whoman her maledyes, withowtyn shewyng here dysese to man, i have thys drauyn and wryttyn in englysh.”4

     The English character of our text is evinced by certain references which also occur in the parent text, Sloane 249.  Most of these references concern London or the Home Counties.  The Baron of Cirencester’s wife was cured of an almost fatal hemorrhage of the womb by powdered roots of dragonwort and parsley leaves in “good ale;” a recipe of burnhart’s horn and eggshell powdered in soup, sauce, or drink, proved very effective in Cheapside to cure excessive menstruation; in the County of Essex, noted for its tanning industry at Colchester,5 a woman was cured of the flux while she sat in a bath of herbs boiled in tanner’s juice, up to her navel; a certain recipe of the Prior of Bermondsey saved a woman almost dead from a hemorrhage of the womb; a herbal recipe for dropsy cured a woman whose life was despaired of by London doctors.  Two persons are singled out for providing good medical advice -- Richard Marche and Lightfoot Gardner.  They both have common English surnames,6  but are otherwise unidentifiable.  “Edmund magister,” also mentioned, was presumably St. Edmund of Abingdon (1180-1240), Archbishop of Canterbury, whose fame for healing, in the opinion of his biographers, exceeded that of St. Thomas à Becket.7

     The manuscript contains many remedies found in earlier treatises.  At times the text becomes confused because the writer seems to have copied indiscriminately, mixing Latin recipes, with many unusual case endings and constructions, with English recipes at random.  The principal recipes are potions, consisting of herbs, parts of trees, fruit, minerals, parts of animals, including turtle doves or eels burned alive, and these ingredients are often boiled in special liquids such as wine or vinegar.  Suppositories, made chiefly of hers, are to be tied by a thread to the thigh to prevent displacement; cupping, bleeding, and herbal baths are frequently recommended.  Whereas Soranus, the famous Greek gynecologist who practised in Rome in the second century, was interested in the mental and physical health of his patients and advised pregnant women to “promenade, exercise the voice and read aloud with modulations, take active exercise in the form of dancing, punching the leather bag, playing with a ball, and by means of massage,”8 our writer is not concerned with such matters and does not mention exercise or general diet.  He is enthusiastic about fumigations for which he recommends an embote, a syringe or douche, in order to introduce curative fumes or liquids into the body, and he accepts the belief, stemming from Hippocrates, that the womb was connected with the digestive tract and ultimately with the mouth and nose.  Not surprisingly, therefore, to cure the suffocation of the womb (hysteria), he advises the application of foul-smelling things to the nose and aromatics to the vagina.  Although Soranus contemptuously rejected such procedures, traditional ideas had persisted in the writings of Aetios, and others.  “The womb,” declared Trotula in De passionibus mulierum, “like a wild beast of the forest wanders to this side and that . . . .”9  When our writer deals with the falling of the womb he naturally recommends the reverse procedure, applying evil-smelling things to the womb and sweet-smelling items to the nose.  Even in the eighteenth century, after the theory of the uterine origin of nervous diseases had been challenged, the practices described by our author were still recommended.

     Although superstitions in connection with childbirth were very numerous, our writer has only two magical remedies to assist parturition: the use of a girdle and the use of a precious stone.  Soranus recommended that a girdle of linen be worn until the eighth month and then discarded in order that the weight of the child might assist in bringing on labor at the proper time.  This girdle was employed for strictly medical purposes.  As far as amulets are concerned, he had no faith in them apart from their possible psychological benefit to a credulous patient:

     Some people say that some things are effective by antipathy, such as the magnet and the Assian stone and hare’s rennet and certain other amulets to which we on our own part pay no attention.  Yet one should not forbid their use; for even if the amulet has no direct effect, still through hope it will possibly make the patient more cheerful.10
 
     The kind of girdle to which our writer refers is one credited with supernatural powers.  Trotula had advised wearing such a girdle, and in England childbirth girdles of various materials were in use from the time of the Druids until the nineteenth century, often remaining in the same family for many generations.  In the Middle Ages even manuscripts in roll form were used as birth girdles.11  Whereas the Latin Trotula recommended a girdle of snake skin, our writer specifies hart’s skin.

