Main Menu | List of entries | finished

TROTULA di Ruggiero, fl. twelfth century A.D., was a physician at the Salerno medical school. She was also the wife of one of the physicians at the school and mother of two sons. She collaborated with her husband in writing the Encyclopaedia regimen sanitatis and is credited with the authorship of a treatise on gynecology and obstetrics, Trotulae curandarum aegritudinum mulierorium ante et post partum, also known as De passionibus mulierum, in sixty chapters. This treatise is referred to simply as Trotula. K.C. Hurd-Mead states that Trotula's identity as a female doctor and specialist in women's diseases was never questioned during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Scholars and physicians accepted her reputation as the most noted woman physician of the Middle Ages. Hurd-Mead sees no necessity to claim that Trotula was a man who chose the name as a nom de plume. Her work was continuously copied as late as the sixteenth century. P. Meyer gives the dates of three such manuscripts: 1544, 1547, 1566.

Dame Alys says that Trotula's treatise was bound up in Jankyn's anthology, WBP 677. [Jankyn2]

The name occurs medially, WBP 677.


L.Y. Baird-Lange, "Trotula's Fourteenth-Century Reputation, Jankyn's Book, and Chaucer's Trot." Studies in the Age of Chaucer (1984): 245-256; K.C. Hurd-Mead, "Trotula." Isis 14 (1930): 349-367; P. Meyer, "Les Manuscrits Français de Cambridge." Romania 32 (1903): 88-91; B. Rowland, "Exhuming Trotula, sapiens matrona of Salerno." Florilegium 1 (1979): 42-57; Trotula of Salerno, The Diseases of Women by Trotula of Salerno, trans. E. Mason-Hohl.
From CHAUCER NAME DICTIONARY
Copyright © 1988, 1996 Jacqueline de Weever
Published by Garland Publishing, Inc., New York and London.

Main Menu | List of entries | finished