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Trotula and Maria Montessori

From the last Sunday column of the Corriere della Sera, “La lettura” (7 June 2020), we share two articles dedicated respectively to Trotula and Maria Montessori. Download the articles here (in Italian).

Trotula or Trota (XI century), author among other things of a capital text in the field of obstetrics, the De mulierum passionibus ante in et post partum, probably belonged to the famous Medical School of Salerno, in southern Italy.

The School is considered the oldest institution in Western Europe for the practice and education of medicine. It had its period of greatest success around the 13th century, when the medical knowledge of the Arabs was combined with the classical ones. According to a legend, which insists on the use of textbooks belonging to different cultures, it was founded in the ninth century by four masters, a Latin, a Greek, an Arab and a Jew. Among the reasons for its notoriety there is also the attention for women, who were admitted to the courses and received a degree.

Maria Montessori (Chiaravalle 1870 – Noordwijk aan Zee, Netherlands, 1952), doctor, pedagogist and neuropsychiatrist, great promoter of women’s emancipation and the fight against illiteracy, she is internationally recognized for the educational method that bears her name.

The Montessori method, centred on an experimental and no longer speculative idea of pedagogy, emphasizes the importance of the environment in which learning takes place, the respect of childlike mental processes, different from the adults, and the active and even autonomous participation of children in the various phases of the educational process. On the basis of this philosophy, the Montessori Schools continue to operate, with around 22,000 in the world, from kindergarten to high school, mainly in Italy and Europe, but also numerous in India, the United States, Japan, New Zealand and Canada.