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experimental
archaeology

the Trotula's
hair powder

Bancke's
tooth
powder

Hildegarde von Bingen's
mouthwash

the Trotula's
tooth powder

Gilbertus Anglicus's breath freshener

Trotula's Tooth Powder
Making a medieval tooth powder using the recipe
attributed to the Trotula in On Cosmetics.

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

The Trotula, or the set of three texts attributed to Trotula, includes a section called On Women's Cosmetics, and recipes for beauty. Among these, we find a tooth powder, so that the teeth and gums are cleaned and free from disease. In the section about On Various Kinds of Adornments, it reads:

 

"For whitening black teeth and strengthening corroded or rotted gums and for a bad-smelling mouth, this works best.

Take some each of cinnamon, clove, spikenard, mastic, frankincense, grain, wormwood, crab foot, date pits, and olives.

Grind all of these and reduce to a powder, then rub the affected places."

I have recreated this powder to use in my MEDIEVAL BATH DISPLAY and have included a step by step guide to my approach, including my expectations and how it really worked out.

The overall verdict? It was much nicer until the spikenard was added. It did work.

The prep:

There were a number of things to think about before I started.

- Where can I get the ingrediants?
- Drying the ingredients or buying them pre-powdered or using them fresh?
- Air dry or oven dry the grown ingredients?
- How much of which ingredients should I use?
- Will it actually make any real difference?
- How long will it last?
- Do any of the plants have benefits associated with them which make them particularly useful?
- Can I buy spikenard locally?
- Do any of the spices and plants have benefits associated with them which makes them particularly useful for a tooth powder other than that they smell nice?
- Drying olives seems like it will be a long process.

What you need: Ingrediants cinnamon clove spikenard mastic frankincense grain wormwood crab foot date pits olives Kitchen things Spoon Bowl for mixing Mortar and pestle for powdering
	Cinnamon
	Cloves I bought this already powdered simply because I couldn't get hold of any whole ones at the moment, which was odd because it's usually very easy to get. The smell is quite strong, and I expected it to overpower everything else if I used an equal amount, but it was tempered by the other ingrediants. Hildegarde recommends cloves to clear stuffiness of the head, although whether Trotula chose it to include for that reason, I do not know.
	spikenard
	mastic
	frankincense
	grain
	wormwood
	date pits
	olives
	crab foot
	Mortar and pestle I have a really great stone set which is sturdy enough to work well on most substances.

Method:

My plan was to buy what I could already prepared, and dry the other bits and pieces myself without the use of modern ovens or drying implements. I felt that this would give me (perhaps) a more honest attempt at what might be achieved by a medieval woman at home.

I checked some of the properties attributed to the plants being used in the tooth powder to see if they were chosen for beneficial reasons, and it's noted that cloves, when chewed, will have a certain numbing effect for toothache, so it was a good inclusion.

The reality:

This was a journey of great discovery, where I discovered:

• Less is more of some things.
• Spikenard needs to be ordered way ahead of time as it's never in stock.
• Mastic is hard to find and harder to crush.
• Drying olives to powder is a long drawn-out process.
• Crabfoot. hm. Plant or actual crab foot (the shell would be an abrasive?)
• Date pits require some serious muscle or a hammer to crush.
• Nepalise grocery stores carry frankinsence all year round.
• I understand why apocathary shops would have had assistants to grind things up.

The results:

I really

When ... and I would say this absolutely works.

The test audience results:

Being of a scientific mind, I asked re-enactors. A diverse range of ages were polled, and of the people who particpated, the responses were as follows:

• OMG

As a general trend,

THE TROTULA
An English Translation of the Medieval Compendium of Women's Medicine.
Edited and translated by Monica H. Green.
University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. 2001, 2002. P112 [237]