First printed edition of the gynecological writings attributed to the woman physician, Trota, who is frequently called Trotula after the name of the collection of works with whom she is associated. Trota is said to have taught at Salerno during the 12th century. Trota was the earliest woman physician to write significant medical treatises. Her writings were Liber de sinthomatibus mulierum ("Book on the Conditions of Women"), De curis mulierum ("On Treatments for Women", and De ornatu mulierum ("On Women’s Cosmetics"). "The Trotula was published not because it was still of immediate clinical use to learned physicians (it had been superseded in that role by a variety of other texts in the 15th century), but because it had been newly "discovered" as a witness to empirical medicine by a Strasbourg publisher, Johannes Schottus. Schottus persuaded a physician colleague, Georg Kraut, to edit the Trotula, which Schottus then included in a volume he called Experimentarius medicinae ("Collection of Tried-and-True Remedies of Medicine"), which also included the Physica of Trota of Salerno's near contemporary, Hildegard of Bingen. Kraut, seeing the disorder in the texts, but not recognizing that it was really the work of three separate authors, rearranged the entire work into 61 themed chapters. He also took the liberty of altering the text here and there. As [Monica] Green has noted, "The irony of Kraut's attempt to endow "Trotula" with a single, orderly, fully rationalized text was that, in the process, he was to obscure for the next 400 years the distinctive contributions of the historic woman Trota" (Wikipedia article on Trotula, accessed 08-03-15). 

A new translation of a new edition of the texts based on collation of 9 MSS from the second half of the 13th or early 14th century. "The Trotula was the most influential compendium on women's medicine in medieval Europe. Scholarly debate has long focused on the traditional attribution of the work to the mysterious Trotula, said to have been the first female professor of medicine in eleventh- or twelfth-century Salerno, just south of Naples, then the leading center of medical learning in Europe. Yet as Monica H. Green reveals in her introduction to this first edition of the Latin text since the sixteenth century, and the first English translation of the book ever based upon a medieval form of the text, the Trotula is not a single treatise but an ensemble of three independent works, each by a different author. To varying degrees, these three works reflect the synthesis of indigenous practices of southern Italians with the new theories, practices, and medicinal substances coming out of the Arabic world" (publisher).

Includes on pp. 185-188, and 211-13, Monica H. Green, "Reconstructing the oeuvre of Trota of Salerno." Also, on pp. 15-60, Monica H. Green, “Rethinking the manuscript basis of Salvatore De Renzi’s Collectio Salernitana: The corpus of medical Writings in the ‘long’ twelfth century,"