7.
Structures and Subjectivities in 16th-Century Gynecology,
or How the Father of Medicine Reclaimed His Paternity
Organizers:
Description:
In 1992, the historian Judith Bennett called for greater attention to the
importance of bridging the divide between “medieval” and “early
modern” in European women’s history. That divide—created
in the Renaissance and perpetuated up through the present day—had, Bennett
argued, obscured historians’ abilities to perceive continuities in the
situation of women vis-à-vis men throughout the period from the 13th
through the 17th centuries. In intellectual and cultural history (which includes
medical history), a similar divide—that between the manuscript culture
of the Middle Ages and the print culture of the Renaissance—has set
up a similar barrier, both obscuring continuities and distorting the novel
effects of humanistic scholarship. The present workshop will pair a historian
of medieval women’s medicine with a historian of Renaissance medicine
in order to examine several key features in the written gynecological traditions
between the 15th and late 16th centuries: the role of authority (especially
classical authority), the role of vernacular languages in relation to the
learned languages of Latin and Greek, the significance of the transition from
manuscript to print (and sometimes back again), and finally, the impact of
these shifts on the audiences of gynecological literature.
The history of women’s healthcare in the early modern period has thus
far been dominated almost entirely by narratives about the status and struggles
of female midwives, especially the challenges they faced from male accoucheurs
from the 16th century on. But midwives were by no means the only providers
of healthcare to women during this period. Throughout the late medieval and
early modern periods, male practitioners had been intimately involved in the
administration of basic gynecological and also some limited (esp. emergency)
obstetrical care to women. The 14th and 15th centuries witnessed a marked
increase in the amount of new gynecological texts being written, most of which
focused on questions of fertility. The pace of new compositions rose dramatically
in the era of print following the publication of the rediscovered Hippocratic
gynecological texts in 1525, leading to (among other publications) the three
increasingly massive editions of the compendium, Gynaeciorum libri,
“The Books of Gynecology,” between 1566 and 1597. Yet despite
this explosion, one of the ironic results of the “print revolution”
is that it narrowed the amount of gynecological information available.
This narrowing occurred in two respects: the amount of vernacular material
available vis-à-vis the learned languages, and the representation of
medieval vs. ancient or “modern” texts. According to our assessments,
there were nearly 100 different gynecological texts in active circulation
in western Europe in the 15th century. About half of this total was in Latin,
the remainder in various local vernacular languages. In England, for example,
there were ten different English gynecological texts in circulation in the
15th and early 16th century. Yet none ever made the transition into print.
Instead, well into the 17th century, the only printed English text on women’s
medicine was a translation of the Rosengarten, a brief German obstetrical
text for midwives and the women who supervised them. A similar phenomenon
of narrowing occurred in other vernacular traditions.
For the learned languages, the situation was different. The only gynecological
texts to appear in print prior to 1525 were either the sections on diseases
of the reproductive organs in several large summae of Italian physicians (whose
works had already been popular in the 15th century) or seven specialized treatises
on women’s medicine: the Latin De passionibus mulierum attributed in
1490 to Galen (but by 1541 recognized to be pseudepigraphic), the obstetrically-focused
German Frauenbüchlein of 1495 and Rosengarten of 1513 (both of which
derived from earlier manuscript texts), a Dutch translation of the latter
in 1516, Luigi Bonaccioli’s Latin Enneas muliebris in ca. 1502,
and the brief Latin Tractatus de sterilitate tam ex parte viri quam ex
parte mulieris and Compilatio de conceptione included within
the opera of Arnau de Vilanova in 1504 and 1505. It was with the publication
of the Greek Hippocratic gynecological texts that the pace of publication—and
of new composition—suddenly increased. Composed originally in Greek
between the 5th and 3rd centuries BCE, this substantial corpus of texts had
been largely inaccessible to the Latin-speaking world throughout the Middle
Ages. The Greek originals were recovered and, for the first time, translated
in their entirety into Latin in 1525, with an edition of the Greek texts themselves
soon after.
Although the authenticity of their attribution to Hippocrates is, according
to modern scholarly opinion, quite dubious (indeed, it is clear the texts
have multiple authors), in the 16th century this corpus of texts on women’s
medicine was accepted without question as the work of his hand. The recovery
of the Hippocratic gynecological corpus had a special relevance because it
demonstrated the ancient validity of gynecology as a specialized field of
medical learning. As asserted in the first book of the Hippocratic Diseases
of Women (1.62), “the healing of the diseases of women differs
greatly from the healing of the diseases of men.” Thus, the recognition
that Galen had never produced a specialized gynecological text beyond a tract
on uterine anatomy could be accepted since the greater authority of Hippocrates
made up for this lack. The reclamation of gynecology as an ancient field of
specialization also explains why we find, in 1544, the humanist physician
Georg Kraut editing the medieval composition, the Trotula, as if it were an
ancient text. It was soon reprinted by the Venetian printer, Aldus Manutius,
in a collection entitled Medici antiqui omnes, and from then on seems to have
been accepted as an ancient authority. Conversely, beyond the late antique
texts attributed to Cleopatra, Theodorus Priscianus, and Metrodora, no other
medieval gynecological text, Latin or vernacular, with the exception of the
Arabic surgical writer Abulcasis, would be “reclaimed” by printers
in the 16th century.
In the act of creating or re-creating these ancient “roots” of
gynecology as a distinct subdiscipline within medicine (a task only reinforced
by the new anatomical researches of the period), 16th-century physicians were
able to secure their authority in this field. Moreover, with the pre-eminent
authorities in gynecology now firmly masculine (the female “Trotula”
having been turned into a male “Eros” by 1566), male domination
of the field was now uncontested. The simultaneous loss of vernacular gynecological
texts, some of which had explicitly been directed to female audiences, only
reinforced this gendered shift. To be sure, manuscript copies of these works
continued to circulate and even be produced in the 16th century, but in every
case where we can document ownership, they are all owned by men, usually practicing
physicians. Attempts to claim gynecological literature (or, more precisely,
obstetrical literature) as a feminine field only began in the 17th century,
first with the publication of Louise Bourgeois’s works (1609-1626),
then with the work of Elizabeth Cellier, Jane Sharp, and Justine Siegemund,
the first female-authored texts on women’s medicine produced since the
12th century.
The workshop will be organized as follows: it will be expected that all participants
prepare in advance the Readings listed below, which will be circulated by
the organizers. After introductions of the participants, the seminar will
begin by examining a new gynecological composition based on the Hippocratic
texts, Lange’s “Letter on the Disease of Virgins” (published
in 1554 but probably composed in the 1530s), which shows how 16th-century
medical practitioners coopted the Hippocratic legacy to meet their own strategies
for professional advancement.
Discussion will then be opened up to address several themes:
Preliminary Readings (all Latin or Greek texts will be provided in English translation):