ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a rapid survey of the texts on women's medicine beyond the Trotula now known to have been circulating in medieval England from the time of the Conquest up through the later fourteenth century, when Middle English began to assert itself as a force for scientific and medical language. Motherhood's ubiquity has often made it invisible to historians. Even after forty years of the new women's history of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, motherhood has largely escaped the attention of medieval historians. The subjective experiences of maternity may well remain beyond our grasp for most medieval women not of the elite classes, owing to the lack of private documents such as letters and diaries. One source for medieval understandings of motherhood is medical writing, which gives us access to the systems of intellectual discourse and practical interventions developed to understand and intervene in the processes of the female body.
