The sources of Eucharius Rösslin's 'Rosegarden for pregnant women and midwives' (1513).

Few medical authors can unambiguously claim to have written one of the most important works in their field: most important not simply in one language but in half a dozen, and not simply for a few years but for over a century and a half. Yet that distinction has long been given to the work of a largely obscure early sixteenth-century apothecary-turned-physician from Freiburg, Worms, and Frankfurt, one Eucharius Rosslin (c.1470–c.1526).1 His Der Swangern Frauwen und Hebammen Rosegarten (Rosegarden for Pregnant Women and Midwives), first published in Strasbourg and Hagenau in 1513, went through at least sixteen editions in its original form, was revised into three different German versions (each of which went through multiple printings), and was translated into Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, Italian, Latin, and Spanish, with almost all of these translations then going through their own multiple editions.2 The Rosegarten is the only work known to have been produced by Rosslin. His son, Eucharius Rosslin Jr, further capitalized on the work by producing in 1526 a German compilation of “marriage texts” which he called Ehestandts Artzney; this included his father's Rosegarten as well as extracts from the Enneas muliebris (Nine-Part Treatise on Women) by Ludovico Bonacciuoli (d. c.1540), a herbal by Johannes Cuba (Johann Wonnecke von Caub, d. 1503/4), and Bartholomeus Metlinger's (born after 1440) tract on paediatrics. Eucharius Jr. also produced a Latin translation of the Rosegarten in 1532. That Rosslin's work was only the third obstetrical text addressed directly to an audience of midwives in a thousand years also places it in an important position in the history of the professionalization of midwifery.3 While it remains to be determined how frequently midwives themselves read the text, it is clear that both physicians and laypersons used the Rosegarten and later adaptations as the basis for medical training and as a reference for information on generation.4 Despite the unquestioned historical importance of this work, its textual sources have never been examined in any systematic way. In large part, this seems to have been due to scholars’ sense that the text was sui generis, an “out of the blue” creation that suddenly revived the long-lost obstetrical practices of the ancients. The one source that scholars have always acknowledged for the Rosegarten is the late antique work of Muscio, the Gynaecia (Gynaecology, itself a Latin translation of Soranus's second-century Greek Gynaikeia), from which Rosslin derived the foetus-in-utero figures that are still the most recognizable feature of the work. Yet, as I will show, while it is clear that Rosslin must have consulted at least one independently circulating fragment of Muscio's text that included the foetus-in-utero images, the Rosegarten owes nothing at all to the full text of the Latin Gynaecia. In 1994, a philologist, Britta-Juliane Kruse, published an initial analysis of a German manuscript now in Hamburg, dated 1494 and so predating by nearly twenty years the initial publication of the Rosegarten. She argued that it presents an Ur-version of Rosslin's printed text. It lacks a number of features found in the printed work: the imprimatur of Emperor Maximilian; the dedication to Katharina, Duchess of Brunswick-Luneburg;the rhymed prologue with its viciously critical account of the errors of contemporary midwives; and a closing glossary.5 It also has no illustrations. In nearly every other respect, however, it is the predecessor text of the Rosegarten, which Kruse could now prove had not been created for publication in print. Kruse announced plans to publish this Ur-version (which bears the manuscript title Von Kranckheiten, Siechtagen und zu val der Swangern und geberenden frowen und ihrer neugebornen Kinderen [On the Sicknesses, Illnesses, and Accidents of Pregnant and Labouring Women and Their Newborn Children]), a project that is still much anticipated. Important as Kruse's analysis was, however, it only pushed back to a manuscript phase the question of the text's origins. Rosslin would have been in his early twenties at the time the Hamburg manuscript was written, and it is by no means clear that he had anything to do with its production. Indeed, it has long been questioned how he could have assembled such a detailed text on a topic on which, as far as we can tell, he had no particular expertise. So where did Von Kranckheiten, Siechtagen und zu val der Swangern und geberenden frowen und ihrer neugebornen Kinderen come from? The present study is meant to contribute to a new understanding of the genesis of the Rosegarten and its antecedent German text by demonstrating that the bulk of the text was not a novel composition by Eucharius Rosslin himself, or even another German physician or apothecary, but a translation of a pre-existing Latin text (composed between 1440 and 1446) from the other side of the Alps by the Paduan and Ferrarese physician Michele Savonarola (c.1385–1466). Savonarola was himself drawing heavily on the obstetrical chapters of the early fourteenth-century Neapolitan physician, Francesco da Piedemonte (d. 1320), but the nature of the correspondences between the German texts and Savonarola's is close enough to prove that the latter was the direct source, not the Neapolitan da Piedemonte.6 This discovery also helps us better understand the relation of Rosslin's 1513 Rosegarten to the one similar printed German text that preceded it, the anonymous Frauenbuuchlein (Women's Manual) that was first published in Augsburg c.1495. Finally, it suggests the importance of interrogating more systematically what was really “new” in the age of print; as this example shows, Rosslin's Rosegarten was as important in disseminating late medieval northern Italian obstetrical practices to the rest of Europe as in capturing local empirical practices in sixteenth-century Germany.