MedCat

Darrera modificació: 2017-06-19
Bases de dades: Sciència.cat

Cabré i Pairet, Montserrat, "Trota, Tròtula i Tròtula: autoria i autoritat femenina en la medicina medieval en català", dins: Badia, Lola - Cifuentes, Lluís - Martí, Sadurní - Pujol, Josep (eds.), Els manuscrits, el saber i les lletres a la Corona d'Aragó, 1250-1500, Barcelona, Publicacions de l'Abadia de Montserrat (Textos i estudis de cultura catalana, 210), 2016, pp. 77-102.

Resum

"Trota, Trotula and Tròtula: female authorship and authority in medieval medicine in Catalan". — From the early Latin Middle Ages, we have medical works by the two important women authors, both from the twelfth century: Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) and Trota of Salerno (fl. first half of the twelfth century). Hildegard's medical oeuvre did not circulate beyond the boundaries of the Rhineland, but the name of the woman healer from Salerno, soon transformed into Trotula —‘little Trota'— became a Europe-wide symbol of women's medicine. This article presents, firstly, a summary of current scholarship on Trota of Salerno and her influence on medieval culture. Her authority as Trotula is deconstructed, as the figure who gives her name to an eponymous Latin compendium of women's medicine, the Trotula, which includes the De curis mulierum, a work deriving directly from her medical expertise. Such was the fame both in Latin and the vernacular of this compendium that Trotula came to denominate a genre of medical texts on treatments for women, thematically but not textually related to the original compendium. An explanation is provided as to how the figure of Trotula was disseminated through several texts in which she is cited as an authority on women's medicine. There then follows the presentation of a corpus of manuscript witnesses in Catalan from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries which reflect the dissemination of this female symbol of authority. News is provided for the first time of a Catalan Tròtula copied in a fifteenth-century medical miscellany, currently held in the Biblioteca Riccardiana in Florence. It is a fragmentary translation of the De curis mulierum which the anonymous copyist of the Florentine manuscript —probably a surgeon— collates with an old Latin version, highlighting the differences. The age of the Latin originals explains why the Catalan tradition retains Trota's original name and high esteem, a unique occurrence in the vernacular traditions of the Trotula. Other important ways in which Trotula's authority was disseminated are also documented: firstly, through the explicit quotations in the chapters on gynaecological treatments from one of the mid-fourteenth-century Catalan versions of the Thesaurus pauperum attributed to Petrus Hispanus; and secondly, through texts entitled Tròtula that circulated in the Crown of Aragon, even though it is not always known which treatises were included under this title or in which languages they were written. An inventory of the books belonging to a Barcelona apothecary from 1428 lists a book in Catalan with the title Tròtule de Grècia: although this is clearly a vernacular text, the transcription of the short fragments of the incipit and explicit are not sufficient to determine which text the volume contained. Finally, the Tròtula by Mestre Joan is described. This is a Catalan medical compendium of women's medicine from the third quarter of the fourteenth century preserved in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, which includes a wide range of health and beauty treatments for women. This text is preceded by an Occitan ‘salut d'amor', in noves rimades metre, addressed to an Aragonese princess (an edition is included in the article). Extant documentation shows that in the fifteenth century this Catalan Tròtula was disseminated beyond the royal court, amongst surgeons and barber-surgeons. We conclude that the Catalan tradition is rich in witnesses that illustrate how medieval culture constructed a female medical authority around the figure of Trota, the woman healer from Salerno, for whom we only have a sketchy biography. Transformed into Trotula and Tròtula, she came to lend her authority to knowledge about medical treatments for women.

Matèries

Medicina - Ginecologia, obstetrícia i cosmètica
Manuscrits
Dones
Recepció
Traduccions
Català