Abstract Summary
My paper intends to explore the impact of translation practices on the construction of female authority in one particular vernacular tradition. My approach traces how late medieval Catalan medicine articulated its own notion of female medical authority by acknowledging, adapting and erasing Latin ideas while translators, adaptors and compilers were working to bring medical literature over to new audiences. It intends to analyze through a focused case-study the gendered effects of a broad cultural process of mediation that has not been explored from this perspective. The Catalan corpus of medical texts is a relevant instance as it belongs to a particularly rich and geographically widespread linguistic tradition in the late middle ages. With the determined political concourse of the Aragonese crown, Catalan became a medical language from the late thirteenth century on, and the ongoing project Sciencia.cat provides a detailed body of evidence for both extant and missing texts allowing for a solid reconstruction of the healthcare corpus. A significant number of texts were produced during the 14th and 15th centuries and extant translations date from as early as 1305, when laywomen and men as well as emerging new groups of healthcare practitioners were involved in commissioning, producing and consuming translations in the vernacular. This essay explores globally 14th and 15th century Catalan medical texts, but it considers especially a mid-fifteenth century translation of the De curis mulierum that I have recently identified in an anonymous surgeon’s handbook.
