within the text in the third person. Trota appears in an anecdote about a young woman suffering from ventositas matricis ("wind in the uterus"). As the text explains, sometimes women "take in wind" into their uterus, "with the result that to certain people they look as if they were ruptured or suffering from intestinal pain." Trota was called in to treat a woman suffering from the condition. The text stressed that "Trota was called in as if she were a master." The Latin word for "master" here is in the feminine form, magistra, the most compelling sign that Trota had a social stature comparable to that of male magistri. This treatment of "wind" in the uterus has no other parallel with known works coming out of Salerno. But much of the rest of the text of De curis mulierum has strong echoes of practices of Trota's known from the Practica secundum Trotam. The third-person reference to Trota's cure raises the question of who the "we" is that is seen throughout most of the text of De curis mulierum. Green posits that the text seems to capture the collective practices of one group of female practitioners, setting down their cures for another group of readers (or auditors) who will have the same unfettered access to the bodies of their female patients: "it appears to have been written down to provide a more permanent and concrete mechanism for the transmission of knowledge from woman to woman than the oral forms that had traditionally served the needs of Salernitan women.... [T]he text posits a community of female readers who would be able to rely on this text for instruction..." Women's literacy is not well documented in southern Italy in this period, which raises the question of why the De curis mulierum was written down in the first place. Green finds a clue to this question in the three words of English derivation found in the earliest copies of the text. The De curis mulierum may have been written down, she suggests, not for the benefit of local women in Salerno, but for an audience in England eager in general to learn about medical practices in far-off Salerno. Both England and southern Italy were under Norman rule at this point, and transference of southern Italian medical writings to Normandy and especially England are well-documented in this period. In fact, the manuscript where we find