APPEALING TO WOMEN: FEMALE MEDIATIONS OF MEDICAL KNOWLEDGE IN LATIN EUROPE

Aside from two 12th century medical authors,Trota of Salerno (fl. 1st half 12th cent.) and Hildegard of Bingen(1098-1179), the pursuit of medical knowledge was consistently conceived of as a male enterprise in medieval Europe. The great medical authorities, ancient and contemporary, Muslim, Jewish and Christian, were all men and as such they are depicted in the authorial portraits that appear in some medical texts. However, medical literature ―both popular and learned, in Latin and in the vernaculars― presents a number of instances where women's authority is called upon, and where women ―not men― mediate medical knowledge. This phenomenon has been noted by scholars such as Monica Green and Katharine Park, who have identified the generic emergence in medical literature of the «secrets of women», a particular type of knowledge of the body that, obtained through empirical methods and unexplained by causal analysis, was used, transmitted and shared by women. Following their path, this paper attempts to map the contextswhere women's medical knowledge is appealed to in medieval medical literature. By studying in detail when and how women's knowledge is called upon, the aim of this paper is to establish precisely what kinds of knowledge women mediate in medieval medical Latin texts, as well as their fields of specialization. It will analyze the rhetorical and iconographic devices employed in texts ranging from the 12th to the 15th century.