Medieval and Renaissance Lactations: Images, Rhetorics, and Practices, ed. by Jutta Sperling...

Proof Copy

MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE LACTATIONS

Medieval and Renaissance Lactations.indb 1 6/13/2013 3:40:50 PM

Proof Copy

Women and Gender in the Early Modern World

Series Editors:Allyson Poska, The University of Mary Washington, USA

Abby Zanger

The study of women and gender offers some of the most vital and innovative challenges to current scholarship on the early modern period. For more than a decade now, “Women and Gender in the Early Modern World” has served

Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary in scope, this Ashgate book series strives to reach beyond geographical limitations to explore the experiences of early modern women and the nature of gender in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. We welcome proposals for both single-author volumes and edited

Titles in the series

The Mother’s Legacy in Early Modern EnglandJennifer Heller

Birthing Bodies in Early Modern France:Stories of Gender and Reproduction

Kirk D. Read

Childbirth and the Display of Authority in Early Modern FranceLianne McTavish

Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare’s EnglandCaroline Bicks

Maternal Measures:Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern PeriodEdited by Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh


Proof Copy

Medieval and Renaissance Lactations

Images, Rhetorics, Practices

Edited byJUTTA GISELA SPERLINGHampshire College, USA


Proof Copy

© Jutta Gisela Sperling and the contributors 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

Jutta Gisela Sperling has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,

Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing CompanyWey Court East 110 Cherry StreetUnion Road Suite 3-1Farnham Burlington, VT 05401-3818Surrey, GU9 7PT USAEngland

www.ashgate.com

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataMedieval and Renaissance lactations: images, rhetorics, practices. –(Women and gender in the early modern world) 1. Breastfeeding in art. 2. Breastfeeding in literature. 3. Lactation in art. 4. Lactation in literature. 5. Arts, Medieval. 6. Literature, Medieval – History and criticism. 7. Arts, Renaissance. 8. European literature – Renaissance, 1450–1600 – History and criticism.I. Series II. Sperling, Jutta Gisela.700.4’561’0903-dc23

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:Medieval and Renaissance lactations : images, rhetorics, practices / edited by Jutta Gisela

Sperling.pages cm. — (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World)

Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-1-4094-4860-0 (hardcover: alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4094-4861-7 (ebook) — ISBN 978-1-4094-6988-9 (epub)1. Mother and child in literature. 2. Breastfeeding in literature. 3. Breastfeeding in art. 4. Women and religion—History. 5. Wet nurses in literature. 6. Breastfeeding—History. I. Sperling, Jutta Gisela, editor of compilation. PN56.5.M67M43 2013809’.933520431—dc23

2013007749ISBN 9781409448600 (hbk)ISBN 9781409448617 (ebk)ISBN 9781409469889 (ePUB)


Proof Copy Für Olivia Principina und Lucia Angelina


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Contents

List of Figures ixNotes on Contributors xiii

Introduction 1Jutta Gisela Sperling

1 “The Milk of the Male”: Kinship, Maternity and Breastfeeding in Medieval Islam 21 Mohammed Hocine Benkheira

2 Why Could Early Modern Men Lactate? Gender Identity and Metabolic Narrations in Humoral Medicine 37 Barbara Orland

3 The Mother and the Dida [Nanny]: Female Employers and Wet Nurses in Fourteenth-Century Barcelona 55 Rebecca Lynn Winer

4 Peasants at the Palace: Wet Nurses and Aristocratic Mothers in Early Modern Rome 79 Caroline Castiglione

5 “With My Daughter’s Milk”: Wet Nurses and the Rhetoric of Lactation in Valencian Court Records 101 Debra Blumenthal

6 Popular Balladry and the Terrible Wet Nurse: “La nodriza del rey” 115 Emilie L. Bergmann

7 Picturing Institutional Wet-Nursing in Medicean Siena 129 Diana Bullen Presciutti

8 Mother London and the Madonna Lactans in England’s Plague Epic 147 Rebecca Totaro

9 Nicolas Poussin’s Allegories of Charity in The Plague at Ashdod and The Gathering of the Manna Seventeenth-Century French Art 165 Alexandra Woolley

10 The Economics of Milk and Blood in Alberti’s Libri della famiglia: Maternal versus Wet-Nursing 187 Julia L. Hairston


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

Medieval and Renaissance Lactationsviii

11 The Social and Religious Context of Iconographic Oddity: Breastfeeding in Ghirlandaio’s Birth of the Baptist 213 Patricia Simons

12 Wet Nurses, Midwives, and the Virgin Mary in Tintoretto’s Birth of Saint John the Baptist (1563) 235 Jutta Gisela Sperling

13 Full of Grace: Lactation, Expression and “Colorito” Painting in Some Early Works by Rubens 255 J. Vanessa Lyon

Bibliography 279Index 311


Proof Copy

Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

List of Figures

4.1 Villa Aurora, detail, “The Donkey Room.” Photo Credit: © Marco Mancini. 80

4.2 Artemisia Gentileschi, Madonna Feeding the Christ Child, 1610–1611, Spada Gallery, Rome. Photo Credit: Archivio

Artistico ed Etnoantropologico e per il Polo Museale della città di Roma. 85

4.3 Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (Il Guercino), Christian Charity, c. 1625–26;; oil on canvas (93.3 x 109.9 cm), The Dayton Art Institute, Museum purchase with funds provided by Miss Anne Chapman and the Junior League of Dayton, Ohio, Inc. 1958.99. Photo Credit: The Dayton Art Institute. 86

7.1 Pietro d’Achille Crogi and Raffaele Navesi (attr.), Assignment and Payment of Wet Nurses, ca. 1575–77, Sala Pellegrinaio, Ospedale di S. Maria della Scala, Siena. Photo Credit: Alinari/Art Resource, NY. 130

7.2 Pietro d’Achille Crogi and Raffaele Navesi (attr.), Distribution of Grain, ca. 1575–77, Sala Pellegrinaio, Ospedale di S. Maria della Scala, Siena. Photo Credit: Alinari/ Art Resource, NY. 131

7.3 South Wall, Sala Pellegrinaio, Ospedale di S. Maria della Scala, Siena. Photo Credit: Alinari/ Art Resource, NY. 135

7.4 Domenico di Bartolo, Distribution of Alms, 1443;; detail of woman and lame man, Sala Pellegrinaio, Ospedale di S. Maria della Scala, Siena. Photo Credit: Alfredo Dagli Orti/ The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY. 136

7.5 Domenico di Bartolo, Care and Marriage of Foundlings, 1443, Sala Pellegrinaio, Ospedale di S. Maria della Scala, Siena. Photo Credit: Alfredo Dagli Orti/ The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY. 139

7.6 Paolo di Giovanni Fei, The Public Treasurer (Camerlengo) and , 1394, Archivio di Stato, Siena. Photo

Credit: Alinari/ Art Resource, NY. 142


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

Medieval and Renaissance Lactationsx

9.1 Nicolas Poussin, The Plague at Ashdod, 1631, oil on canvas (1.480 x 1.980 m), Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo Credit: Musée du Louvre, Paris. 166

9.2 Nicolas Poussin, The Gathering of the Manna, 1637–39, oil on canvas (1.490 x 2 m), Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo Credit: Musée du Louvre, Paris. 167

9.3 François Perrier, The Plague of Athens, ca. 1635, oil on canvas (0.72 x 0.97 m), Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon, Dijon. Photo Credit: François Jay. 178

9.4 Sébastien Bourdon, The Plague at Ashdod, ca. 1670, oil on canvas, private collection. Photo Credit: ©Christie’s Images Limited [2009]. 180

9.5 Charles Le Brun, The Striking of the Rock, 1648, oil on canvas (1.140 x 1530 m), Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo Credit: Musée du Louvre, Paris. 182

11.1 Domenico Ghirlandaio, The Birth of the Baptist, ca. 1487–88, fresco, high altar chapel, S. Maria Novella, Florence. Photo Credit: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali / Art Resource, NY. 214

11.2 Domenico Ghirlandaio, The Birth of the Virgin, ca. 1486–88, fresco, high altar chapel, S. Maria Novella, Florence. Photo Credit: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali / Art Resource, NY. 216

11.3 Antonio Pollaiuolo, The Birth of the Baptist, ca. 1477–80, silver and enameled relief, altar frontal for the Baptistery, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence. Photo Credit: Gianni Dagli Orti / The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY. 217

11.4 Antonio Pollaiuolo, The Birth of the Baptist, ca. 1469–80, or nué embroidery, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence. Photo Credit: Nicolo Orsi Battaglini / Art Resource, NY. 220

11.5 Domenico Ghirlandaio, Annunciation to Zacharias, 1490, fresco, high altar chapel, S. Maria Novella, Florence. Photo Credit: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali / Art Resource, NY. 224


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

List of Figures xi

11.6 Domenico Ghirlandaio and workshop, The Virgin and Child in Glory with Sts. Dominic, Michael, John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, ca. 1491–94, tempera and oil on panel (221 x 198.2 cm), Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Photo Credit: Art Resource, NY. 226

12.1 Tintoretto, The Birth of Saint John the Baptist, 1563, San Zaccaria, Venice. Photo Credit: Soprintendenza Speciale per il Patrimonio Storico Artistico et Etnoantropologico e per il polo museale della città di Venezia e dei comuni della gronda lagunare. Permission: Patriarcato di Venezia. 236

12.2 Frédéric Horthemels, after Tintoretto, The Birth of Saint John the Baptist, 1729, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (original: Saint Petersburg, Hermitage, ca. 1554). Source: gallica.bnf.fr. 237

12.3 Anon., Saint Anne Breastfeeding the Virgin Mary, either 6th or 12th century, Scenes from the Life of Mary, column A, ciborium of Saint Mark’s Chapel, Venice. Photo Credit: Studio Bohm – Venezia. 244

12.4 Tintoretto, Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, 1553–65, Madonna dell’Orto, Venice. Photo Credit: Studio Bohm – Venezia. 249

12.5 Tintoretto, Circumcision of Christ, 1541–42, Santa Maria dei Carmini, Venice. Photo Credit: Studio Bohm – Venezia. 252

13.1 Peter Paul Rubens, Nursing Madonna, ca. 1614, Schloss Sanssouci, Potsdam. Photo Credit: Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg. 257

13.2 Peter Paul Rubens, Holy Family with Saints Elizabeth and John the Baptist, ca. 1615, oil on panel (114.5 x 91.5 cm), Major Acquisitions Fund, 1967.229, Gallery 208, The Art Institute of Chicago (1967.229). Photo Credit: The Art Institute of Chicago. 259

13.3 Peter Paul Rubens, Juno and Argus, ca.1610–11, oil on canvas, Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne. Photo Credit: Giraudon/ The Bridgeman Art Library. 264


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

Medieval and Renaissance Lactationsxii

13.4 Peter Paul Rubens, Roman Charity, ca. 1612, oil on canvas (140.5 x 180.3 cm), Collection of Count Cobenzl, Brussels 1768, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo Credit: The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. 269

13.5 Peter Paul Rubens, St. Augustine between Christ and the Virgin Mary, ca. 1615, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid. Photo Credit: Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid. 273


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Notes on Contributors

Mohammed Hocine Benkheira is Directeur d’études in Anthropology and the History of Islamic Law at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Études, V.e section, Sorbonne, Paris. He is the author of L’amour de la Loi. Essai sur la normativité en islâm (Paris: PUF, coll. Politique d’aujourd’hui, 1997), 408 pages;; and of Islâm et interdits alimentaires. Juguler l’animalité, (Paris : PUF, coll. Pratiques théoriques, 2000).

Emilie L. Bergmann is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to her publications on literature and the visual arts, she is co-editor of a variety of volumes, most recently: Approaches to Teaching the Works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, with Stacey Schlau (New York: MLA, 2007) and Mirrors and Echoes: Women’s Writing in Twentieth-Century Spain, with Richard Herr (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Among other articles, she wrote “Language and ‘Mother’s Milk’: Maternal Roles and the Nurturing Body in Early Modern Spanish Texts,” in Maternal Measures. Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period, Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh, eds, (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000), 105–20, and is currently working on a monograph entitled Nurturing Monsters: The Maternal Imaginary in Early Modern Hispanic Culture.

