Follow the Recipe! Un/Authorizing Muslim Women’s Cosmetic Expertise in the Medieval and Early Modern West
Jess Clark1 Comment
By Montserrat Cabré
“I saw a certain Saracen woman from Sicily,” claimed an
anonymous twelfth-century author in Latin, “curing infinite numbers of
people [of mouth odour] with this medicine alone.”[1]
Knowledge about beauty circulated extensively in medieval Western
Europe, and this know-how was almost always associated with women.
Virtually every medieval healthcare handbook in Latin, Hebrew, and
Arabic contained sections devoted to questions of beauty. In particular,
tracts on women’s cosmetics abounded. Recipe collections included a
considerable number of beauty recipes, serving either the laity or a
variety of health practitioners.
Latin medical texts, and the vernacular traditions they inspired, did
not simply acknowledge women’s interest in cosmetics, but also
emphasized their expertise. Texts portrayed women as active agents and
producers of collective knowledge on beauty. Cosmetic recipes—often
penned by male authors—conveyed women’s common interests and shared
knowledge in beautification.
At the same time, Latin medical texts ascribed specific practices to
certain individual women or to particular groups of women. As we see in
the opening quotation, texts very rarely included women’s given or
family names. Instead, other features identified them: their place of
birth, where they lived, or, often, their religious identity. As the
works of reputed Arabic physicians and surgeons were admired in medieval
Western Europe, Christian sources unambiguously distinguished Muslim
women’s expertise in the art of beauty treatments. However, Moorish
women’s collective authority would eventually become lost in favour of
other women.
For example, in the earliest versions of the Salernitan De Ornatu Mulierum,
a twelfth-century Latin treatise written by an anonymous male author, a
certain “ointment… which removes hairs, refines the skin, and takes
away blemishes” was recorded as a recipe for noble Saracen women.
However, less than a century later, the new Latin version of the same
text attributed the depilatory to Salernitan noblewomen.[2]
This was neither an accident nor a simple adaptation of a recipe for
new audiences. Rather, it marked the beginning of an on-going erasure of
Muslim women’s authority from Western cosmetic literature.
This obliteration of female Muslim expertise happened gradually.
Later vernacular texts dealing with cosmetics still acknowledged their
collective or individual authority about beauty. For instance, we see
six acknowledgements for recipes from an unnamed Saracen woman in the
late thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman Ornatus Mulierum.[3] Vergel de señores. Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, Ms. 8565, libro 3, cap. 9, fol. 134r.
The fifteenth-century Vergel de Señores (Garden of Gentlemen),
an anonymous Spanish recipe book for household use, attributed certain
beauty treatments to Moorish women. The text devoted a long section to
cosmetics, mentioning the practices of ladies (señoras) and their
particular investment in knowing recipes that beautified the face. The
expertise of Moorish women was called upon, however, when referring to
cosmetic recipes containing lead and mercury. The dangerous effects of
these ingredients had worried physicians and surgeons for centuries,
particularly in regards to potentially noxious effects on the gums and
teeth. The compiler of Vergel advised his readers to use them wisely, detailing safe practices.
Juan
Vallés, Regalo de la vida humana, Wien, Österreichische
Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 1160, fol. 97r. [facsimile edition: Juan
Vallés, Regalo de la vida humana, edited by Fernando Serrano Larráyoz
(Pamplona: Gobierno de Navarra, 2008), vol. II.]The
authority acknowledged to Muslim women on cosmetics, however, did not
last. Sometime before 1563, Juan Vallés compiled another household
manual which was meant to go into print—albeit it never did. The Regalo de la Vida Humana also contained a long section of cosmetic recipes, copied extensively from the Vergel de Señores.
Its author, Juan Vallés, still acknowledged women’s authority in beauty
treatments, but he narrowed their agency by gracefully tending to
portray them as the intended audience of the recipes rather than
asserting their expertise. And significantly, he omitted any mention of
Moorish women and their knowledge of beautifying recipes. Having been
recognized as experts in the medieval traditions, Muslim women did not
make it into the new texts. Stripped of identifying traits, female
agency was impoverished and transformed into an audience of Christian
women.[4]
Ultimately, noticing these shifts reveals the delicate and fragile
nature of the acknowledgement of collective and anonymous authority over
knowledge –that is, of the particular types of authority granted to
women. Recipes, therefore, should be treasured sources for they offer
us a unique perspective to detect and trace how specific groups of
people, particularly vulnerable people, are empowered or unauthorized
over a long time span.
[1] Monica H. Green, ed. and trans., The Trotula. A medieval compendium of women’s medicine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2001), p. 46.
[2] Green, ed. and trans., The Trotula, pp. 169, 246.
[3] Montserrat Cabré, “Beautiful bodies”, in Linda Kalof, ed., A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Medieval Age (Oxford: Berg, 2010), pp. 134-136.
[4] Juan Vallés, Regalo de la Vida Humana, edited by Fernando Serrano Larráyoz (Pamplona: Gobierno de Navarra, 2008), vol. I , pp. 306-310, 410-411.
Montserrat Cabré is
an Associate Professor of the History of Science at the Universidad de
Cantabria, Spain, where she teaches the history of science and women and
gender studies. She works on medieval and early modern women’s
medicine, particularly on women’s knowledges as well as the construction
of sexual difference.
