Trementinaires: they were not witches, but great connoisseurs of nature

The trementinaires were a group of women from the Catalan Pyrenees who stood out for their extensive knowledge of local herbs and their medicinal properties. A professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) in Spain reveals the knowledge and techniques that they developed in her trade, challenging traditional feminine roles.

Trementinaire was a trade, mainly female, that existed in the Catalan Pyrenees from the 19th century until the arrival of industrialization in rural areas, and which allowed these women to become the economic engine of their families and of the regions that they inhabited

In a recent study, Elisa Garrido Moreno, a professor at the UAM, proposes a review of what the individual experiences of these women with the natural world contributed to knowledge, female autonomy, and even to the maintenance of the ecosystem in which they lived.

Based on the hypothesis that all knowledge is “situated” (partial and dependent on the context), the author offers a reflection on the trementinaires as a case study to understand the role of knowledge outside, in this case, that of rural women on the natural environment, whose voices have been underrepresented in the construction of knowledge about nature and its resources.

The work is based on a documentation process carried out, above all, from the ethnographic study published by Joan Frigolé, Dones que anaven pel món (2005), and the documentary collection of El Museu de les Trementinaires that preserves the oral and material memory of these women.

Blessing of aromatic and medicinal herbs on the occasion of the Fira de Sant Ponç in Hospital Street (Barcelona, ​​Catalonia). Photograph from 1915 (Photo: National Archive of Catalonia (Generalitat de Catalunya))

the trade of turpentine

It was an itinerant trade. During the warm months, the most necessary species for the preparation of their formulas were collected, cataloged and stored. Precisely, the name by which they were known (trementinaire) comes from the essence of turpentine, a remedy for which they were especially in demand.

After the collection and with the arrival of the cold, they left the family nucleus, leaving the men in the care of the family at home, to undertake long trips in order to market their products and supply their clients with the remedies that they were going to buy. need during winter.

Those trips could last for months, which highlights the challenge to gender roles that this implied for the traditional functioning of the family, at a time when it was not frequent to see women traveling alone, much less doing business. and practicing his own trade.

The study highlights this fact and, furthermore, reveals a series of their own technologies and practices, elaborated by themselves.

For example, the bags they used to transport and dry the herbs were made from bedding, woven from old cushion covers. For the collection of mushrooms and mushrooms, they also developed a particular method, drying them and threading them like necklaces. Turpentine oil used to be carried in metal cans uniquely tied to the body during long journeys.

The knowledge of the trementinaires was transmitted orally, between grandmothers, mothers and daughters, and was kept as family secrets. Precisely for this reason, the turpentines have remained outside the history of knowledge, since it is extremely difficult to find written references to their contributions.

Thanks to their extensive knowledge of natural resources, generally inaccessible to women of their time, the trementinaires managed to develop a trade that came to cover the medical needs of many of the families who lived in the surroundings of the valley and nearby cities.

Sometimes they were branded as “witches” in the places they visited, an unfair accusation that was based on mistaken questions about morality and the prejudices of the feminine ideal of the time. This is also what the study deals with. “Witch” and scientific knowledge are often confused when it comes to women’s history. They are stereotypes that must be overcome. In the case of turpentines, his specialized knowledge included identifying a multitude of species, where to find them, how to keep them, when to collect them, and how to apply them.

His knowledge about his natural environment was not just a matter of knowledge, but a way of survival; knowledge that is extremely topical, given the environmental situation that has been caused, in part, by the progressive separation between human beings and nature.

The study is titled “Trementinaires: Gender, Collecting, and Subsistence in the Pyrenees”. And it has been published in the academic journal Journal for the History of Knowledge. (Source: UAM)