     The writer of De passionibus mulierum also recommended a precious stone that would shorten the pangs of childbirth.  This stone was aetites, the eagle’s stone, which has had a long history in obstetrics.  It was supposed to prevent abortion and facilitate delivery if applied at the correct time.  Dioscurides, Plutarch, and others believed that the stone actually pulled out the unborn child and retained its power of traction long after the birth.12  The Talmud recommended its use.13  In the sixteenth century a physician reported that a woman suffered a fatal prolapse of the uterus because a large eagle’s stone was not removed from her immediately after her delivery.  In the eighteenth century, the eagle’s stone was still being recommended along with other magical objects.14  The procedure, according to the Latin Trotula, was to tie the stone to the thigh; a magnet in the woman’s right hand, and coral around her neck were also helpful.15  Our writer in the English manuscript refers not the eagle stone, nor to the magnet, but to “isapis.”  I presume that he intended to write “iaspis.”  Jasper amulets to facilitate childbirth date from the Graeco-Egyptian period.16 They were also believed to increase lactation.  According to the mediaeval lapidary, jasper “helpeth a woman in bering of children & deleverance.”  In the opinion of Albertus Magnus, the stone prevented conception, aided childbirth and kept the wearer from “licentiousness.”17  St. Hildegard of Bingen in the eleventh century recommended that the pregnant woman should have jasper in her hand for a full nine months in order to ward off malevolent spirits:
Et cum mulier infantem parit, ab illa hora cum eum jam gignit, per omnes dies ejusdem knicbeke (kindbette?) jaspidem in manu sua habeat, ut (et) maligni aerei spiritus tanto minus eam et infantem interim nocere poterunt, quia lingua antiqui serpentis extendit se ad sudorem infantis de vulva matris egredientis; et ideo tam infanti quam matri eo tempore insidiatur.18
[And when the woman bears a child, from that hour when she conceived it until she delivers through all the days of her childbearing, let her have jasper in her hand, so that the evil spirits of the air can do so much the less harm to the child meanwhile, because the tongue of the ancient serpent extends itself to the sweat of the infant emerging from the mother’s womb, and he lies in wait for both mother and child at that time.]

     While some of the recipes in the English manuscript are the same as those in De passionibus mulierum, there are also considerable differences.  Certain chapter headings such as those dealing with menstruation and various complications of the womb are common to both, but the Latin Trotula has many subjects not found in the vernacular, such as regulations for pregnant women and for women about to give birth, choice of a wet nurse, incidents which befall women after childbirth, the very harsh coughing of children, foul smelling sweat, pain of the eyes, scum over the eyes, spots of the eyes, of fat women and slender ones, abortion, stone, dysentery, lice, scruff of the lips and other parts, cancer, cancer of the nose, swelling of the feet, small pimples of children, foulness of breath, falling of the uvula, worms of the hands and feet, deafness of the ears, the tonsils, hemorrhoids, toothache, fistula, roughness of the hands, adornment and whitening of the face, a water of marvelous effectiveness for the preservation of the human body from various infirmities, and other chapters.

     The most important difference is that whereas the Latin Trotula gives only vague observations on the difficulties of parturition, our English manuscript describes various abnormal positions of the fetus in the womb and gives explicit instructions on how to correct them with a view to delivering the child successfully.  In addition, these obstetrical details are accompanied by “birth figures,” some sixteen illustrations of unnatural childbirth.  In the parent manuscript, Sloane 249, and in the copy Sloane 2463, a series of well-developed infants with mops of crenellated yellow hair descend through pink balloon-like representations of the uterus;19 in the manuscript at the Royal College of Surgeons black infants descend through dark red plasma to the green half-moon at the base of the uterus.20 Variations of these figures are not uncommon, and the series occurs in other manuscripts not ascribed to Trotula.21  The source may have been Soranus’ Gynecology.22  There appears to have been a place for the figures in the text, and in the opinion of one scholar an extant, badly corrupted Soranus manuscript of the fifteenth century contains a reference to them.23  The illustrations were used about 500 A. D. by an otherwise unknown Latin writer called Muscio and his work seems to have circulated widely in the Middle Ages, even turning up in a fifteenth-century Latin manuscript, John of Arderne’s De arte phisicale et de cirurgia in the Royal Library at Stockholm.24  The obstetrical advice which accompanies these figures in the vernacular manuscript  Sloane 249 and its copies appears to derive ultimately from Soranus via redactions of Muscio and Caelius Aurelianus, supplemented by encyclopedic medical writers such as Roger de Baron, Arnaldus de Villanova, and Gilbertus Anglicus.25