Debra Blumenthal is Associate Professor of Medieval History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is author of, among others, Enemies and Familiars: Slavery and Mastery in Fifteenth-Century Valencia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009) and is currently working on a monograph entitled ‘Comares’: Midwives, Wet-Nurses and the Construction of Maternity in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain.

Caroline Castiglione is Associate Professor of Italian Studies and History at Brown University. She won the Marraro-Prize for best book in Italian History in 2005 for Patrons and Adversaries: Nobles and Villagers in Italian Politics, 1640–1760 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005);; in addition, she published several articles on her new research project, most recently “Mater litigans: Mothering Resistance in Early Eighteenth-Century Rome,”

, vol. 35, no. 1 (2009): 6–27.

Julia L. Hairston is Academic Director of the University of California, Rome Study Center. In addition to several articles on Machiavelli, Ariosto, and Tullia d’Aragona, she co-edited two volumes: The Body in Early Modern Italy, with Walter Stephens (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), and Gendered Contexts: New Perspectives in Italian Cultural Studies, with Laura Benedetti and


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

Medieval and Renaissance Lactationsxiv

Silvia Ross (New York: Peter Lang, 1995). Her edition and translation of the poems and letters of Tullia d’Aragona is forthcoming in the series The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe with CRRS.

J. Vanessa Lyon is Assistant Professor of Art History at Grinnell College. She is the author of “‘The Wheel Within the Wheel’: Reading Margaret of York’s Burgundian Miniatures According to the Fourfold Exegesis of Scripture,” Word & Image, vol. 24 (April–June, 2008): 139–51. Her current research project, Reynolds after Rubens, explores the legacy of Flemish painting in British art and art writing from 1620 to 1790.

Barbara Orland is Senior Scientist at the Science Studies Program, University of Basel, Switzerland. She is the author of numerous articles on the history of milk, nutrition, and pregnancy, most recently: “Enlightened Milk. Reshaping a Bodily Substance into a Chemical Object,” Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe, Between Market and Laboratory, ed. by Ursula and Emma Spary, (Chicago: Chicago University Press 2010), 163–97;; and “White Blood and Red Milk. Analogical Reasoning in Medical Practice and Experimental Physiology (1560–1730),” Blood, Sweat and Tears. The Formation of Early Modern Medicine, ed. by M. Horstmannshoff, H. King, H., and C. Zittel, Physiology, Intersections;; Yearbook for Early Modern Studies, vol. 18 (Leiden, Boston: Brill 2012), 443–80. She is the co-editor of Assimilating Knowledge. Food and Nutrition in Early Modern Physiologies, with Emma Spary, Special Issue of Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (Amsterdam: Elsevier 2012).

Diana Bullen Presciutti is Assistant Professor of Art History at The College of Wooster. She is the author of “Dead Infants, Cruel Mothers, and Heroic Popes: The Visual Rhetoric of Foundling Care at the Hospital of Santo Spirito, Rome,” Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 64, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 752–99;; and of “Carità e potere: Representing the Medici Grand Dukes as ‘Fathers of the Innocenti,’” Renaissance Studies, vol. 24, no. 2 (April 2010): 234–59.

Patricia Simons is Professor of History of Art at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has published numerous articles on topics relating to gender, sexuality, and desire in Renaissance art. She is the author of The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and co-editor of Patronage, Art, and Society in Renaissance Italy, with F.W. Kent (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).

Jutta Gisela Sperling is Professor of History at Hampshire College. She is the author of Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) and co-editor of Across the Religious Divide: Women, Law, and Property in the Wider Mediterranean (ca. 1300–1800), with Shona Kelly Wray (Routledge, 2010). She is currently writing a monograph entitled Pero and Cimone: Queer Lactations in Early Modern Visual Culture.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Notes on Contributors xv

Rebecca Totaro is Professor of English at Florida Gulf Coast University and General Editor of the Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies book series with Duquesne University Press. Author of Suffering in Paradise: the Bubonic Plague in English Literature from More to Milton (2005), she is editor of The Plague in Print: Essential Elizabethan Sources, 1558–1603 (2010), co-editor of Representing the Plague in Early Modern England (2011), and editor of The Plague Epic in Early Modern England: Heroic Measures 1603–1721 (2012).

Rebecca Lynn Winer is Associate Professor of History at Villanova University. She is the author of Women, Wealth, and Community in Perpignan, c. 1250–1300: Christians, Jews, and Enslaved Muslims in a Medieval Mediterranean Town (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), and of numerous articles, most recently: “Conscripting the Breast: Lactation, Slavery and Salvation in the Realms of Aragon and Kingdom of Majorca, ca. 1250–1300,” Journal of Medieval History, vol. 34, no. 2 (2008): 164–84, which was awarded the Best Article Prize in 2009 by the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship. She is currently working on a monograph on wet nursing, motherhood, and Christian/Jewish/ Muslim relations in Catalonia and Roussillon ca.1200–1400.

Alexandra Catherine Woolley is pursuing a doctorate in art history at the Université Toulouse-II Le Mirail, with a thesis on “The use of images of charity in Seventeenth-Century France.” She also lectures on French and Italian Renaissance, and is the author of “L’oeuvre de miséricorde du Roi: La statue de Louis XIV pour l’Hôtel-de-ville de Paris par Antoine Coysevox, 1687–1689,” Cahiers de Framespa, vol. 12 (2012).


Proof Copy


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Introduction

Jutta Gisela Sperling

Historiographical Overview

The contributions gathered in this volume make a case for the systematic study of tropes, images, and practices of lactation in early modern Europe. Analyzing the

of both maternal and non-maternal nursing, the present volume seeks to establish milk-sharing as an important phenomenon in medieval and Renaissance societies. Perhaps somewhat counter-intuitively, it is not primarily meant to be a contribution

of the term that stresses the containment of bonds of affection and nurture within a clearly delineated nuclear family, and female domesticity at its core. Rather, it studies the displacement of mothering conveyed and employed by non-maternal breastfeeding as a form of signifying gendered relations of care and the careful

commercial forms of wet-nursing had been ubiquitous since antiquity.1As Plato, Aristotle, and other venerable Greek philosophers put it: every mother

is nothing but a nurse, and it is this paradoxical construction of the mother as a hollow and passive space full of abject, but also nourishing and transformative, matter that allowed for the allegorical emphasis on breastfeeding as a primary

2 Literary protagonists, such as gods and heroes, were commonly, and very spectacularly, not nursed by their mothers: Heracles achieved immortality by ingesting drops from Juno’s milk;; Jupiter was raised by Amalthea, the she-goat;; and wild animals suckled the powerful heroines in Hyginus’ fables.3 A shepherdess raised Oedipus, or else he might never have killed his father and slept with his mother. The one taboo he notably did not violate when inventing the

4 Divine and

1 See also Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh, eds, Maternal Measures. Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period (Aldershot, 2000).

2 See Judith Butler’s analysis of Irigaray’s critique of Plato’s Timaeus. Judith Butler, “Bodies That Matter,” in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York, 1993), 27–56. In this chapter, metonymy is understood in its Freudian sense as Verschiebung [displacement], in contrast to metaphor or Verdichtung [condensation].

3 Hyginus, Fables, trans. and ed. by Jean-Yves Boriaud (Paris, 1997). 4 This fact has been blissfully ignored by modern psychoanalytic theorists, including

Judith Butler. Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim. Kinship between Life and Death (New York, 2000).


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

2

animal milk could confer superhuman qualities on mortals, but mother’s milk was held in low esteem among ancient Greek physicians: Empedocles “observed” that milk was pus, that is, corrupted blood;; Aristotle claimed it to be menstrual blood

“benign and useful excrement.”5In contrast to the Greeks, who endowed breastfeeding with Dionysian

promiscuity, magic powers, and maternal abjection, the Roman world never ceased to venerate goddesses in their capacity as both mothers and nurses.6 The

breastfeeding. In their version of Juno’s encounter with Heracles, the goddess voluntarily confers immortality on her stepson, allowing him to suckle her milk as a bearded man.7 Roman law, in contrast, did anything but endorse the forging of kinship ties through milk exchange. Legal kinship was entirely based on one’s relationship to a pater familias. Mothers could confer only natural kinship on their offspring, which was of no consequence in matters of inheritance and status.8 Possibly in order to reinforce the abolition of kinship based on fosterage, Roman authors recommended maternal breastfeeding, pronouncing appreciation for a mother’s labor of care while at the same time repressing alternative ideas to patriarchal kinship formation.9

against the degeneration of republican and, in a wider sense, societal values

5 “Empedocles … said: milk is nothing but pus, a claim Aristotle refuted in his De Generatione Animalium, book 4, chapter 8 … because of the following reason: … milk is concocted [from blood], but pus [a] corrupted [form of blood].” Quoted in Girolamo Mercuriale, De morbis mvlieribus praelectiones ex ore Hieronymi Mercvrialis iam dudum à Gaspare Bauhino exceptae, ac paulo antea inscio autore editae: nvnc vero per Michaelem Colvmbvm ex collatione plurium exemplarium consensu auctoris locupletiores, & emendatiores factae (Venice, 1587), 62. “Galen said on the last page in his seventh book of De Usu Partium, milk is a benign excrement, useful for nutrition … Aristotle said in book 4, chapter 8 of De Generatione Animalium that milk is concocted from blood, not corrupted … against Empedocles, who said that milk was white pus.” Quoted in Girolamo Acoromboni, Tractatus de Lacte (Venice, 1536), no pagination, fourth page.

6 Larissa Bonfante, “Nursing Mothers in Classical Art,” in Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow and Claire L. Lyons, eds, Naked Truths: Women, Sexuality, and Gender in Classical Art and Archaeology (New York, 1997), 174–96.

7 Waldemar Deonna, “La légende de Pero et de Micon et l’allaitement symbolique,” Latomus, 13 (1954): 140–166;; 356–75;; especially 149–52.

8 Gianna Pomata, “Blood Ties and Semen Ties: Consanguinity and Agnation in Roman Law,” in Mary Jo Maynes et al., eds, Gender, Kinship, Power (New York, 1996), 43–64. See also extended Italian version: “Legami di sangue, legami di seme: consanguinità e agnazione nel diritto romano,” Quaderni Storici, 86, 2 (1994): 299–334.

9 This would change under Emperor Justinian (482–565). Peter Parkes, “Fostering Fealty: A Comparative Analysis of Tributary Allegiances of Adoptive kinship,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 45, 4 (2003): 761–3.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Introduction 3

due to wet-nursing. He inspired Renaissance humanists, Protestant reformers, and Enlightenment philosophers alike in their polemics against non-maternal childcare.10 Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72), Francesco Barbaro (1390–1454), and other early modern political theorists expressed rising concerns over the contamination of elite offspring by the “vulgar” speech and “bad” habits of lower-class wet nurses, who threatened to make a mockery of the purity of patrilineal bloodlines that contemporary legal systems depended on.11 As Vasari—half-jokingly—proposed, Michelangelo imbibed his artistic genius from his wet nurse, wife of a stonemason.12 This anecdote rests on Aristotelian notions of conception, according to which a man’s sperm “activates” both a woman’s pregnancy and her

modern legal notions of patrilineal descent, which were at the basis of a heavily 13

In terms of access to legal status and inheritance, mothers in ancient Rome

on exclusive maternal breastfeeding. Mother’s milk never came to rival paternal

thus pre-empting foster mothers from legalizing relationships with nurslings as

daughters in marriages sine manu (without dowry exchange) as well as cum manu (with dowry exchange) to pass on paternal properties to their children.14 In the Byzantine Empire, gender relations relaxed to some extent, notably through the momentous law reform under Emperor Justinian (reigned 527–65).15 In a gesture

10 Valerie Fildes, (Oxford, New York, 1988), 15, 68, 116. Emilie L. Bergmann, “Language and ‘Mother’s Milk’: Maternal Roles and the Nurturing Body in Early Modern Spanish Texts,” in Maternal Measures, 105–20.

