Do not call them historical, even if they have scraped from the libraries of Salerno what little could be found on them Ruggiero’s Trotula. The goal of Roberta, Anella and Valerio was anything but: to rehabilitate an exceptional and completely forgotten figure like that of the first female doctor of the Middle Ages through a fairy tale for children: “The work took shape during the months of the lockdown, but the ideas they had already been mature for three years ”, says Anella, one of the authors.
For them, who have always dealt with other things in life, it was an act of duty.
The name of Trotula de Ruggiero is still almost unknown today. So then it is necessary to rehabilitate its history, hidden for centuries by History, the capitalized one, “because a doctor and even more a pioneer, could not be a woman”. Trotula’s life reveals a bridge of continuity between the Middle Ages and the contemporary age, in which women elbow more than others to achieve what they deserve. Born in Salerno around 1030, Trotula comes from a wealthy family, a condition that allows her to access the famous Salerno School, an authentic temple of ancient science, especially medicine. Trotula is the product of the social and cultural contamination of Salerno, a fair represented by the Salerno mulieres who study and practice the art of care.
He is the head of a group of “doctors” who will produce the first writings on cosmetics – De ornatu – and on women’s diseases – De passionibus.
In life, a prodigy. But precisely in that prodigious being, an unrepeatable exception in a world governed by men, lies the reason for his decline in the aftermath of his death. Suddenly, in fact, the name Trotula de Ruggiero becomes something to be obscured. Not a few scientists even deny its existence on the basis of a simplistic, banal principle, which sounds like a lapidary and discriminatory judgment: what he did and the books he wrote are of such a level that they could never be the work of a woman.
It is from the anonymity in which she has been imprisoned for centuries that the book proves to tear her away. And by rehabilitating it, he decides to hand it over to the generation that most of all has the key to their identity in the spontaneous acceptance of the other: children. Trotula lives its own stories only from the start, told from a distant era. The authors’ narrative expedients, together with the many illustrations, wanted to make it incredibly close to ours by putting on the plate, without fear or overestimation of young readers, extremely current topics such as gender gender, sexuality and the relationship with one’s body. A fairy tale to convey urgent topics, re-founding society, placed in the hands of those who will populate it in the years to come and who have already demonstrated the firmness of their ideas by breaking into the public sphere.
“Trotula begins as an editorial experience, but has a broader objective in which we trust: we would like it to become a symbol of dialogue, that is, the alternative to the shouted battle of rights that too often populate the public sphere. We would like to instill the message that there is a different way to talk about the problems that break up communities: a message that does not pass through opposition ”, explains Roberta, architect and other co-author.
Hoping in the spread of their work, which today finds an exceptional platform at the Book Fair, the girls speak as young authors united by a “sense of duty” that has swept away any initial doubts, of an entrepreneurial nature and beyond . “We would like to unite many people under the values of Trotula; we hope to get as far as possible, making this name a symbol of community and shelter, of dialogue and reconciliation ”.