Constantine's De genecia Revisited: Women's Medicine at Monte Cassino
paper to be presented at
"Before/After Constantinus Africanus:
Medicine in the Beneventan Zone and Beyond"
sessions sponsored by the Society for Beneventan Studies
International Congress on Medieval Studies
12-15 May 2016
Monica H. Green
Professor of History
Box 874302
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85287-4302, U.S.A.
[email protected]
Lacking any narrative of Constantine's precise activities at Monte Cassino, or the medical activities of other Cassinese monks, we must reconstruct his activities and those of his peers through the manuscripts produced in and around Monte Cassino in the late 11th and early 12th centuries. In 1987, I argued that a work on women's medicine included in the 1536 edition of Constantine the African's (d. ante 1098/99) Opera omnia was likely not the De genecia ("On Women's Matters") attributed to him by his near-contemporary biographers. Thirty years later, and with a richer body of evidence, I wish to retract that conclusion—or rather, complicate it significantly.
In fact, there are multiple candidates that can legitimately vie to be Constantine's "On Women's Matters." Francis Newton's discovery that Copenhagen, Det Kgl. Bibliotek, Gamle Kgl. Samling, MS 1653—a Beneventan copy of the late antique Gynaecia of both Muscio and "Cleopatra"—was made at Monte Cassino by scribes associated with Constantine, now allows a precision hitherto impossible in unravelling the genesis of not one, but eight different texts on women's medicine in this period. The Copenhagen MS served as the source for new whole copies and new abbreviations of the Muscian and Cleopatran texts. And other materials were recovered and remixed in the same period.
Much of this retrieval and editing work on late antique materials started before, or independently of Constantine's arrival, as it bears no trace of Arabic influence. Nevertheless, several elements of gynecological material in his Arabic translations were coopted into this continuing interest in "women's matters" and generation. In defining the transformations in medicine at Monte Cassino in this formative period, therefore, we must also recognize the amount of energy that went into women's medicine at this male monastic house.
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Green – Constantine's De genecia Revisited