     Arnaldua de Villanova has a chapter on difficult births: he finds two natural modes of birth, headling and footling; in other cases he recommends manipulation by the midwife to effect normal delivery.26  On the other hand many writers ignore the subject: Bartholomew the Englishman’s encyclopedia, 1230-1240, popular as it appears to have been in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, has only one chapter “de obstetrice,” and this chapter is concerned with child-rearing rather than midwifery.27  In the middle of the thirteenth century, Vincent de Beauvais in his Speculum dealt with pregnancy, sterility and involuntary abortion, but referred to childbirth only briefly and stated that it was facilitated if the woman was made to sneeze (“Sicut Hippocras sit”).28  The famous surgeon Guy de Chauliac paused briefly to consider women’s diseases (“Of passiouns of ze  matrice”) between treating of hermaphroditism and “sickness” of the thighs and feet.  He gave instructions for removing a dead child, but of childbirth itself he observed only that “A newe borne childe goz out proprely vpon his hede, ze face turned toward ze erthe.  All ozer goyinge oute forsothe is vnkyndely and harde.”29  Our manuscript was therefore dealing with material not always treated by the encyclopedists and practitioners of his time.  The later printed books did not improve upon the work until the advent of Paré.  The subsequent wide dissemination of this material and its transmission into printed texts such as The Byrthe of Mankynde30 testifies to its popularity, and the possibility exists that it may have been the Trotule in the libraries.

     This hypothesis reminds us that very little is known about Trotula.  Kaspar Wolf in Harmonia gynaeciorum (1566) denied her existence altogether, stating that De passionibus mulierum curandarum was written by a Roman freedman of the Empress Julia, named Eros or Erotes-- “Erotis medici liberti Juliae, quem aliqui Trotulam inepte nominant in mulierum liber ....”31 Since that time, mainly because of the assertions in De Renzi’s Collectio  Salernitana,32 she has been variously identified as wife of Johannes Platearius with two distinguished sons, and as the “learned woman” of Salerno, the equal in medicine of Rudolph Mala Corona, the famous medical monk of Normandy.  Südhoff and others believed she was only the name of a book;33 feminist medical historians such as Mélanie Lepinska and Kate Campbell Hurt-Mead believed that she was both medical practitioner and author.34  One medical historian, on a “cursory examination” of the Latin Trotula manuscripts in Britain, maintained that many differed in content and some could be wholly attributed to authors such as Petrus Hispanus and Albertus Magnus.35  In the case of the vernacular manuscripts which I have examined and Trotula’s most popular work, De passionibus mulierum, the medical traditions on which they are largely based are so different as to make single authorship unlikely.  Yet despite the manuscript variation in her name such as Trot, troto, tto, Trotta, Trocula, Truta, Trota, and Trutella, one authority seems to be implied.36  Who was Trotula that so many gynecological works should be ascribed to her?  The answer, I believe, lies outside the medical texts.

