She wrote the book. They credited a Roman man who had been dead a thousand years.

In 1566 a Swiss physician named Hans Kaspar Wolf printed a collection of gynecological writings in Basel. He came to the most widely copied text on women’s medicine in Europe and did not like what the manuscripts told him. Every early copy named a woman.

So he fixed it. Wolf reassigned the work to Eros, a freedman of the Roman empress Julia, a man dead for roughly fourteen centuries.

Her name was Trota.

What she actually was

She lived in Salerno, in southern Italy, sometime in the early decades of the twelfth century. Salerno was the medical center of the Latin West, and it had women practitioners. Twelfth and early thirteenth century sources refer to them dozens of times as a recognized group, the mulieres Salernitane, the women of Salerno.

Trota is the only one of them credited with writing a medical book.

She wrote a Practica, a working collection of her cures across the whole range of medicine. Not gynecology alone. General practice, everything but surgery. She is also named, in the earliest surviving manuscripts, as the authority behind De curis mulierum, Treatments for Women.

That is the whole verified record. Historian Monica Green, who spent decades reconstructing her from the manuscripts, is blunt about the rest. We do not know her husband. We do not know her children. We can place her within a few decades and no closer.

The legend that ate the woman

Somewhere in the transmission, three separate texts on women’s medicine were bound together into a single ensemble: Conditions of Women, Treatments for Women, and Women’s Cosmetics. The first and third were almost certainly written by men. The second was hers.

The ensemble acquired a title. Someone took her name, Trota, and turned it into Trotula, a diminutive. That title traveled across Europe in Latin and then in French, English, Dutch, Irish, and German. It became the standard European reference on the female body for four hundred years.

And the title became a person.

By the fourteenth century “Trotula” was a character. A woman who never existed, credited with texts two thirds of which were written by men. Chaucer put her in the Wife of Bath’s husband’s book of wicked wives. A fourteenth century French encyclopedia illustrated her under the caption how the woman teaches the clerk the secrets of nature. Later readers promoted her to the first female professor of medicine at the University of Salerno.

There was no such chair. In the early twelfth century there was no university at Salerno to hold one.

So the situation Wolf inherited in 1566 was already a wreck. A real writer had been overwritten by an invented one, and the invented one was easy to attack.

Wolf’s edit

Wolf took the obvious next step. If the author was a legend, she could be replaced.

He gave the text to Eros, freedman of Julia, on no manuscript evidence whatsoever. Medical historians have never accepted the attribution. It did not need to be accepted. It only needed to open the question.

For the next three hundred years the scholarship on the most important medieval text on women’s health was not about the medicine. It was an argument over whether a woman had anything to do with it. Every generation restaged it. Nationalists claimed her, misogynists denied her, early feminists inflated her into the professor she never was, and the actual twelfth century healer disappeared underneath all of them.

The record was not lost. It was buried under noise.

The book nobody printed

Here is the part that holds up under any scrutiny.

The Trotula ensemble, the one carrying the corrupted version of her name, survives in well over a hundred Latin manuscripts and dozens of vernacular translations. It was printed repeatedly from the sixteenth century onward. It was, by volume, one of the most successful medical texts of the Middle Ages.

Her own book, the Practica secundum Trotam, the one that is unambiguously hers, sat unpublished.

Not until 1995 did it get a printed edition, when Piero Cantalupo published the Latin text with an Italian translation in a regional Salerno historical bulletin. Green’s critical edition and English translation of the Trotula texts followed from the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2001.

A woman wrote a medical book in twelfth century Italy. It waited eight hundred and fifty years for a publisher.

Why this one is worth getting right

The popular version of Trota is wrong, and the wrong version is everywhere. Hundreds of pages will tell you she held a chair at Salerno and wrote a medieval gynecological encyclopedia. She did not.

That matters, because the false version is fragile. Anyone can knock it down, and knocking it down feels like debunking her. Wolf understood that in 1566. It is the oldest move in the file: inflate a woman past the evidence, then use the inflation to dismiss her entirely.

The defensible version is harder to write and impossible to dislodge. A real woman, named in the earliest manuscripts, who wrote a book of practical medicine and stood behind a treatise on women’s treatments. Whose name was diminutized into a title, whose title was personified into a myth, whose myth was used to discredit her, and whose actual work went unread while the ensemble bearing her deformed name sold across a continent.

She is not the first female professor of medicine. She is something more useful. She is a documented case of what happens to a woman’s name when it survives without her.

The archive grows. The silence shrinks. Enter the archive.

Sources:

Monica H. Green, “Who/What Is ‘Trotula’?” — A Medieval Woman’s Companion, updated 2015

Monica H. Green, ed. and trans., The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine — University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001

Monica H. Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology — Oxford University Press, 2008

Monica H. Green, “The Development of the Trotula” — Revue d’Histoire des Textes 26 (1996). Print. The author has posted a free PDF on her Academia.edu page.

Piero Cantalupo, “La Practica secundum Trotam: Testo, traduzione, appendici e glossario” — Bollettino storico di Salerno e Principato Citra 13 (1995). Print only, no open-access edition.

Hans Kaspar Wolf, ed., Gynaeciorum, hoc est de mulierum tum aliis, tum gravidarum, parientium et puerperarum affectibus et morbis, first edition, Basel, 1566 — Internet Archive, from the Complutense University of Madrid copy

Özlem Gül, “Trotula, the First Female Physician of Europe: A Historiographical Debate” — Lokman Hekim Dergisi, 2023