11 Margaret King, Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance (Princeton, 1986), 97, 131.

12 Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, ed. by William Gaunt (4 vols, London, New York, 1963), vol. 4, 109.

13 Medieval Views of Kinship,” in David I. Kertzer and Richard P. Saller, eds, The Family in

(New Haven, 1991), 150–167.14 Marriages sine manu entailed that a daughter stayed in her father’s potestas, which

meant that she would remain among his heirs. However, she could not pass those properties on to her own children in intestate succession. Marriages cum manu were concluded after dowry exchange. In these cases, the bride entered her husband’s potestas and lost all rights to her father’s inheritance. Suzanne Dixon, “From Ceremonial to Sexualities: A Survey of Scholarship on Roman Marriage,” in Beryl Rawson, ed., A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds (London, 2011), 245–61, especially 251.

15 JoAnn McNamara, “Women and Power through the Family Revisited,” in Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski, eds, Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 2003), 17–30.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

4

early modern Italian legal commentators would later denigrate as evidence of his

by extending inheritance rights to cognatic (maternal) relatives.16 He also gave widows in de facto marriages sine manu inheritance rights of up to a quarter of their deceased husbands’ estates, thereby mapping the privileges of marriages by dowry transfer onto those concluded by consent alone. Finally, and more to our point, he acknowledged de facto adoption resulting from fosterage, that is, non-commercial wet-nursing, at the same time as he prohibited formal adoptions by men, one of the mainstays of Roman patriarchy.17 This happened at the same time as early Christians recognized bilateral descent and god-parenthood as establishing wide-ranging incest prohibitions.18Wives’ and mothers’ contributions to their families were thus increasingly more

far as to recognize milk-sharing as constitutive of kinship. Mohammed himself

wet-nursing.19 Even though no inheritance rights resulted from milk bonds, the recognition of breastfeeding as consequential for exogamous kinship structures in Islamic law remains unique in the pre-modern Mediterranean. Regulations of maternal and non-maternal breastfeeding, as well as informal acknowledgment of milk kinship can also be found in Iberia.20 In Portuguese statutory law, fathers of “natural” offspring were required to pay for three years of breastfeeding, either by the mother or a wet nurse.21 Similar rules regarding infant care existed in Islamic law, stipulating husbands’ alimony payments for their infants in cases of unilateral divorce ( ).22 Also in revolutionary France and contemporary

16 Joannis Baptistae de Luca, Theatrum veritatis et justitiae ... (3 vols, Cologne, 1690), vol. 2, 3. See also Gianna Pomata, “Family and Gender,” in John Marino, ed., Early Modern Italy (Oxford, 2002), 71.

17 Parkes, “Fostering Fealty,” 761–3.18 John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1985). See also Jack

Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge, 1983).19 An early biographer of Muhammad explains why he refrained from marrying the

brother. Do you not know that God prohibited in the domain of milk kinship what He prohibited in the domain of blood kinship?” Avner Giladi, Infants, Parents, and Wet Nurses: Medieval Islamic Views on Breastfeeding and Their Social Implications (Leiden, 1999), 38.

20 In 1572, Priest Rodriguo Fernandez gave a black slave to his milk sister Jsabell de Cujnha—i.e., his wet nurse’s daughter—“in order to see her married and honored according to her station.” Arquivo Nacional de Torro do Tombo, Registro Notarias de Lisboa, Cartorio 15, livro de notas 8, Belchior de Montalvo, 41r.

21 Rui Gonçalves, (Lisbon, 1785;; 1st ed.

1557), 232–5.22 Judith E. Tucker, In the House of the Law: Gender and Islamic Law in Ottoman

Syria and Palestine (Berkeley, 1998);; Yossef Rapoport, Marriage, Money, and Divorce in Medieval Islamic Society (Cambridge, 2005).


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Introduction 5

Prussia, breastfeeding became the object of government regulation, but here with the aim of suppressing the interlocking phenomena of commercial nursing and

as they took the trouble of nursing their own infants.23

over the Mediterranean found its correlate in the emergence of the cult of the Virgin

residual doubts about highlighting Christ’s relationship to his earthly mother, and made a point of calling Mary “only” theotokos, that is, bearer, not mother, of God. However, Roman and Coptic imagery soon showed the Madonna in the act of nursing her very own son.24 When, in the thirteenth century, the iconography of the Madonna Lactans re-emerged in central and northern Italy and, soon afterwards, in Flanders, Mary’s act of breastfeeding Christ became the mark of her humility

and milk, that rendered her son fully human.25 If this imagery was meant to be exhortative, as some art historians have claimed, it promoted spiritual motherhood among non-reproductive women rather than maternal nursing.26The veneration of the lactating virgin developed in the context of a sprawling

culture of gender-bending, embodied forms of devotion that centered on the importance of feeding and starving as mothering. While male monks and mystics expressed their veneration for the lactating virgin most fervently, religious women aimed to become one with Christ in his suffering, but also nourishing, qualities.

nourished sheep, God, and human worshippers alike, and were themselves fed with blood from Christ’s wound, milk from Mary’s breasts, and similar bodily

27 Charitable acts stood at the center of women’s

23 George Sussman, Selling Mother’s Milk: The Wet-Nursing Business in France 1715–1914 (Urbana, 1982), 31;; Mary Jacobus, “‘‘Incorruptible Milk’: Breastfeeding and the French Revolution,” in First Things: The Maternal Imagery in Literature, Art, and Psychoanalysis (New York, 2005), 222;; Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston, 1993), 41.

24 Ioli Kalavrezou, “Images of the Mother: When the Virgin Became the ‘Meter Theou’,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 44 (1990): 165–72.

25 Margaret Miles, “The Virgin’s One Bare Breast: Female Nudity and Religious Meaning in Tuscan Early Renaissance Culture,” in Susan R. Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture (Cambridge, MA, 1986), 193–208.

26 Rosemary Drage Hale, “Imitatio Mariae: Motherhood Motifs in Late Medieval German Spirituality” (Ph.D. thesis, Harvard University, 1992).

27 Clarissa W. Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation: Christian Motherhood in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 1991);; Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast. The Religious

(Berkeley, 1987);; Gianna Pomata, “A Christian Utopia of the Renaissance: Elena Duglioli’s Spiritual and Physical Motherhood (ca. 1510–1520),” in Kaspar von Greyerz, Hans Medick, Patrice Veit, eds, Von der dargestellten Person zum erinnerten Ich: Europäische Selbstzeugnisse als historische Quellen (1500–1850) (Cologne, 2001), 323–53.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

6

extravagant Eucharistic piety, which ranged from licking pus off of the sick and performing food multiplication miracles to working in soup kitchens, endowing masses for the dead, and giving spiritual advice to governments and ecclesiastic dignitaries.28 Institutionally, this new, urban form of devotion was fueled by women’s organization in convent-like, independent religious communities (Beguines, pizzochereand spiritual advisor.29Charity had since antiquity been of prime importance to Christians, as had the

fostering of kinship-like communities based not on reproduction but on belief and devotional practice.30 Both the material assistance of Christians to each other and

31 Saint Augustine, ever so disdainful of male sexuality, had carefully distinguished between love as charity and love as desire, but in medieval mysticism, the two concepts came to be merged again.32 The author of Meditations on the Life of Christ, long assumed to have been Saint Bonaventure (1221–74), endows charity and spiritual love for Christ with the urgency of embodied desire. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) expresses similar ideas in his sermons, elaborating on the Song of Songs’ sensual language on the sweetness of the milk of the beloved

33 In the visual arts, Charity was allegorized as a breastfeeding woman who nursed more than one child simultaneously to signify the displacement of maternal care onto one’s neighbor.34 Also Ecclesia and, sometimes, Grammar were represented in this way.35 Giotto envisioned Charity with an ancient cornucopia and a—

36 Breastfeeding Charity

28 Gabriella Zarri, “Living Saints: A Typology of Female Sanctity in the Early Sixteenth Century,” in Daniel Bornstein and Roberto Rusconi, eds, Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 1996), 219–303.

29 Katherine Gill, “Open Monasteries for Women in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy: Two Roman Examples,” in Craig A. Monson, ed., The Crannied Wall (Ann Arbor, 1992), 15–48.

30 “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three;; but the greatest of these is charity.” I Corinthians xiii, 13.

31 R. Freyhan, “The Evolution of the Caritas Figure in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 11 (1948): 68–86.

32 Freyhan, “The Evolution of the Caritas Figure,” 72–4.33 Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Cantica Canticorum. Eighty-six Sermons on the Song

of Solomon, Samuel J. Eales, ed. (London, 1895), sermon IX, 48, and sermon XLIII, 269.34 “Love [as in agape/caritas] does not seek its own.” 1 Corinthians 13, 5 (Luther’s

translation). Quoted in Dieter Koepplin, “Cranach’s Paintings of Charity in the Theological and Humanist Spirit of Luther and Melanchthon,” in Bodo Brinkmann, ed., Cranach (London, 2007), 63–80, especially 68.

35 Max Seidel, “Ubera Matris: Die vielschichtige Bedeutung eines Symbols in der mittelalterlichen Kunst,” Städel-Jahrbuch, N.F., 6 (1977): 41–99.

36 Giotto, “Charity,” Capella Scrovegni, Padoa (1302–1305).


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Introduction 7

Italian communes.37 In Renaissance Florence, classicizing images of abundance merged with Charity to signify the government’s welfare for its citizens.38 The eroticization of Dovizia turned abundance into an—unattainable?—object of desire in Florentine republican discourse. At the same time, the Madonna’s lactating breast was de-sexualized by deliberate anatomical displacement as a distancing device.39 Even seventeenth-century Protestants envisioned Christ’s promise of redemption to be imbibed like mother’s milk.40One of the characteristics of the proliferation of breastfeeding imagery

in medieval and early modern Catholic discourse was its stress on the transfer of maternal love onto others for the purposes of creating community and transcendental meaning by reference to God’s promise of redemption. Charity, in its capacity to foster myriads of meaningful relationships based on men’s and women’s labor of care and their belief in Christ, became the perspective from

mother of all allegories, emphasized the movement of metonymy as the primary

(pace Lacan!), while also tying semantics to religious beliefs and practices.Catholicism had, of course, not invented the concept of rhetorical displacement.

In ancient rhetoric, allegorization, that is, the process by which abstracts concepts were presented as female embodiments, was theorized as the attempt of attributing speech to the voiceless.41 Allegories were thought of as “other speech,” a different way of expressing abstract notions by reference to vivid imagery. The use of allegories could thus enhance an orator’s persuasive powers, even though it might result in “shrouding” truths, and rendering verbal communication too ambiguous

37 David Rosand, Myths of Venice. The Figuration of a State (Chapel Hill, 2001).38 Adrian W.B. Randolph, Engaging Symbols: Gender, Politics, and Public Art in

Fifteenth-Century Florence (New Haven, 2002).39 Megan Holmes, “Disrobing the Virgin: The Madonna Lactans in Fifteenth-Century

Florentine Art,” in Geraldine A. Johnson and Sara F. Matthews Grieco, eds, Picturing (Cambridge, 1997), 167–95.

40 Daniel Cramer, Zehen Catechismus Predigten. Das ist: Die Vernunfftige Lautere Milch des Heiligen Catechissmi Lutheri (Stettin, 1635).

