‘Trotula’ expounding on the nature of women to a male clerk. Rennes, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 593, an. 1303, f. 532r. Fuller description: "The earliest extant copy of the Placides and Timeus (written in 1304) shows this strikingly. In an image bearing the rubric ‘How the woman reads to the clerk the secrets of nature’, a woman is seated on a bench in front of a book perched on a lectern. She holds up her right finger in a gesture of teaching to the tonsured clerk who stands in front of her. The image is a depiction of ‘Trotula’ who, the text tells us, ‘looked in her books and found confirmation of all which nature revealed to her and, from that, she knew most of the nature of women’. Source: Monica H. Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 224.
I also proposed it was likely that CdP knew of the #Trotula texts. And likely, too, that she knew they were understood to be the work of a ♀️ author "Trotula." Why not celebrate her, too, in her City of Ladies? The answer I came to was the inverse of what I proposed for Chaucer, CdP's contemporary.