     The thirteenth-century trouvère Rutebeuf in Le dit de l’herberie depicted a quack who said he was employed by Trotula, the wisest lady in all four parts of the world -- “le plus sage dame qui soit enz quatre parties dou monde.”37  Despite the hyperbole, the reference has a curious facetiousness, and in appearance Rutebeuf’s Trotula seems to have the characteristics of the quack’s nag.  Writing in the next century, Chaucer put Trotula in the book that the Wife of Bath’s ex-clerical husband used for his admonitory fireside chats:

In which book eek ther was Tertulan,
Crisippus, Trotula, and Helowys,
That was abbesse nat fer fro Parys.  (WB Prol 676-78)

There is no evidence that the poet was thinking of Trotula in a medical capacity.  Jankyn, the Wife’s fifth husband, in his nightly “desport,” was primarily concerned with amorous relationships between the sexes, and the inclusion of Trotula with Heloise, the woman whose letters, written when she was the abbess at Paraclete, revealed the history of the tragic love affair of her youth, might hve been for reasons other than those usually assumed.  The connotations of trot, already proverbial in the Middle Ages, are too suggestive to be ignored.  A trot was a vieille.  She trotted for a living.  Deprived of physical attractions by age, she had a wisdom of a sorceress, and in her business as a procuress, she taught her protegées the tricks of the trade.  “Besoing fait vielle troter” 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.38  To the mediaeval misogynist she was the repulsive creature that the promiscuous, proud, and desirable young woman inevitably became.  When a satirist such as John Gower, Chaucer’s contemporary, inveighs against her, he calls her “la viele trote” or “la trotière,” a word which was often employed in the Middle Ages when speaking of “une femme de mauvaise vie.”  In his indictment of humanity, Mirour de l’Omme, Gower writes:

Mais sur trestoutes je desfie
La viele trote q’est jolie
Qant secches ad les mammellettes.  (17899-901)
[More than all of them I despise
The old woman who is flirtatious
When her breasts are withered.]

As old as Ovid’s Dipsas, she appears in all the major vernacular literatures of the west.  The Duenna in the Roman de la Rose, in her capacity as a bawd, trots to the home of the Lover (l. 14691).  In Juan Ruiz’s Libro de Buen Amor the priest is advised to seek out a trota to procure the young woman with whom he has fallen in love:

“Por ende busca tú una buena medianera,
Que sepe sabiamente andar esta carrera,
Que entienda des vos anbos byen la vuestra manera:
Qual don Amor te dixo, tal sea la trotera.”
[”Therefore avail yourself at once of some old go-between
Who knows the crooked alley-ways of vice and love obscene,
She understands what both you need, she knows just what you
                                                                                        mean --
Get such a trot Sir Love described and much upon her lean.”]39

Subsequently she is called Trotaconventos because she trots from convent to convent looking for business.
The subjects of the recipes attributed to Trotula, 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, anicula) passed on the young women.  Traditionally, as in the Roman de la Rose (ll. 13281 ff.), the vieille gave instruction on feminine personal appearance, hygiene, eating, drinking as part of her advice on how to ensnare men.  While her own hideous appearance was a cure for the kind of love which she inspired as a young woman, she was still knowledgeable in matters of contraception and abortion and had some repute as a midwife.  Much to the horror of mediaeval moralists she was even called medica and thereby associated with an estimable profession.40  Although Cotgrave in his Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues in 1611 defined trotière as “a raumpe, fisgig, fisking huswife, raunging damsell, gadding or wandering flirt,” usually she was old.  The old woman in Chaucer’s Friar’s Tale is called a viritrate by the Summoner when he falsely accuses her of lechery:

This somonour clappeth at the wydwes gate,
“Com out,” quod he, “thou olde virytrate!
I trowe thou hast som frere or preest with thee.”  (1581-83)

Various explanations have been offered for virytrate.  Heiner Gillmeister finds viritoot and virytrate correspond to the regular OF forms viretost and viretart, “early riser” and “slug-a-bede.”41  However, if viry is the genitive form of the Latin vir, it makes good sense -- “a trot of man.”  The word may be a debased Latin compound.  The Latin trattus (Middle English tratte) has the double meaning of anus: “old woman” and rectum.42  The pun would be appropriate here.  Gammer Gurton,  in the early English comedy Gammer Gurton’s Needle, is also called an “old trot,” and the editor John S. Farmer, who is better known for his dictionary of slang, glossed trot as “old woman; usually in contempt, a drab, slut, strumpet.”43  A similar implication is made by Shakespeare in The Taming of the Shrew (I. ii. 89): “an old Trot, with ne’er a tooth in her head although she may have as many diseases as two and fifty horses.”  Sixty years later Urquhart, translating Rabelais, refers to “an ugly old Trot in the company who had the reputation of an expert she-physician.”44