41 “Imagine that your ancestors, or Hellas, or your native land, assuming a woman’s form, should address such and such reproaches to you.” Demetrius of Phalerum (350–280 BCE), On Style

be applied to a variety of things, mute and inanimate. It is most useful in the divisions under Rhetorica Ad Herennium (90 BCE), IV 66. Quoted in

James J. Paxson, (Cambridge, 1994), 12–14.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

8

by evoking female, or otherwise “terror striking,” imagery.42 The reverse discursive movement, namely, allegorical interpretation, was developed by early Christians to clarify the—otherwise unstable and possibly incomprehensible—relationship between the Old and New Testaments. The extraction of allegorical meaning out of rather plainly written texts served to view Jewish prophecy as a “pre-

foreshadowing the food multiplication miracles of Jesus, and so on and so forth. Here again, charity was often held to be the glue that integrated both authoritative texts “meaningfully.”43

dethroning charity and elevating “faith alone.”44 Not coincidentally, the reformers’ abolition of charity as a means to gain salvation and their purges of the Bible of allegorical meaning were accompanied by hostility to visual representations, most importantly in the form of eroticizing images of the Virgin Mary. According to Luther, the Madonna was to be shown only in her capacity as Christ’s mother, holding her baby in her lap—but not in the act of lactating (!)—and no longer as the queen of heaven.45than her own—similar to the Virgin Mary, who nursed all believers “in” Christ—the principle of female embodiment, the displacement of allegorical interpretation, and the community-building labor of care came to be united in a triadic relationship. Catholic allegories had come a long way from the ventriloquizing of women “and other voiceless things” in ancient rhetoric.While medieval religious discourse constructed the charitable breast as sign

and object of desire—in sync with Augustinian maledictions of male sexuality—Renaissance medical writers saw the breast in analogy to the penis. Especially

high esteem among famous anatomists such as Vesalius, the wish to see the two sexes as complementary and—almost—symmetrical resulted in the proliferation of both penetrative and inverted phallic imagery.46 Even though Aristotelian

42 “The speaker has shrouded his words, as it were, in allegory … Any darkly-hinting expression is more terror striking, and its import is variously conjectured … by different hearers. On the other hand, things that are clear and plain are apt to be despised, just like men when stripped of their garment.” Demetrius of Phalerum, On Style, 365. Quoted in Theresa M. Kelley, Reinventing Allegory (Cambridge, 1997), 18.

43 Jutta Gisela Sperling, “Allegories of Charity and the Practice of Poor Relief at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco,” Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch, 70 (2009): 119–46.

44 Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (Chicago, 2004).45 Sibylle Weber am Bach,

Reformation (Regensburg, 2006).46 Thomas W. Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud

(Cambridge, MA, 1990). For a critique of Laqueur’s concept of the “one-sex body,” see, among others, Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge, 1993);; Katharine Park, “Itineraries of the ‘one-sex-body’: A history of an idea,” unpublished manuscript.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Introduction 9

concepts of utter female difference and inferiority never entirely faded, Galen’s idea of viewing vagina and uterus as the concave image of penis and scrotum inspired medical scholars to speculate about female desire.47 As Thomas Laqueur has argued, the Galenic model of anatomical difference, according to which women contributed seed to the process of generation, required women to achieve orgasms in order to conceive.48 This assumption encouraged medical scholars to investigate female erogenous zones, albeit starting from the maxim that all desire was phallic in nature. Therefore, the rediscovery of the clitoris in 1561

pathologic, and possibly perverse, the clitoris was imagined to swell to penis-like proportions, thus to be of use exclusively in sodomy between women.49 Another, less embattled, analogy was found between the erectile functions of the penis and

human blood. A “wondrous harmony” was thought to exist between the erogenous zones of women’s internal and external sexual organs, as well as a vein conducting uterine blood directly into the milk ducts.50When investigating the causes of lactation in greater detail, however, the phallic

51 In his Treatise on Milk (1536), Girolamo Acoromboni, professor of medicine at the University of Padua, investigates how exactly milk was “concocted” from blood, as the ancient Greeks had claimed, but hesitates to come to a conclusive statement.52 Following Pliny on the possible therapeutic usages of women’s milk, however, he recommends the use of human milk against all sorts of fevers and shares with his readers that Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), notable Venetian patrician, humanist, and

47 Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston, “Destiny is Anatomy,” essay review of Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990), The New Republic (18 February 1991): 53–7.

48 Thomas Laqueur, “Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology,” in Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur, eds, The Making of the Modern Body (Berkeley, 1987), 1–41.

49 Gabriele Fallopia, Observationes Anatomicae (2 vols, Venice, 1561), quoted in: Katharine Park, “The Rediscovery of the Clitoris. French Medicine and the Tribade,” in David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, eds, The Body in Parts. Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern England (New York, 1997), 177.

50 As Bernardino Ramazzini, in his (Modena, 1700), explained: ‘The wondrous harmony between breasts and uterus, both of them sources of desire, is widely evidenced by the remarkable excitement which is produced in women, when, as they themselves say, their breasts are being caressed.” Quoted in Gianna Pomata, “La meravigliosa armonia: il rapporto fra seni ed utero dall’anatomia vascolare all’endocrinologia,” in Giovanna Fiume, ed., Madri. Storia di un ruolo sociale (Venice, 1995), 46.

51 Judith Butler, “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary,” in Bodies That Matter, 57–92.

52 Girolamo Acoromboni, Tractatus de lacte (Venice, 1536).


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

10

secretary of Pope Leo X (1475–1521), drank women’s milk right off the breast for over a year to get cured from a nagging catarrh.53 In the seventeenth century, many physicians recommended animal milk for the treatment of gout. However, in anthropomorphizing the cow whose milk was to be ingested, and by inserting passages from Pliny’s Natural History, gout experts implied that wet nurses were preferable to animals.54 Female milk continued to be recommended for tuberculosis and eye diseases, even dropsy, as the only existing remedy until the late eighteenth century.55 Simultaneously, many scientists conducted experiments to analyze the

of particular urgency because of skyrocketing rates of infant abandonment and the consequent collapse of institutional wet-nursing.56Both domestic and institutional wet-nursing had been widespread since the

Renaissance, when it was the most remunerative of women’s unskilled labor. Peasant women from Florence’s contado, who were employed by wealthy patricians as domestic nurses in the city, earned enough money to settle their own infants with lower-paid wet nurses in the countryside. Commercial infant care was predicated upon a chain reaction of displacement, a result of the prohibition of nurses to care for more than one child simultaneously. The preferred wet nurse was a mother whose infant had just died;; mothers of toddlers were sometimes suspected of not weaning their own children properly upon assuming a foster

activity while wet-nursing. Not only a new pregnancy, but sexual activity in and of itself was thought to “spoil” a woman’s milk, an assumption medical authorities never substantiated in greater detail. Wet nurses who became pregnant lost their salaries for that period and had to return their nurslings as soon as they found out. As Christiane Klapisch-Zuber has shown, wet-nursing contracts in Renaissance Florence were usually drawn up between the child’s father and the wet nurse’s husband, indicating that to some extent, upper-class men paid lower-class men

53 Pliny the Elder, “Remedies Derived from Woman’s Milk,” Natural History (written 77–9 CE), book 28, chapter 21;; http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/searchresults?target=en&inContent=true&q=milk&doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137;; accessed 17 August, 2011. Acoromboni, Tractatus de lacte, no pagination, pages “74” and “75.”

54 Johann Georg Greisel, indagata natura lactis et arthritidis tandem rationibus, et experientiis allatis, diaeta lactea, optima arthritidem curandi methodus, proponitur (Leipzig, Ioh. Garb. Bueschelii Viduae,

55 Heide Wunder, “Frauenmilch-Muttermilch. Eine Geschichte aus dem 18. Jahrhundert,” in Barbara Duden, Karen Hagemann, Regina Schulte, and Ulrike Weckel, eds, Geschichte in Geschichten. Ein historisches Lesebuch (Frankfurt a.M., 2003), 295–305;; Encyclopédie, où dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers, Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, eds (17 vols, Paris, 1751–65), vol. 9, 207.

56 Barbara Orland, “Enlightened Milk: Reshaping a Bodily Substance into a Chemical Object,” in Ursula Klein and E.C. Spary, eds, Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe: Between Market and Laboratory (Chicago, 2010), 163–97;; Sussman, Selling Mother’s Milk.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Introduction 11

for the abstention from sexual activity with their wives rather than remunerating foster mothers for their labor of care.57 That milk and blood, meaning lactation and sex, were not to be mixed, can be traced to ancient assumptions about milk-sharing as constitutive of kinship, of which the Islamic legal tradition still bears witness. In the mountainous regions of Pakistan, adultery was until recently punished by having the man ingest milk from the bosom of his beloved for the purpose of establishing ritual kinship governed by incest taboos.58Rising rates of child abandonment resulted in ever more futile attempts to

organize infant care for unwanted children. Florence’s Ospedale degli Innocenti

existence—at around 30 percent.59 However, the demand for institutional infant care grew faster than the supply of funds, which meant that in the following centuries, the mortality rates of abandoned infants rose sharply.60 At the foundling home of Santa Casa da Misercórdia in Lisbon, for example, 603 infants were abandoned between 1 January 1672, and 5 May 1673.61 Of those, only 38 did not die immediately of starvation but were lucky enough to be placed with a permanent wet nurse. An additional 82 babies died in foster care before they reached one year of age. This means that 483 infants, or 80 percent, died at the Misericórdia within a few weeks, before they could be matched with an individual wet nurse. The reason for this

in-house wet nurses. Only 13 lactating women resided in the Misericórdia during

Pascoa da Silva put 126 nurslings to her breast, she and her colleagues cared for 49 infants on average in those 17 months, trying to keep them alive until a permanent wet nurse could be found. The average life expectancy of an abandoned infant inside the Misericórdia was approximately two weeks, which meant that the main services the foundling home came to provide were baptism and burial.62In pre-revolutionary Paris, rates of abandonment reached a quarter of all baptized

children, resulting in mortality rates among foundlings of around 85 percent.63 The

57 Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “Blood Parents and Milk Parents: Wet Nursing in Florence, 1300–1500,” in Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Florence (Chicago, 1985), 132–64.

58 Michael Slackman, “A Compass That Can Clash With Modern Life,” New York Times, 12 June 2007;; Peter Parkes, “Alternative Social Structures and Foster Relations in the Hindu Kush: Milk Kinship Allegiance in Former Mountain Kingdoms of Northern Pakistan,” Comparative Studies in History and Society, 43, 1 (2001): 4–36, especially 10.

59 Philip Gavitt, Charity and Children in Renaissance Florence: The Ospedale degli Innocenti, 1410–1536 (Ann Arbor, 1990), 217.

60 Gavitt, Charity and Children, 222–4.61 Santa Casa dà Misercordia à Lisboa, Arquivo/Biblioteca, Livro das Entradas e

Baptismos 6, ff. 187v–287v;; Livro das Entradas e Baptismos 4 (old no. 7), fols 1r–50r.62 Santa Casa da Misericórdia da Lisboa, Arquivo/Biblioteca, Livro Entrada e

Baptismo dos Expostos (EB) 2 1657 August 1–1661 June 30.63 Sussman, Selling Mother’s Milk, 67.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

12

obvious inadequacy of institutionalized infant care led some town governments to experiment with new forms of social welfare. In Rouen, the payments reserved for wet nurses were offered to poor mothers on condition that they nursed their babies themselves, which resulted in a sharp drop in infant abandonment.64 This was a radical change in approach from prior centuries. At the Ospedale degli Innocenti, wet nurses who had somehow managed to take their own, previously abandoned infants home while being on the foundling home’s payroll were accused of fraud and embezzlement. For fear of setting a bad example, visual representations of Miriam, mother of Moses, employed by the Pharaoh’s daughter as his wet nurse, were correspondingly rare. The paradoxical situation that foundling homes would rather pay for mothers to abandon their infants to be available for wet-nursing than

was judged to be for the maintenance of Renaissance patriarchal family structures. Access to poor women’s milk was a sign of power and wealth and indicated the privilege to generate as many heirs as upper-class ladies could bear. This happened

The prescriptive literature on women and marriage often ran into a double bind when it came to theorizing maternity. On the one hand, loyalty to ancient Roman authors demanded praise for lactating mothers;; on the other hand, nursing was a sign of low social status and thus to be avoided whenever possible. In Spain, Portugal, and England, the colonial context contributed to racializing the polemics against wet nurses, be they indigenous, black, or Irish.65portrayal of wet nurses in Renaissance hospital art suggests that the societal value of their labor of care was generally acknowledged, even though Diana Bullen Presciutti points to the political agenda of such institutional representations of wet nurses as allegories of abundance in the context of early modern state-building processes and welfare policies.66 Other art historians have studied allegories of charity, poverty, and almsgiving in the visual arts, but often without paying systematic attention to the gendered aspects of these representations.67 This is all the more astounding as breastfeeding women and women with small children in

64 Ibid., 31.65 Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World

Slavery (Philadelphia, 2004), 27–31;; Bianca Premo, Children of the Father King: Youth, Authority, and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima (Chapel Hill, 2005);; Megan Vaughan, Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius (Durham, 2005).

