Women's History

Muscio’s Gynecology was a work on women’s medicine written in North Africa probably some time in the fifth or sixth century.  Why it came to play such an important role in the development of gynecology and obstetrics in England is a function of many lines of development that the text underwent between the 11th and 15th centuries.  At the end of the Middle Ages, the text existed in many different forms in England:  full text, abbreviated text, text with images, images extracted from text.  Although there is no evidence that the text ever circulated in French, it was available in both Latin and English versions.  It was hardly a “static” text.  Instead, it was repeatedly manipulated to allow it to better serve the interests that both clerics and medical practitioners developed in women’s medicine and childbirth in the later Middle Ages. 

I argue specifically that the particular function of Muscio’s Gynecology and its derivative texts was that it provided obstetrical knowledge not otherwise available in the more widely circulating Trotula texts.  Although obstetrical information was also available in al-Zahrawi’s (Albucasis’s) Surgery and in Guy de Chauliac’s Surgery, in neither case were those sections extracted for special circulation. Rather, it was the Muscian texts that were turned to repeatedly for obstetrical instructions, in part, I argue, because the fetal images that sometimes accompanied the text gave the material a particular guarantee of importance.  Particularly, I argue that incorporation of obstetrics was important to practicing surgeons (likely male), who give increasing evidence of involvement in obstetrical interventions.

This essay critiques the idea--common in feminist historiography--that throughout the Middle Ages "women's health was women's business."  Using the evidence of women as medical practitioners (which is minimal) and that of texts on women's medicine, I argue that the gendering of knowledge production and practice in the fields of women's healthcare was complicated.  Women had no monopoly in the field.  Indeed, it is questionable whether much of the written work on women's medicine was written for female readers.

The present file includes the corrigenda and addenda, updated up through 2010, to Monica H. Green, “Women’s Medical Practice and Health Care in Medieval Europe,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14 (1988-1989), 434-73. This review essay, summarizing the state of the field in the late 1980s, was first reprinted with minor corrections in Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages, ed. J. Bennett, E. Clark, J. O’Barr, B. Vilen, and S. Westphal-Wihl (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 39-78. It was reprinted a second time (here from the Sisters and Workers version) in Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts, Variorum Collected Studies Series, CS680 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000).  In the last reprint, Corrigenda and Addenda were included. I have here updated the Corrigenda and Addenda by including references to works published between 1988 (when it was sent to press) and 2010.

This essay was meant to capture the state of the field in the late 1980s. A lot has happened in the history of women and medicine since then. (Note that ALL the statements regarding the Middle English tradition of gynecological writings were superseded by my later work; see especially my publications in 1992, 2003, 2006, and 2008.)  Readers are encouraged to refer both to my subsequent writings (especially my 2008 book, *Making Women's Medicine Masculine*) and to the 82-page bibliography, Monica H. Green, “Bibliography on Medieval Women, Gender, and Medicine (1980-2009),” available gratis at http://www.sciencia.cat/biblioteca/publicacionssc.htm, and here on my Academia.edu page.

The original article can be found on JStor at this URL:  http://www.jstor.org/stable/3174557, or by writing to me directly:  monica.green@asu.edu.

Though modern feminist historiography and pedagogy have moved away from emphasizing the actions of great individuals in history, the “exemplary life” was still a primary mode of instructing young people about the past throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe. This included stories of female figures, although women are not usually associated with the heroic, masculine individual lionized by Enlightenment liberalism. Such narratives must be taken into account to better understand the cultivation of historical perspectives for children and youth. This paper examines the production of historical knowledge for children through a comparison of heroic female figures in amusement periodicals and instructional textbooks.

Pedagogical innovations, the development of new book genres and markets, and an increased emphasis on bourgeois domesticity conspired during the late Enlightenment to make German-speaking Central Europe a key site for the modern Western reimagining of the socialization of children and ideologies of childhood. Children’s literature in this era presents an intriguing intersection of adult desires to shape childhood and the agency of the child readers themselves. Observing the ways in which German children in the late Enlightenment subverted the intentions of authors and educators through their own reading, misreading, rereading, not reading, and so on is a powerful tool to engage the overlooked agency of children. Accordingly, this paper also poses questions about the reception and response of children themselves to histories of heroic women.

Biography as a primary mode of teaching history follows in a European tradition of eighteenth and nineteenth-century women’s history focused on individual stories, as historians Natalie Zemon Davis and Gianna Pomata have demonstrated.  How was this tradition refracted for a youth audience? How were histories of heroic women presented differently in periodicals, nominally intended for children’s entertainment, compared to world history textbooks, aimed at edifying and instructing? How did conventions and perspectives on this history change over time? This paper addresses such questions through a close analysis of particular individuals as they are represented in the texts, as well as archival materials that make some of the missing links to understanding children’s reception of the historical narratives produced for them.

This article addresses the legacies of Louise Tilly’s work on women and the family in Europe for current studies of girls’ agency in history. Using my preliminary analysis of a body of German periodicals written for girls during the late Enlightenment, I propose some methodological possibilities for combining cultural histories of reading with social historical approaches to the roles played by girls and women in European social life. Tilly’s focus on the life cycle as an organizing principle and the family economy as a key site of history established the importance of such groups to social historical understandings of the past. Though my study incorporates sources outside the usual bounds of social history, it also depends on the analysis and methods of pioneering feminist social historians such as Louise Tilly.