ABSTRACT
Why were the texts included in the Gynaeciorum libri originally composed, and what did the collection mean to those who first encountered it? As Table 1 shows, virtually all of the works included were either composed or edited in the sixteenth century. Other works on the diseases of women were written at this time, but not included in the three editions of the compendium; it thus represents part of a wider interest in the nature of women, the diseases from which they suffer, and their treatment. As I have suggested in the Introduction, Calvi’s publication of the complete Hippocratic corpus in Latin, in 1525, made it possible to think of Hippocrates as a gynaecologist; it was a generation after this publication that there was a surge in publishing on both gynaecological and obstetrical matters. In this period, Hippocrates was praised as the great authority on the diseases of women even though it is clear that his admirers had not appreciated the detail of the theories put forward in the texts that bore his name. More immediately, Calvi’s translation was followed a year later not only by a reprint of the whole volume, but also by a separate, sextodecimo publication of the four main Hippocratic gynaecological works: Diseases of Women books 1-3 and Nature of Woman.1 Although I shall be drawing on evidence from all periods of ownership and use, in this chapter I shall mostly concentrate on those who encountered the book in the sixteenth and first part of the seventeenth centuries. In this period, medical readers would not have seen it as something of antiquarian interest, but rather as a work directly relevant to their practice. By the second half of the seventeenth century, the compendium was no longer seen as the cutting edge of medicine, but nor was it yet sufficiently old to be appreciated as a historic document. Even at the beginning of the seventeenth century, however, not everyone saw the Gynaeciorum libri as a valuable collection. In a 1603 discussion of the idea that menstrual suppression led to the womb drying up and moving around the body in search of moisture, the Galenist Castro denounced the compendium as ‘an amalgam of excellent doctrine and wild speculation which could easily mislead students of medicine’, a position possibly reflecting its mixture of established
Galenic medicine with Hippocratic suggestions of a two-sex model. He noted that the four ‘huge volumes’ of the previous edition had, in 1597, been collected into a single volume, which he criticized as bringing together different views without any attempt at organization.3 In particular, he mentioned de la Corde’s Hippocratic commentary, and stated that the Hippocratic view of the womb seeking moisture is ‘clearly ridiculous’.4 Elsewhere in his treatise he attacked other writers whose work was included in the collection, especially Luis de Mercado.5 Yet in his preface to the reader, Castro praised Hippocrates as ‘the most wise Hippocrates’. How did sixteenth and early seventeenth century writers reconcile such general enthusiasm for Hippocrates with criticism of the medical details of the gynaecological texts of the Hippocratic corpus? As we shall see later in this chapter, one solution was to question the authenticity of Diseases of Women, while continuing to hail Hippocrates as the great expert on the subject. For those who insisted that it was genuinely by the Father of Medicine, anything that did not make sense to them could be explained away as being due to textual error. Practical uses of these medical treatises were thus complemented by textual work on them. The first part of this chapter will focus on the reasons for writing on the diseases of women given by those authors whose works were included in the various editions of the compendium: the second part will discuss how early readers, generally much more enthusiastic than Castro, engaged with the three editions, and will illustrate their engagement by briefly examining approaches to two important topics for sixteenth-century medicine: the treatment of menstrual disorders, and the materialization of sterility in the uterine mole. Both conditions were related to the different role of blood in the bodily economy of the female, and affected women’s social status. Prefacing women The Gynaeciorum libri normally removed the prefaces originally supplied by many of the authors of the constituent texts. Often highly rhetorical in their presentation,
2 … hinc colligas, vulgatis illis gynaeciorum tribus voluminibus una cum praestanti doctrina, similes fabellas et prodigiosa multa figmenta contineri, quae facile possint tyronibus fucum facere, Roderico à Castro Lusitani, De universa mulierum medicina, novo et antehac a nemine tentato ordine opus absolutissimum (Hamburg, 1603), p. 12; translation by Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge and New York, 1980), p. 29; Schleiner, ‘Early Modern Controversies about the One-sex Model’, p. 190.