66 Diana Bullen Presciutti, “Carità e potere: Representing the Medici Grand Dukes as ‘Fathers of the Innocenti’,” Renaissance Studies, 24, 2 (2010): 234–59.

67 See, among others, Thomas Nichols, “Secular Charity, Sacred Poverty: Picturing the Poor in Renaissance Venice,” Art History, 30, 2 (2007): 139–69;; Bernard Aikema, “L’immagine della carità veneziana,” in Bernard Aikema and Dulcia Meijers, eds, Nel regno dei poveri: Arte e storia dei grandi ospedali veneziani in età moderna 1474–1797 (Venice, 1989), 71–98. A notable exception: Nicholas Eckstein, “The Widow’s Might: Women’s Identity and Devotion in the Brancacci Chapel,” Oxford Art Journal, 28, 1 (2005): 99–118.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Introduction 13

art in their interlocking activities of giving as receiving.68In addition, lactating polymasts and other images of female fertility in

Renaissance French art have recently been studied as expressions of largesse and imperial excess.69 Likewise, the iconography of the so-called Roman Charity, which illustrates Valerius Maximus’ anecdote about a daughter who breastfeeds her starving father in prison, has started to attract the attention of art historians and other scholars.70 Given the bewildering complexity and abundance of lactation imagery in early modern art, however, more research needs to be done. Among the many scenes of queer breastfeeding in early modern art that on occasion stretch our comfort levels and that so far have remained understudied, are Ribera’s gender-bending portrayal of The Bearded Lady (1631), Juno’s species-crossing lactation in Tintoretto’s The Creation of the Milky Way (1575), Guido Romano’s drawing of a many-breasted lactating mermaid, and Lucas Cranach’s nude Charities.71 Even the breastfeeding allegory in Giorgione’s Tempest (1506–1508)—hardly an understudied painting—is still awaiting feminist analysis.

Our Contributions

The present collection tries to address some of these lacunae by investigating the allegorical as well as narrative components of breastfeeding imagery in Ghirlandaio, Tintoretto, Poussin, di Bartolo, and Rubens. Other contributions examine the domestic organization, affective repercussions, and occasional criminalization of wet-nursing as a complex social practice;; analyze the tensions and contradictions surrounding commercial nursing in humanist discourse as well as popular culture;; investigate the physiology of milk-production and accompanying body images

68 Sperling, “Allegories of Charity.”69 Rebecca Zorach, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French

Renaissance (Chicago, 2005).70 Renato Raffaelli, Roberto M. Danese, and Settimio Lanciotti, eds, Pietas e

(Urbino, 1997);; Roberto M. Danese, ed., , conference proceedings Urbino, 28–29 April 1998 (Urbino, 2000);; Jutta Sperling, “Las Casas and His Amerindian Nurse: Tropes of Lactation in the French Colonial Imaginary (ca. 1770–1810),” Gender & History,

Renaissance and Baroque Art,” in Allison Levy, ed., Sex Acts: Practice, Performance, Perversion and Punishment in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 2010), 165–80.

71 On Lukas Cranach’s representations of Charity, see D. Koepplin, “Cranach’s Paintings of Charity”;; on Ribera’s The Bearded Lady, see Sherry Velasco, Male Delivery: Reproduction, Effeminacy, and Pregnant Men in Early Modern Spain (Nashville, 2006), 101–2;; Susanne Thiemann, “Sex trouble: Die bärtige Frau bei José de Ribera, Luis Vélez de Guevara und Huarte de San Juan,” in Judith Klinger and Susanne Thiemann, eds, Geschlechtervariationen. Gender-Konzepte im Übergang zur Neuzeit, Potsdamer Studien zur Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung, N.F. 1 (Potsdam, 2006), 47–82.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

14

in early modern medical discourse;; discuss the patriarchal make-up of Islamic conceptions of milk kinship;; and demonstrate the resilience and afterlife of the Madonna Lactans in Protestant English plague literature. Interesting overlaps begin to emerge between ancient Greek concepts of generation and Islamic ideas about milk kinship;; Spanish ballads about “terrible” wet nurses and the prosecution of alleged wet nurses engaged in the sale and disposal of unwanted babies;; the representation of breastfeeding Charities in Poussin’s art and contemporary English plague literature. The variety of topics and methods singles out Medieval and Renaissance Lactations as a collection of interdisciplinary scholarship on the practices, discourses, and images surrounding milk-exchange. It is meant to

72

Mohammed Hocine Benkheira’s article “‘‘The Milk of the Male’: Kinship, Maternity, and Breastfeeding in Medieval Islam” sets the stage for this volume, as it not only addresses the ubiquity of commercial and non-commercial forms of wet-nursing in the medieval Mediterranean but also investigates early Islamic concepts of matrilineal kinship bonds deriving from milk-exchange and their subsequent patrilineal transformations. Most likely due to the reception of Aristotelian medical theories of generation, medieval Islamic legal scholars invented the notion of laban al-fahl [the milk of the male] in order to address the lack of the position of

declared that in addition to “blood” relatives, one’s nurses and milk-sisters were unmarriageable. Later legal scholars complicated the web of incest prohibitions by declaring the wet nurse’s husband to be the sole author not only of her pregnancy but also of her milk, in line with Aristotle’s and ancient Greek medical writers’ notions of paternal causality in the process of generation. As a consequence, all agnatic relatives of the suckling child’s “milk-father” would be prohibited to him or her in marriage, in addition to any other foster children the wet nurse might have had. Investigating the different legal schools’ approaches to the problem of

Benkheira argues that such mapping of patrilinearity onto relations of milk-sharing expresses a departure from Mohammed’s earlier acknowledgment of nursing women’s distinct and independent contribution to the process of family formation. His analysis of later medieval legal casuistry that proliferated as a result of such

milk from a virgin, animal, or man might also constitute incest prohibitions—questions that, likewise, arose with the study of ancient Greek medicine.The “milk of the male” thus appeared in two varieties in Islamic legal

Islamic incest prohibitions and legal kinship;; and as an empirical observation of actually occurring “wonders” in nature. It is this second topic that Barbara Orland

72 It is distinct from both Margaret Miles and Marilyn Yalom’s recent work in that it places breastfeeding relationships at the center of analysis. Margaret Miles, A Complex Delight: The Secularization of the Breast, 1350–1750 (Berkeley, 2008);; Marilyn Yalom, A History of the Breast (New York, 1997).


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Introduction 15

investigates in her contribution “Why Could Early Modern Men Lactate? Gender Identity and Metabolic Narrations in Humoral Medicine.” Framing her article

mutations,” and the “cacophonous ringing of changes” that in his view occurred in the early modern body, leading to a fuzzy and dynamic understanding of anatomical sex difference in Galenic medicine, Orland gives a precise analysis of contemporary medical thought on the issue of male and female lactation, its causes, and phenomenology. Rather than arguing that male lactation was a result of what Laqueur termed the “one-sex body” with its quantitative model of gender difference based on heat, Orland demonstrates that seventeenth-century authors developed rather differentiated metabolic theories concerning lactation that tried to account for both the normative (maternal) and exceptional (male, virginal)

each other, nor were these conversion processes reversible. Quoting Hippocratic theories, Helkiah Crooke (1576–1648), for example, wrote that human milk either derives from the conversion of menstrual blood, or from the leakage of nutritive substances during digestion into the omentum and from there into a woman’s—or man’s—breasts. This latter theory gained greater weight after Gaspare Aselli’s (1581–1626) discovery of the milk veins originating in the intestines, William Harvey’s (1578–1657) discovery of the circulation of blood, and James Keill’s

idea that menstrual blood was concocted into milk was thus gradually abandoned. As a result, male lactation could be explained without resorting to theories of “effeminacy” and abjection, even though a growing body of empirical evidence on the topic of male menstruation was also available.Galen’s pronouncement that sexual intercourse would spoil the milk, and that

wet nurses ought to commit to sexual abstinence, helped Christiane Klapisch-Zuber a few decades ago to explain why, in Renaissance Florence, the wet-nursing business was entirely in male hands. According to her records, child-care contracts were signed by upper-class fathers and wet nurses’ husbands;; pregnant wet nurses

of having continued sexual access to their wives, while the husbands of wet nurses had to abstain from sex and reproduction in return for money. In contemporary Spain, the domestic repercussions and affective economy surrounding wet-nursing may have been different. In her article “The Mother and the Dida [Nanny]: Female Employers and Wet Nurses in Fourteenth-Century Barcelona,” Rebecca Winer revises and expands our understanding of the gendered organization of wet-nursing through her analysis of wet-nursing contracts in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Perpignan and Barcelona. These notarial documents, often drawn up by the mothers and wet nurses themselves, contain ample evidence of enduring relationships and affective bonds between mothers, wet nurses, and their nurslings. In two-thirds of the 75 contracts that survive from 1295 to 1380,

female relatives signed roughly half of all receipts of actual salary payments to wet nurses. Winer’s records also suggest that after 1381, wet-nursing relations


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

16

changed considerably due to a greater use of enslaved women. One of the reasons for Aragonese women’s greater participation in hiring caretakers for their infants compared to Florentine women may have been, according to Winer, their more generous property rights and extended legal status.73A similar argument can perhaps be made for early modern Rome, where the

expropriation of daughters, wives, and widows due to dowry exchange was not carried to such extremes as it was in Renaissance Florence.74 In her contribution “Peasants at the Palace: Wet Nurses and Aristocratic Mothers in Early Modern Rome,” Caroline Castiglione investigates upper-class mothering in the context of domestic wet-nursing. Analyzing epistolary exchanges of seventeenth-century Roman aristocratic women, Castiglione argues that the choice of a good wet nurse and her close supervision constituted important aspects of early modern mothering, which did not impede the forging of affective bonds between mothers and their children. On the contrary, the triadic relationships among infants, their mothers, and their nurses provided ample opportunity to establish close personal ties characterized by mutual care and respect, as well as occasional tensions. As the correspondence between Eleonora Boncompagni Borghese (1642–95) and her sister-in-law Ippolita Ludovisi Boncompagni (1663–1733) reveals, mothers and their relatives would worry about minute details of infant care, giving precise instructions to their wet nurses about how to swaddle, feed, and administer medicines to their nurslings. It also shows how suspicious upper-class mothers were of physicians on the one hand, who might not know how to treat infants, and of their “peasant” wet nurses on the other, who might have too many ideas of their own and threaten to overstep class boundaries, given the intimacy of their relations to both nurslings and their mothers.Debra G. Blumenthal reveals a similar dynamic between wet nurses and their

female employers in her article “‘‘With My Daughter’s Milk’: Wet Nurses and the Rhetoric of Lactation in Valencian Court Records.” Analyzing 53 age-of-majority hearings from a random sample of court documents (1435–1511), Blumenthal is able to show the complex, kinship-like relationships that would often develop between wet nurses, their nurslings, and their relatives. While it is interesting in and of itself that wet nurses should be the ones that judges relied on in estimating a young person’s age—presumably for purposes of inheritance—the evidence also suggests that “milk kinship” was established in quite a few instances, despite the wet nurses’ prohibitions against nursing their own children. Often, neighbors would voluntarily serve as enconadoras, that is, women who would give newborn

century Tuscany.

73 Rebecca Winer, Women, Wealth, and Community in Perpignan, ca. 1250–1300: Christians, Jews, and Enslaved Muslims in a Medieval Mediterranean Town (Aldershot, 2006).