     While medical historians never fail to include Trotula in their accounts of the development of gynecology, they usually base their remarks on her De passionibus mulierum, appraising  it both as a “notable achievement” and as an illustration of “the deplorable state to which gynaecology in the Middle Ages had fallen.”45  Yet the vernacular manuscripts with which I have been dealing appear to have been influenced by traditions very different from those in her most well-known work.  The widespread use of the word “Trot” and its associations with expertise in feminine matters may explain why a number of manuscripts variously treating of women’s diseases came to be ascribed to her.  Although women doctors certainly did exist in the Middle Ages there appears to be no firm evidence that Trotula was one of them or that she had an impressive funeral attended by a procession of mourners two miles long.46  My own findings do not add another proverbial nail; they tend to deprive her even of her coffin.

York University.
 

1 Salerno, which became renowned as a centre of medicine from 985, attained legal status and royal privileges in the thirteenth century and was recognized as a city university in the fourteenth.  See Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The School of Salerno: Its Development and Its Contribution to the History of Learning,” Bull. Hist. Med., 17 (1945) 138-94.

2 G. L. Hamilton, “Trotula,” MP, 4 (Oct. 1906) 378.

3 M. R. James, The Ancient Libraries of Canterbury and Dover.  The Catalogues of the Libraries of Christchurch Priory and St. Augustine’s Abbey at Canterbury and St. Martin’s Priory at Dover (Cambridge 1903) 58, 339, 340, 345, 385, 481, 482.

4 Bodleian MS.  Douce, 37, fol. lv.

5 See entries in The Oath Book or Red Parchment Book of Colchester, tr. W. Gurney (Colchester, Essex County 1907) 7,9.

6 Middle English Dictionary, a. v. gardiner (c); light-fot.  The names are not recorded in C. H. Talbot and E. A. Hammond, The Medical Practitioners in Medieval England.

7 Bernard Ward, St. Edmund, Archbishop of Canterbury: His Life as Told by Old English Writers (London 1903) 169; A. T. Baker, “Le Vie de Saint Edmond,” Rom. 55 (1929) 279, 11. 1940-64; C. H. Lawrence, St. Edmund of Abingdon (Oxford 1960) 101-5.

8 Gynecology, tr. Owsei Temkin (Baltimore 1956) I, 49.

9 (Paris: J. Fucherius 1551), cap. xx.

10 Gynecology, III, 42.

11 Curt F. Bühler, “Prayers and Charms in Certain Middle English Scrolls,” Spec. 39 (1964) 274.

12 Adolphe de Chesnel, Dictionnaire des Superstitions, erreurs, préjugés, et traditions populaires (Petit-Montrouge 1856), col. 896.

13 M. Höfler, Volksmedizin und Aberglaube (Munich 1893) 39.

14 Nicholas Culpepper, Culpepper’s Compleat and Experienc’d Midwife in Two Parts, made English by W-. S-. (London 1718) 55-56.

15 caps. xvi, xvii.

16 Campbell Bonner, Studies in Magical Amulets, Chiefly Graeco-Egyptian (Ann Arbor, Mich. 1950) 79-83; E. A. Budge, Amulets and Superstitions (London 1930) 314-30.

17 English Mediaeval Lapidaries, ed. J. Evans and M. S. Sergeantson EETS, O. S. 190 (1933; rpt. London 1960) 121; Albertus Magnus, Book of Minerals, tr. D. Wykoff (Oxford 1967) 100.
 
18 PL 197.1257.

19 fols. 196v-97v; 217r-18v.  In Sloane 249 the figures are crudely drawn, and the parchment background is used; in Sloane 2463 the figures are in the same position and in the same groups of four, but the artist has used bright pink flesh tones.

