Women's healthcare in the medieval west: texts and contexts

to poor priests and scholars, corrodarians, and a staff of craftsmen is seen not as the perversion of charity to the deserving poor but rather as its extension. Fifth, the medieval hospital is firmly established as a major type of religious house-one that from now on will have to be given a considerable place in any synoptic study of music, education, architecture, and a number of other topics in medieval ecclesiastical history. Finally, because of these larger implications, and because Dr Rawcliffe's discussion is animated by numerous comparisons with hospitals elsewhere in England and continental Europe, this is not just the total history of one institution; it comes close to being a general survey of later medieval and early modern English hospitals. To echo President Nixon on the Great Wall of China, St Giles was, in its quiet way, a great hospital; and now, almost three centuries after Kirkpatrick, it has found a more than worthy historian. Over the last fifteen years, Monica Green has established an international reputation for work on medieval women's health care which effortlessly combines meticulous scholarship with stimulating ideas. She has brought medical texts to the attention of those working in medieval studies-in the process, deftly correcting a number of often-repeated but unfounded assumptions about the content and use of medical manuscripts-while translating the complexities of the medieval world to medical historians. It is therefore very valuable to have a number of her most important essays on the recovery and interpretation of medieval medicine available in one volume. This rich collection brings together seven separate pieces, arranged under the section titles 'Historical questions and methodologies', 'Identifying the texts' and 'Exploring the contexts'. It includes Green's important 1996 essay, 'The development of the Trotula', an analysis of the Latin and vernacular versions of the Trotula manuscripts which forms a prolegomenon to her forthcoming monograph. This is followed by Green's study of the omission of "Trotula" from Christine de Pizan's Livre de la cite des dames, a work which also condemns books on "the secrets of women" as "lies". The juxtaposition of Christine and Trotula enables Green to shed new light on Christine's attitude to the female body as well as raising questions about the use of medical texts in fourteenth-and early-fifteenth-century France. The final essay, on the gendering of medical literacy and book ownership, is previously unpublished, as is a useful appendix listing all the western …