74 Renata Ago, “Oltre la dote: i beni femminili,” in Angela Groppi, ed., Il lavoro delle donne (Bari, 1996), 164–82.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Introduction 17

The many dangers and anxieties surrounding wet-nursing are the focus of Emilie L. Bergmann’s article “Popular Balladry and the Terrible Wet Nurse: La nodriza del rey.” Investigating early modern printed as well as nineteenth- and twentieth-century oral versions of this medieval lullaby, Bergmann emphasizes the deep-seated fears it expresses about negligent wet nurses. All of the lyrics, which exist in Spanish, Portuguese, Moroccan, Jewish, and French sources, talk of the infant’s death by burning or drowning. In some versions, the nurse commits suicide out of remorse;; in others, she is both mother and sister to the infant, victim of her father’s incestuous desires. In Italy, by contrast, wet nurses appear in carnival songs that praise the Rabelaisian abundance of their breast-milk. The women themselves are not endowed with agency, nor do they seem to pose a threat. Bergmann approaches those tragic (Iberian) as well as carnivalesque (Italian) lyrics by pointing to Melanie Klein’s theory of the “good” and “bad” breast that can be either offered or refused, or experienced as split from the woman’s body, respectively. Such different portrayal of wet nurses resonates with Klapisch-Zuber’s and Winer’s research on the different organization of milk-sharing in Italy and Iberia. Perhaps those Spanish, Portuguese, and French ballads obsessing on

mothers’ greater involvement in the milk-business?Representations of wet nurses are at the center of Diana Bullen Presciutti’s

article as well, this time in the arts. “Picturing Institutional Wet-Nursing in Medicean Siena” examines the politics and resulting ambiguities in the portrayal of institutional wet nurses in Siena’s hospital La Scala. These extra-ordinary depictions are part of the wall decoration of the hospital’s main ward (Pellegrinaio), which was executed in two phases. In the 1440s, Domenico di Bartolo painted six frescoes depicting the hospital’s many charitable activities, among others: The Care and Marriage of Foundlings. On the left side of this fresco, abandoned infants are shown in the care of wet nurses, who breastfeed, carry, and cuddle them;; on the right side, adolescent foundling girls are married off with a dowry;; at the center, a man dressed in black hands a swaddled infant, presumably a new foundling, to a ward attendant. As the author points out, lots of naturalistic detail embellishes this fresco, whose main intention was to show the resources of the hospital and the abundant good care it took of its wards. In the 1570s, two additional frescoes were added to the existing cycle: the Assignment and Payment of Wet Nurses, and the Distribution of Grain. This time, Rector Saracini, loyal supporter of Francesco de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, whose predecessor incorporated Siena into Florentine territory after the city’s defeat by Imperial forces in 1555, seems to have commissioned the art works. Bullen Presciutti’s careful analysis of the visual language of these frescoes reveals how the more generic, allegorizing, and somewhat sterile depiction of wet nurses points to the abstract and distant organization of charity by a colonizing power, in obvious contrast to the concrete detail and snapshot-like quality of di Bartolo’s earlier images that celebrated La Scala’s local organization.Rebecca Totaro continues the study of “charity,” and the sprawling,

polymorphous embodiments thereof, in her article “Mother London and the


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

18

Madonna Lactans in England’s Plague Epic.” Totaro argues that in seventeenth-century English plague poems, metaphors of lactation convey a host of different meanings, ranging from the devastation, horror, and breakdown of civilization as a result of the plague, to the nurture, relief, and charity that “mother” London offers to its victims. In the former instance, a child’s attempt to breastfeed from its dead

latter, references to the iconography of the Madonna Lactans and the embodiment of “charity” as a breastfeeding woman restore the hope for comfort, abundance, and protection. In William Muggins’s brief plague epic (1603), in particular, the city

and transforming the cultural memory of centuries of veneration for the Virgin Mary and the doctrine of charitable works, as well as generations of devotion to Queen Elizabeth I, into the secularized maternal image of England’s capital city and its new Protestant work ethic. Totaro’s article emphasizes the evocation and simultaneous displacement of mothering as an ongoing process that underlies the allegorization of charity as a breastfeeding woman.The horror image of a child nursing from its dead mother, and the many

permutations of “charity,” loom large in Alexandra Catherine Woolley’s article as well. Her “Nicolas Poussin’s Allegories of Charity in The Plague at Ashdod and The Fall of the Manna Art” examines Poussin’s classicizing, subversive, and possibly anti-Catholic

Sébastien Bourdon, and Charles Le Brun. The author emphasizes how the corpse of a lactating mother and the mother-daughter breastfeeding scene inspired by Valerius Maximus (1st century CE) in Poussin’s two historical paintings The Plague at Ashdod (1630) and The Fall of the Manna (1637–39) were meant to innovate and possibly criticize both the normative treatment of “Charity” in Cesare Ripa’s emblem book and the post-tridentine Church’s control of central religious imagery. Especially the later director of the Académie Royale, Charles Le Brun, devoted close attention to Poussin’s iconographical innovations. What emerges in conjunction with Totaro’s article is the possibility that Poussin’s rendering of the epidemic that God visited on the Philistines (I Samuel 5:5–7)

Britain’s Remembrancer (1628): “Sometimes he [death] took the mother’s life away, and left the little babe, to ley and play with her cold paps.”75A further variation on the theme of contradictory constellations in the rhetorics

and imagery of breastfeeding is Julia L. Hairston’s article. In her chapter “The Economics of Milk and Blood in Alberti’s Libri della famiglia: Maternal versus Wet-Nursing,” she investigates the unique rhetorical structure of Leon Battista Alberti’s and Francesco Barbaro’s arguments concerning breastfeeding. Tracing the ancient and medieval tradition of the debate on commercialized child care, Hairston points to the argumentative dilemma that most authors encountered in dis-recommending wet-nursing. On the one hand, maternal breastfeeding was

75 See Rebecca Totaro’s contribution in the present volume.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Introduction 19

thought to secure greater emotional attachment between mothers and their children and establish female domesticity, but on the other hand, upper-class reproductive behavior required women to maximize fertility and forgo the contraceptive effects of prolonged breastfeeding. Ancient, medieval, and Renaissance writers on breastfeeding express such mutually exclusive demands of patriarchal reproduction in the rhetorical form of what Hairston calls a “reverse occultatio.” Occultatio has

professes to remain silent about;; Hairston shows how treatises on breastfeeding, in particular, use the inverted form of this argumentative method. Starting out by recommending exclusive maternal nursing (A), Alberti, Barbaro, and other writers soon deviate from this maxim and explain how to choose a good wet nurse if the mother is unable or unwilling to nurse (B)—not without sometimes concluding that maternal nursing is preferable after all (A). Again, what emerges is the displacement of mothering expressed as breastfeeding and the instant metonymic transfer of this trope onto “others.”Patricia Simons returns to the topic of Renaissance depictions of wet nurses in her

article “The Social and Religious Context of Iconographic Oddity: Breastfeeding in Ghirlandaio’s Birth of the Baptist.” Investigating Domenico Ghirlandaio’s extraordinary representation of infant John in the act of suckling from a wet nurse, Simons carefully traces the many references of the scene to Dominican theology, the Golden Legend (ca. 1260), apocryphal laude on the Life of the Virgin, the Florentine civic ideal of republican abundance, and the commissioning family’s desire for religiously enhanced self-representation. In her reading, the two wet

Tornaquinci’s armorial colors gold and green, they are integrated into the overall portrayal of patrilineal reproduction that the fresco cycle emphasizes, replete with portrayals of members of the family;; but they also foreshadow, perhaps, the role of charity in the life of Christ’s “predecessor,” as John the Baptist was frequently called in Renaissance religious discourse. In addition, they are depicted as “ideal, young, clean, and respectable” as Leon Battista Alberti and Francesco Barbaro would have wished them to be. In contrast to humanists’ insistence on maternal breastfeeding as a guarantee of female domesticity, however, both of Ghirlandaio’s nativity scenes in Santa Maria Novella, the Birth of John the Baptist and the Birth of the Virgin Mary, show mothering to be an eminently public and collective female effort. Calling the breastfeeding scene an “iconographic oddity,” Simons points to the unlikely integration of a “mundane, indecorous, and almost irreligious element” into a fresco of both major religious and civic relevance.Another, perhaps even more perplexing, iconographic oddity emerges in

Tintoretto’s rendering of the scene. In her contribution “Wet Nurses, Midwives, and the Virgin Mary in Tintoretto’s Birth of Saint John the Baptist (1563),” Jutta Gisela Sperling investigates Tintoretto’s depiction of the nativity scene, which the nuns of San Zaccaria commissioned for their altar of Sant’ Atanasio. It shows the Virgin Mary not only in her apocryphal role as Elizabeth’s midwife but also as John’s “wet-nursing assistant,” a scene Tintoretto had already painted a decade


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

20

earlier on a grander scale.76 In both versions of the scene, the Virgin Mary cradles the newly born infant and holds him up to the breast of his wet nurse in an unlikely posture. Not quite able to breastfeed herself—Mary was only six months pregnant at the time—the composition nonetheless alludes to the special bond and intimacy that connected John and Christ via their mothers’ miraculous conceptions, many times foretold. Sperling argues that Tintoretto’s frequent depiction of women in reproductive capacities as narrative elements and allegories of charity was inspired by the concomitant representation of women in Byzantine apocryphal literature and its later medieval derivatives. She also points out that the nuns of

their own Byzantine heritage against the Counter-Reformation church of Rome.Last but not least, J. Vanessa Lyon’s contribution “Full of Grace: Lactation,

Expression, and ‘Colorito’ Painting in Some Early Works by Rubens” concludes the volume with a further investigation into seventeenth-century permutations of “charitable” lactation imagery. Analyzing Rubens’s extraordinary depictions of non-maternal nursing in his Roman Charity (1610), Juno and Argus (ca. 1611), and Saint Augustine Between Christ and the Virgin Mary (ca. 1615), Lyon shows how this unlikely triad is conceptually united by the artist’s view on breastfeeding as virtuous and creative. Especially Juno and Argus, Rubens’s idiosyncratic interpretation of Ovid’s tale of the peacock’s “painted” eyes, presents itself as a most

the rainbow, as the mother of color itself. In this curious depiction of the Ovidian personages Juno, Iris, Argus, and possibly Aurora, the formerly male dominion over creation by means of invention seems at least momentarily transposed to a vividly female-dominated realm where Mother Nature and her sovereign breast provide the sources of a naturalistically sensual and richly chromatic pictorial art.Lyon’s investigation of Rubens’s paintings thus concludes a volume devoted

to the investigation of discursive practices surrounding—mostly non-maternal—breastfeeding in medieval and early modern Europe and wider Mediterranean. While more research needs to be done, a few preliminary conclusions can be drawn: in the visual arts, breastfeeding images tended to assume a decidedly allegorical—and thus political and densely metaphorical—character;; in medical

fuzziness of gender boundaries;; archival documents surrounding wet-nursing practices give evidence of complex relationships among nurses, nurslings, and their families that seemed to threaten the patriarchal set-up of legitimate descent;; in humanist and literary discourse as well as oral traditions, those tensions were

“milk kinship” by mapping it onto an agnatic theory of descent. Most importantly, our contributions make the case for the systematic study of “images, rhetorics, and

insights into the erotics and politics of early modern mothering.

76 This painting of the Birth of Saint John the Baptist is today at the Hermitage, Saint Petersburg.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Chapter 1 “The Milk of the Male”:

Kinship, Maternity and Breastfeeding in Medieval Islam1

Mohammed Hocine Benkheira

The doctrine of breastfeeding and the concept of kinship that derives from it constitute one of the most original maxims in Islamic law. Islam is the only Mediterranean culture in which milk kinship takes such an extended form.2 According to religious families and the different schools of law, milk kinship is constructed in exact symmetry to consanguineous kinship. This means that the same genealogical positions can be found on either side: there are milk mothers as well as mothers through blood ties, milk sisters, and consanguine sisters, and, most importantly, milk fathers, milk cousins, and so on. This extension of milk kinship is the consequence of two medieval innovations: First, the analogy of birth and breastfeeding as constitutive of kinship, and second, the idea that breast

the premise of the legal theory of laban al-fahl [the milk of the male] as it was developed in the early Middle Ages.3while referring to incest prohibitions due to milk kinship, does not mention the concept of laban al-fahl, which most likely developed among the jurists of the early second/eighth century. I also present in broader detail the extended Islamic

1 Arabic transliteration of Arab names and removed references to primary sources. If the reader wishes to know more, I invite them to read my other publications (see note 3) in which the primary sources are detailed.