20  fols. 28v-31r.

21 Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, MS. 3714. fols. 26v-29r [Codex Bruxellensis]; Copenhagen, Kongelige Bibliotek, MS. G. K. S. 1653, 4o, fols. 17r-19r [Codex Hafniensis]; MS. Thott, 190. 2o, fol 6r; Dresden, Sächsische Landesbibliothek MS. p. 34, fols. 212r-15v; Erlangen, Universitätsbibliothek, MS. B 200, fols. 78r-79r; MS B. 33, fols. 93v-95r; Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek, MS. 1192, fols. 263v-64v; Montpellier, Bibliothèque de l’école de Médecin, MS. 277, fols. 162r-63v; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS.  Ashmole 399, fols. 14r-15r; MS Laud 724, fols. 97r-97v; Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS Lat. 7056, fols. 87r-89r; Rome, Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, MS. Pal Lat 1304, fols. 83r-84v; Stockholm, Kungliga Biblioteket, MS. X. 118; Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS. Lat. Z. 320 (1937), fol. 98r; Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, MS. 597, fols. 259v-61v.

22 For text see Valentin Rose, ed., Sorani gynaeciorum (Leipzig 1882); Johannes Ilberg, ed., Die Überlieferung der Gynäkologie des Soranus von Ephesos (Leipzig 1910); Owsei Temkin, tr., Soranus’ Gynecology (Baltimore 1956).

23 See E. Ingerslev, “Rösslin’s ‘Rosegarten’: Its Relation to the Past (the Muscio Manuscripts and Soranos), particularly with regard to Podalic Version,” J. Obstet. & Gynec, 15 (1909) 25.

24 Stockholm, Kungliga Biblioteket, MS. 118 (1412), in centre column, positions 10-20.

25 Practica (Venice 1513), cap. LXIII ff.; Breuiarium Practice (Lyons 1509), lib. III.  Compendium Medicine (Lyons 1510), fols., 290 ff.

26 Breuiarium Practice, III. iv: “Sed contra naturam & pedibus retoritis, vel stans reversus, & sic inde reducatur ad unum de duobus modis ab obstetrice, ut sit cum capite vel pedibus ante & cum brachiis plicatis ut decet exeat naturaliter exitu.”  Arnaldus attributes some of his advice to “vetula Salerni.”

27 De Rerum Proprietatibus (1601; rpt. Frankfort 1964) XVI. xxxiii.

28 Speculum Doctrinale in Speculum Quadruplex, sive Speculum Maius (1624, rpt. Graz 1964) II, lib XIV, cxxvi. cols. 1364-65.

29 The Cyrurgis of Guy de Chauliac, ed. Margaret Ogden, EETS, 265 (London 1971) 530.

30 ed. Thomas Raynalde, 1545.  For history of this work, see J. W. Ballantyne, “The ‘Byrth of Mankynde’,” J. Obstet. & Gynec. 10 (1906) 297-325.

31 Gynaeciorum sive de mulierum affectionibus commentarii Graecorum, Latinorum, Babarorum iam olim et nunc recens editorum.  In tres tomos digesti et necessariis passim imaginibus illustrati (Basle: T. Guarinus, 1566), cols. 215-16.

32 Collectio Salernitana (Naples 1852-59) I, 149-64; III, 327.  Firm evidence is lacking.

33 Charles and Dorothea Singer, “The Origin of the Medical School of Salerno, the first University: An Attempted Reconstruction,” Essays on the History of Medicine presented to Karl Südhoff (London 1924) 129.

34 Histoire des Femmes Médecins depuis l’Antiquité jusqu’à nos Jours (Paris 1900) 86-89; A History of Women in Medicine (Haddam, Conn. 1938) 136-37.

35 H. P. Bayon, “Trotula and the Ladies of Salerno,” Proc. Royal Soc. Med. (1939-40) 473.  Bayon has been regarded as a champion of Trotula; see Elizabeth Mason-Hohl, tr., The Diseases of Women by Trotula of Salerno (n. p. 1940) vii [preface].  Bayon, in fact, examined the paucity of evidence (pp. 471-75), and then accepted the traditional view.

