Dame Trot Herself
Or As much As We Can Know Her
Having weighed in on the famous book, it is time to contemplate the woman most associated with it: Dame Trotta or Trocta of Salerno.
What can we say about her?
The Most Famous Evidence
First, we have the Trotula, which has several problems.
You know how I thought it sounded like more than one hand had written it? It probably was. The scholar who has done the most work on Dame Trota, Monica H. Green, thinks the Trotula was a compilation from many hands that is aimed at an audience of Norman woman and came from multiple writers even in its original form.
And worse, those fragments have been ‘edited’ by many hands over the centuries.
Then a 1500’s editor changed quite a bit, changing the name of Trota to ‘Eros,’ removing references to medieval sources, and claiming that the compilation was written by an ancient Roman slave. Further ‘improvements’ were added afterwards. It was this guy who put three collections together and claimed they were authored by one person.
In reality, the middle section of The Trotula (the part named On Treatments For Women) is the only part that was spread around under Trota of Salerno’s name independently. The parts on either side of this section were probably written by others.
So, our most famous piece of evidence is a third of a garbled treatise.
The Rest of the Evidence
Basically, we have fragments of her writings and references to her in other works. That’s it.
We have references to her in a 1100’s book called the Codex Salernus, where someone wrote ‘Trot’ next to treatments attributed to her in the margins.
We have her being mentioned, sometimes in misogynistic terms, in fictional works by the likes of Chaucer as someone who was an expert in women’s medicine (which is some shaky evidence at best.)
As a complication, plenty of works have also been misattributed to her, or copied from her work without mentioning of her.
Another manuscript was found by a guy named John F. Benton that is hers. Or at least, is most associated with her name. It is called the Practica Secundum Trota, and covers everybody and everything, including snakebites and fevers. The manuscript was from a Madrid library and seems to have been written in the early 1200’s, and a second copy is found in Oxford.
Benton died before he could translate this new work completely, and he passed the torch on to Green. No one has since been able to make a complete translation.
What We Know About The Lady
Probably, if we squint:
She was from the early 1100’s. She lived in Italy, probably Salerno, and was part of a loose collection of medical practitioners that shared their knowledge in a sort of proto-informal-college.
She was famous for her gynecological treatises and as a midwife. So famous, in fact, that she gets a special mention in books providing that information.
And the debate about her actual existence doesn’t start until the 1500’s and lasts until at least 2001.
Not a lot, in other words. It’s ripe for a historical fiction writer to go hog wild with speculation.
What We Can Glean From Her Work
However, we can say something about her education, or at least medical education of the time. The Trotula draws from a Latin translation of Ibn al-Jazzar’s Arabic Zad al-musafir, a medical text written in the 1100’s, and the gynecological ideas are influenced by the Vioticom by Constatine. It also draws heavily on Galen’s more positive views on menstruation. So, some members of the group of authors knew about the latest and greatest information from the Middle East and were at least interested in Arabic and Greek writings.
However, Dame Trotta’s work is more local and direct. She may not have written anything for herself. She seems to have dictated completely from her own experience, and that is interesting because the part most attributed to her is the only section that gives explicit instructions to a ‘we’ or ‘I’ when male writers use the more passive ‘let something be done.’
Since this was an influential work until the 1400’s, it is the conduit of this more practical Hippocratic style of medicine for centuries.
It also pulls heavily from the local traditions of Salerno, especially the cosmetic section. They get credit for sunburn treatments and depilatories, among other things.
This combination suggests that the medical establishment saw no distinction between folk remedies and Galen’s works. (Which, fair to Galen, honestly.)
The real conclusion here, of course, is some historical fiction writer needs to start producing a book, ASAP.
Sources:
Monica_H_Green_The_Development_of_the_Tr.pdf
Exhuming Trotula, Sapiens Matrona of Salerno — Medievalists.net
The rebirth of fertility: the Trotula and her travelling companions c. 1200–1450 — Medievalists.net
The Trotula with Monica Green — Medievalists.net
The Trotula: An English Translation of the Medieval Compilation by Monica H Green