2 For a comparative anthropology on breastfeeding, see the recent works of Peter Parkes, mainly “Fosterage, kinship and legend: When milk was thicker than blood?” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 46 (2004): 587–615. As for the case of southeastern Europe, see, by the same author, “Milk kinship in Southeast Europe: Alternative social structures and foster relations in the Caucasus and the Balkans,” Social Anthropology, 9, 3 (2004): 341–58.

3 Benkheira, “Donner le sein c’est comme donner le jour,” Studia Islamica, 92 (2001): 5–52;; ainsi que Mohammed Hocine Benkheira, Avner Giladi, Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen and Jacqueline Sublet, La famille en islam (Paris, forthcoming 2013). For extra-legal data, see Avner Giladi, Infants, parents and wet nurses (Leyden, 1999). Gertrud Stern, Marriage in Early Islam (London, 1939) can also be used as a reference, but with caution.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

22

theory of milk kinship and show how different legal scholars mapped patrilineal concepts of consanguinity onto an earlier, all-female notion of milk kinship.4

The Qur’ân: A Restricted Concept

his life, and again in verse 4, 23, which contains the list of prohibited women and

is, in the same order as in the verse, the list of prohibited women, which shows that

and by alliance.

I. Women prohibited by birth: Your mothers. Your daughters. Your sisters. Your paternal aunts. Your maternal aunts. Your brother’s daughters. Your sister’s daughters.

imagines all those men’s mothers individually. Yet, the exegesis drew a different conclusion: in the eyes of later commentators, the plural terms of “mothers” and

one’s birth mother as also one’s grand-mother and all her predecessors, just as the term “daughter” includes one’s grand-daughters and great grand-daughters. Then

sisters and half-sisters;; then the aunts, a term which can also include great-aunts;;

II. Women prohibited as a result of breastfeeding: Your nurses (literally “your mothers that gave you the breast”). Your sisters through breastfeeding.

This is the fragment that directly concerns us: relatives through breastfeeding are limited to one’s nurse and milk sister. Nurses are designated by the expression

breastfeeding. The term “sister” is more ambiguous, by contrast. Does it refer only

4 (or


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

“The Milk of the Male” 23

to the nurse’s birth-daughters? Or does it refer to all girls to whom she gave the breast? In the latter case, does it refer to all of the nurse’s foster daughters or only to those who were breastfed during the same period as Ego [the breastfeeding child]?

“aunts through breastfeeding,” or even “nieces through breastfeeding.” If the

breastfeeding and by birth), the mention of mothers would have been followed by the mention of daughters, while sisters would have been added in the third

because such a notion did not belong to the cultural and historical context of its time. Furthermore, as it does not condition the sister’s status, we can assume that all of the nurse’s daughters, whether by milk or blood, were sisters to all the boys she breastfed.

III. Women prohibited as a result of alliance: The mothers of your wives.

The wives of your sons, born from your loins.5

Looking more closely at the prohibition of the wives of the father (4, 22), we can observe that this third category only concerns relatives by birth, that is, ascendants and descendants of the wife, as well as the wives of ascendants and descendants. These two cases are instructive by way of comparison. While verse 4, 22 refers to “the daughters of your wives,” there is no mention of “the daughters fed by your wives’ milk.” Also, it lists “your sons born from your loins,” a category normally used to distinguish a father’s natural from his adopted children, so why does is not refer to “your sons by breastfeeding?” This reading of verse 4, 22, which stresses the absence of milk relatives,

corresponds roughly to the argumentation of those legal scholars who objected to the theory of laban al-fahl. Moreover, we cannot accept the thesis developed

to a notion of milk kinship that is strictly analogous to consanguineous kinship.

4, 23 and 4, 22. The latter verse contains the impediment to marry one’s father’s wife, either after his death or her separation from the father. The controversial

of Arab customs.6 By contrast, the incest taboos deriving from milk kinship in verse 4, 23 are formulated without any polemic. This probably means that they did not constitute a novelty in central Arabia. We must thus conclude that the

5 “The wives of your fathers” must be added to this list (4, 22) for it to be complete.6 Verse 4, 22 is controversial because it refers to the custom of marrying one’s father’s

wife after his death, which leads us to believe that this was a concrete practice.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

24

did not adopt the same polemical tone in prohibiting marriage with one’s father’s

be formulated very clearly. Given the emergence of a heated debate surrounding

rhetoric concerning the notions it aimed to abolish, it would not have failed to carry a trace of this debate. Hence, we can conclude that the absence of such a

of milk kinship in Arabia during the seventh century CE but that it was content to endorse contemporary notions. It should be noted that the spontaneous concept of milk kinship, expressed by

the faithful in cases they submitted to the Muftis—including today’s—is very often

After this daughter, she had two other daughters. Does the law allow me to marry one of these two [later] daughters or is it forbidden for me to marry [all] three girls?”7 The question relies on the premise that for marriage to be forbidden, there must have been co-lactation, that is, both babies would have had to be breastfed by the same wet nurse during the same period of time, and consequently with the same milk. This means that the doctrine of laban al-fahl is not unambiguous and constitutes a novelty.

of “milk daughters.” The concept of the “milk father” is, likewise, unknown to laban al-fahl is

mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts, and nieces, the second case only lists nurses and their daughters as sisters of the breastfed child. Hence we can suggest that

without being able to determine whether this included her offspring by blood as well as by milk.8

milk kinship was unambiguous in the eyes of those to whom it was addressed. If we accept these premises, we can suggest that the classical Islamic doctrine on milk kinship was established at a later date, after the emergence of the so-called

Ulemas [Islamic legal scholars]. While imposing a new theory, they were forced

7 Hasanayn Muhammad Makhlûf, Fatâwâ shar’iyya (2 vols, Cairo, 1965), vol. 2, 65. 8 We know that Muhammad himself had milk brothers and a milk sister. These

siblings were the consanguineous children of his wet nurses.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


9

maternal and the second one paternal.

via the “maternal channel” was abandoned by the Ulemas, who substituted it with a theory based on bilinearity, which nonetheless privileged the paternal line.

establish bilinearity but, further, emphasizes the supremacy of the masculine over the feminine. Even though breast milk is secreted from the female body, the male is viewed as the primary cause of its production, and it is for this reason that he is related to the nursling. Since the late second/eighth century, at the beginning of the Abbasid Dynasty, this revolution was essentially completed. The ancient concept was abolished, and the new one had spread as the “true” doctrine. The collections

about to play an important part in this process.10 They retained nothing or nearly

11 It would

12

The Analogy between Childbirth and Breastfeeding

This principle, attributed to the prophet Muhammad himself but formulated in the Sunna, states that all unions that are prohibited due to the consequence of birth—that is, through consanguinity—are also prohibited due to breastfeeding. It follows that milk kinship was rigorously modeled after the concept of blood kinship. For this reason it was logical to assert the father’s role in the process of lactation, and to recognize paternal lineage within milk kinship as equivalent

9 The patriarchal perspective is based exclusively on the prophetic tradition, which constitutes the Sunna and is the object of numerous controversies. As it is materially distinct

order to secure it a place in the then emerging institutional system of Islam.10 The prophetic tradition was established in the third/ninth century. This is the century

that saw the great Sunni compilations, some of which have only later been adopted into the

(d. 273/887), Ibn Khuzayma (d. 311/923). A similar process took place for Twelver Shi’ism

11 Harawî, Al-nâsikh wa-l-mansûkh (Riad, 1997).12 Kitâb al-nâsikh wa-l-mansûkh (Beirut, 1996), 98. Arab kinship before

Islam is a controversial topic.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

26

debate. If the link between the theory of laban al-fahl and the analogy between childbirth and breastfeeding seems obvious, related casuistry elements based on the same analogy do not always offer the same clarity. In this contribution, we will systematically lay out the principal themes of classical casuistry that are directly related to this analogy. Jurists were divided on the subject of laban al-fahl, even though they never questioned the analogy of childbirth and breastfeeding.Milk kinship is thus perfectly analogous to consanguineous kinship. Unions

that are prohibited because of consanguinity are also prohibited because of breastfeeding—that is, the same genealogical positions can be found on both sides.13 The family tree of one’s milk relatives is modeled on that of one’s birth parents. This being the case, we have to suppose that there is milk kinship only insofar as it imitates primary kinship—that of consanguinity. This translates on the level of marital prohibitions into the prohibition of all women who hold analogous genealogical positions with respect to both milk and blood ties. It is forbidden to

23), but also one’s milk daughter, that is, the girl that has been breastfed by one’s wife, or by the wife of any of one’s “blood” sons. Also, marrying one’s milk niece, that is, the girl breastfed by one’s sister or by one’s brother’s wife, is prohibited. Just like prohibitions due to consanguinity, prohibitions due to breastfeeding are symmetrical;; the rules apply to both men and women.14 Very early on, jurists debated the method of superimposing relations due

to consanguinity onto those due to breastfeeding. If all children breastfed by a woman at a given time become related as brothers and sisters, and any union between them is incestuous, what is their relation to the nurse’s birth children conceived by her husband or to the children she breastfed during another lactation period? There are a variety of answers to this question. Some jurists maintain that children conceived by the nurse and her partner, and all other children breastfed by her during her marriage to the same man, are siblings of Ego. Ego cannot marry any of them, nor can they marry each other. They constitute a phratry [a kinship group that does not intermarry]. The Sunnis state that all of the nurse’s children by birth and by milk are siblings of Ego, even those conceived or nursed during

are Ego’s siblings, excluding her milk children by other husbands. Finally, the

women, whether by blood or by milk, are siblings of Ego. For the Sunnis, all of a couple’s children, by milk or by blood, are siblings to their family members. They all constitute a phratry: some share father and mother, others only mother or father. For the Sunnis, half-siblingship applies whether or not milk kinship is constituted through the father’s or the mother’s side, as it generally applies to

13 The only obligations that arise from milk kinship are matrimonial impediments.14 On this notion of matrimonial impediments, see Mohammed Hocine Benkheira,

“Alliance, asymétrie et différence des sexes,” Islamic Law and Society, 13, 2 (2007): 191–7.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


constituted only through the father’s side—there is no maternal lineage when it

the strict agnatic interpretation that Imamate jurists developed on the principle of the “milk of the male.” In their view, the milk of the wet nurse originates from her husband as her real author, which is why only the milk children of the latter, whatever marital bed they come from, are half-siblings to each other, as they are also half-siblings to his blood children. Consequently, the children that a wet nurse fed with another man’s milk are strangers to those of her current husband. In this way, children who have the same milk mother but not the same milk father cannot

and milk kinship.

schools agree that consanguinity is spread by both women and men—meaning: the same incest prohibitions can be found on the mother’s and on the father’s side—

transmitted by the wet nurse’s husband, the milk father, which means that a man and a woman who have the same milk mother but not the same milk father are not siblings and can therefore get married. In the eyes of Sunni jurists, such a union is incestuous.Let us consider the problem in reverse: the birth parents of Ego. If the

descendants of Ego’s wet nurse are prohibited to him, are they also prohibited to his birth parents? The Sunnis’ solution is that as long as his birth parents have not had any physical relationship with Ego’s milk parents, they are held by no obligation, and no marital obstacle can be invoked against them. Consequently, a man can marry his child’s wet nurse, just as he can marry any of his child’s milk relatives. Thus, if from the perspective of milk relations, milk kinship and blood kinship concur and merge up to a certain point, they remain strictly parallel

their jurists interpreted the analogy between blood and milk relatives in a broader sense. If the wet nurse’s birth daughters are Ego’s siblings, the father of the latter cannot marry any of them, because analogically, they occupy the same kinship position as Ego, his own child. If he married one of them, it would be as if he were marrying his own daughter.15The analogy between childbirth and breastfeeding implies that blood parents

are the cause of the child’s birth, and milk parents are the cause of the child’s nourishment. In other words, as blood parents are at the origin of the physical

because their milk allows him to develop physically. What establishes the blood relationship is that during its life in the womb, the fetus is fed by the maternal body: the child’s body is the fruit of maternal nourishment. Breastfeeding is the