36  C. Hiersemann, however, asserts that the earliest manuscript, the Breslau De aegritudinum curatione, was by a Dr. Trottus.  See “Die Abschitte aus der Practica des Trottus in der Salernitanischen Sammelschrift ‘De Aegritudinum Curatione’,” doctoral dissertation, University of Leipzig, 1921.

37 Oeuvres Complètes de Rutebeuf, ed. Edmond Faral and Julia Bastin (Paris 1869) II, 276n.  The editors challenge the suggestion of Emile Picot, Romania, 16 (1887) 493, but agree that some burlesque is intended.  Moreover, “hari, trote!” is “un terme dont on se sert en Languedoc pour exciter les ânes à marcher.”  See Pamphile et Galatée, ed. Joseph de Morawski (Paris 1917) 143.

38 Pamphile et Galatée p. 137.  For subsequent use, see OED, s. v. Trot. v. 2; F. Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue Française (Paris 1881-1902) VIII, 92.

39 J. C. Y. Frauca, (Madrid 1960) I, 645. [Trans. Elisha Kent Kane.]

40 Albertus Magnus, “Metaphysica,” IV, i, 6, Opera Omnia XVI, i, 169: “. . . illa vero alia dicitur medica;” St. Bernardina, “Selecta ex autographo Budapestinensi,” Opera Omnia, IX, 369:  “O medici, studuistis in grammatica, logica, philosophia, medicina, cum multis spensis, periculis et laboribus; e la vechi (a) rinchagnata n’a l’onore!”  The subject of one of Trotula’s recipes is found in Galen, Opera, ed. Kühn, XIV, 478: “Ut mulier violata appareat virgo: SH (L<? ? $g$4?F:X<? B?D?N?\<0J?4 B?DhX<@l.”
41 Poetica, 4 (1975), 37-38.  See also A. C. Baugh, Chaucer’s Major Poetry (New York 1963) 408; Norman E. Eliason, The Language of Chaucer’s Poetry: An Appraisal of the Verse, Style, and Structure, Anglistica, 17 (Copenhagen 1972) 105 f.

42 T. W. Ross, Chaucer’s Bawdy (New York 1972) 233.  Conjectured etymologies of the word include Goth. Drotta: domina; Germ. Drutte: mulier fatidica, etc.  See J. Jameson, An Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language (Paisley 1882) V, s. v. Trat.

43 (London 1906) 75.

44 Gargantua and Pantagruel (1900; rpt. New York 1967) I, 40.  For word used contemptuously see Sir Ferumbras, ed. Sidney J. Herrtage EETS, E. S., 34 (1879; rpt. London 1966) l. 1370; The Wakefield Pageants in the Towneley Cycle, ed. A. C. Cawley (1958; rpt. Manchester 1963) 5, l. 394; William of Palerne, ed. W. W. Skeat, EETS, E. S., 1 (London 1897) l. 4769.  I admit to finding one commendatory reference: in Barnfield, “The Affectionate Shepherd,” Some Longer Elizabethan poems, introd. A. H. Bullen (New York n. d.) 169, a “beldame Trot” dispenses advice which is highly moral: “Embrace thy wife, live not in lecherie.”  Edward F. Tuttle, in an excellent article published since my own was written, “The Trotula and Old Dame Trot: A Note on the Lady of Salerno,” Bull. Hist. of Med., 50 (1976) 61-72, considers the question of authorship with regard to the Latin treatise.  Some of his conclusions as far as mediaeval usage of Trot is concerned are similar to my won.  He also draws attention to the appearance of “Dame Trot” in nineteenth-century childrens’ literature, but is doubtful of her connection with the mediaeval celebrity.

45 Bayon, p. 474; James V. Ricci, The Genealogy of Gynaecology, 2nd ed. rev. (Philadelphia 1950) 212.

46 Elizabeth Mason-Hohl, p. viii.