15 Sharâ’i’ al-islâm (Beirut, 1986), part 2, 14.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

28

continuation of this process after delivery. Lactation and the milk let-down have no other end than to feed the baby. Likewise, when the nurse breastfeeds another woman’s birth child, she intervenes in the growth process of the infant’s body. That is why two women occupy the position of the mother. The analogy between childbirth and breastfeeding rests on the analogous relationships between the fetus and the maternal body and on those between the nursling and his wet nurse.In his biography of Muhammad, Montgomery Watt writes: “The retention—

and indeed extension—of the principle that milk-relationship is on the same level as blood-relationship may be regarded as a concession to matrilineal groups.”16 The process we have described is exactly the opposite of that implied by the great British Islamicist. Without following the questionable notions of “matriarchy” and “patriarchy,” it should be emphasized that milk kinship was revised because

cannot therefore speak of a “concession” to matrilineal groups by later legal scholars, on the contrary. It seems more accurate to view the jurists’ contribution

in the transmission of kinship through milk? The doctrine of the legal effects of breastfeeding has resulted in a complex and detailed casuistry, of which we give a summary hereafter.

a wet-nursing couple and a child? Several solutions have been proposed and

its purpose: to feed the child. The solutions adopted by different law schools are

the child and its nurse.17

is ipso facto.18 Finally, the Shi’î Twelver requires 15 feeds, or lactation during a whole night and a full day, if one is unable to determine the exact number of feeds taken. However, the Twelver’s true originality lies in an additional condition: the same nurse must give the breast milk continuously and without interruptions. It

these elements to the Twelver doctrine.19 The feedings must be uninterrupted and

16 Montgomery Watt, Muhammad at Medina (Oxford, 1956), 281. 17 Sarakhsî, Mabsût (30 vols, Beirut, ’1986), vol. 5, 134;; Sahnûn, Mudawwana (6 vols

Cairo, n.d.), Da’â’im al-islâm (2 vols, Cairo, ’1963), vol. 2, 238–9.

18 Umm (5 vols, , n. d.), Mughnî (14 vols, Cairo, 1986–90), vol. 11, 310–311.

19 Abû Ja’far Tûsî, Mabsût (8 vols, Beirut, 1992), vol. 5, 292.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


kinship. If a child has two nurses, both of whom are married to the same man, and

his milk mother;; their husband, however, becomes his milk father as he participated in both lactations. For the Sunnis, one woman’s milk can never supplant that of

feeds by a single nurse is reached, breastfeeding by another nurse cancels a prior relation. In other words, they require perfect integrity of the milk so that there can be a “community of substance” that creates kinship.20 While the Sunnis accept the mix of milks and therefore the transmission of particular identities, the Twelver perceive this mix as antithetical to any transmission of kinship. For the Sunnis, the mix does not alter what constitutes milk on an anthropological level, while for the Twelver, the milk changes and loses its substance.

On the one hand, a simple contact can be enough—the ingestion of one drop of

of the former position consider that the smallest drop of milk, identical to a part of the nurse’s body, creates kinship, as it creates a community of substance between the infant and the nurse. Every drop of milk represents the identity of the whole nurse upon entering the child’s body. It is this identity that leaves its mark.

because kinship requires a certain volume. In this vein, the determined number of

needs.21 The emphasis here is on the actual care taking of the infant.2. If breastfeeding has irreversible legal effects on an infant, can it have similar

is within reach of every woman who has milk: She could equally give her milk to an adult. This was a major point of discussion among all schools of law, which,

20 This does not mean that a child cannot have more than one milk-mother.21 Even if jurists do not mention this, I cannot help thinking that the atomistic

conception of the physical world of the Islamic theology resonates here. See Daniel Gimaret, (Paris, 1990), especially part one entitled “Le monde.” Thus, a

drop of milk would be analogous to an atom, which is called juz’ ou jawhar. Theologians, too, also wonder what the number of atoms is required to form a body (D. Gimaret, La

, 127–30).


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

30

only the feeding of an infant is effective in causing marital impediments.22 The reason is that in “nature,” it is observed that infants cannot digest any food other than breast milk for quite a long time. That is why breastfeeding can have consequences on matrimonial matters. From this perspective, the breastfeeding of an adult is not in the order of things in nature. Therefore, if an adult is breastfed by a woman, this milk exchange, being in contradiction with nature’s order, will not entail any marital impediment. Breastfeeding is inferior to generation, because milk alone cannot bring a child into the world, but without breastfeeding, no child can survive. By absorbing the nurse’s milk, the child becomes part of her, insofar as a part of his body comes from her milk. Yet in the case of adults, such a relationship cannot occur, as his physical body is already complete. Moreover, when a woman gives birth, she gives birth to a child, not to an adult;; in the same way, a nurse should breastfeed only one child, in order not to break the analogy between birth and breastfeeding. If one wanted to feed a child over the age of two or an adult with the milk of a nurse, one could not satisfy either’s needs. In both cases, breastfeeding is physiologically ineffective because after two years, the human being needs solid food. We can therefore conclude that nursing an adult is not legally effective, because it is not physiologically effective. Generally, it is considered that breastfeeding loses all its legal effect after 24 months or up to 30 months maximum.

to milk, it is not because of its nourishing qualities;; kinship is created because milk contains a vital element that passes through the nurse’s body into the child’s and is presumably absorbed by it. No further information is given on the nature of this element. Even the discussions on the necessary quantity of milk needed to create kinship do not allow conclusions to be drawn on this aspect. What we do know for certain is that kinship has a physical basis. This fundamental belief is at the origin

element that carries kinship: if the milk contains a subtle element that can generate kinship, can this element cease to exist and under what conditions? The second is of a different order: can this element exist in any kind of milk?

infant’s way of ingesting the milk affect kinship? If milk is processed or mixed with other substances, will it retain its original effectiveness? Finally, if the nurse dies, what are the consequences? The second set of questions concerns the origin of the milk. Usually, babies are breastfed by women: what if the milk came from a man or an animal? Also, what if it came from a woman who has never had

22 Sahnûn, Mudawwana, vol. 2, 407;; Sarakhsî, Mabsût, vol. 5, 135–7;; Tûsî, Mabsût, Da’â’im, vol. 2, 239.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


The Milk Ingestion Modes

The only mode of milk ingestion that complies with “nature” is suckling. Are other forms of ingestion, such as pouring milk down the infant’s throat, giving a nasal instillation or performing an enema with milk, effective in terms of establishing kinship? Does milk intake in general constitute a source of matrimonial impediment, or must this intake occur in a determined manner? Most schools of thought maintain that all forms of milk ingestion lead to marriage impediments. Only the Twelver insist on suction. They believe that for breastfeeding to be legally effective, the child must succor the breast. If milk is poured into the child’s mouth, or if it collects in his stomach during an enema or by similar means, it produces no marital impediment.

Milk Processing

If the milk is mixed with another substance, or if it is processed by cooking or by another method, does it lose its essence, namely, its power to create kinship?

that is transformed into cheese or mixed with other foods. They believe that milk processed into cheese does not create an impediment, because for it to be

milk’s natural state: usually, when feeding a newborn, one does not give him milk in a solid form such as cheese or butter;; therefore, if the milk is not in its original

believe that if one mixes milk with food or water or if it is turned into cheese, it is considered breastfeeding for all practical purposes, whether the milk is the main ingredient or not. If the baby is nourished, all the food goes into its stomach, and so the feeding is accomplished. The milk is still effective because it causes what the milk in its original form achieves, namely the growth of tissues and bones.

Does Milk Die?

If milk transmits the identity of the nurse and of her husband, can it still keep its

subsequently dies? This question is the starting point of an interesting casuistry.23

23 In Islamic law, casuistry should not be considered a form of jurisprudence. The jurists do not always develop this by starting from empirical cases;; it is an implementation of theoretical thinking, and on some aspects comparable to experimentation. Indeed, each


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

32

Before considering this, it should be noted that Muslim jurists are divided on this

includes the majority of law schools and lawyers, the milk of living or dead women remains effective and is a source of prohibition. According to the other

with the death of the person from whom it came.

to consume, it creates the same matrimonial impediments as the milk of a living woman. The identity of the breast milk is not affected by the death of the person from whom it originated;; death does not alter it. “Milk does not die,” said Ibn al-

24 This point of view is reminiscent of a theological-legal debate: if the milk is not affected by the death of the woman who gave it, it is because milk is not alive, as it is a truism to state that only what lives can die. From this point of view, milk is similar to hair or nail clippings.

dies, and if one gives this milk to a child, it can cause matrimonial impediments, as this feeding meets all the required conditions of breastfeeding in creating kinship. The dead woman is compared to a sleeping woman: If a baby suckles a woman’s breast while she is deeply sleeping, matrimonial impediments are the result. This case is similar to that of a child who drinks milk from a living woman, however not directly from her breast, but pumped beforehand. If one pumps milk from a woman’s breast after her death and pours it into the child’s throat, one creates matrimonial impediments.

because it does not have any life in it.” Taken from a living animal, it remains pure;; yet when what constitutes life is separated from the living animal, it becomes a non-ritual food and therefore illegal;; consequently, if there is no life in milk, it

the milk was taken from a living woman but put in a soiled container. Despite the 25

illegal sexual intercourse, cannot create matrimonial impediments, because they can only result from honorable behavior. Similarly, drinking the milk of a corpse

addressed case focuses on a crucial aspect, forgetting all others. It is by acting like this that

used in theology.24 Sahnûn, Mudawwana, vol. 2, 410–411.25 Sarakhsî, Mabsût, vol. 5, 139.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


milk from a corpse to having coitus with a dead woman.26 Hanafî scholars do

the usual conditions, which is why they believe illicit sexual relations generate impediments. They consider the dead woman’s milk to be capable of feeding the

one should not relate breastfeeding from a dead woman to having coitus with a corpse, because “coitus after death is not coitus.” Yet pouring the dead woman’s milk in a child’s mouth is a form of effective breastfeeding.27 The milk has also been compared to an egg: if the death of the hen does not make the egg lose its nutritional values, the same is true for the milk of a dead woman. Hanbalî scholars

matrimonial impediments just as a living woman’s does, because milk does not

said they believe that milk from a corpse is like the milk of a person who cannot give birth;; from this point of view, it is comparable to that of a man, which is, as we will see, absolutely ineffective.28

creating kinship. If a woman breastfeeds a child four times, pumps her breast milk, and dies, and if subsequently her milk is poured into the child’s throat, he becomes

time, this feed would not create any marital impediment because a legal act cannot be predicated upon death. It is not the same with a sleeping woman. If you pump milk from her breast and pour it into a child’s throat, it constitutes a perfectly

sleeping woman is liable under criminal law: if she turns in bed and accidentally kills a child by smothering it, or if in her sleep she falls and kills someone, she is required to pay the price of blood. In contrast, one cannot ask a dead person to pay, because she is not criminally responsible.29 Milk is an entity that causes permanent impediments, but death terminates this process, as it does in the case of coitus.30

matrimonial impediments. If a baby suckles the breast of a dead woman, or that of a living woman, fewer than 15 times and completes the number of 15 after she dies, there are no obstacles. Due to her death, the laws cease to apply to her, and she is in the position of an animal. Even if one pumps the needed amount of milk to establish milk kinship before the woman dies, and the whole milk is given to an infant after her death, no impediment will follow.31

26 Ibid., 139.27 Ibid., 139.28 Mughnî, vol. 11, 316, no. 1370.29 Umm, vol. 5, 31. 30 Muhaddab31 Tûsî, Mabsût, vol. 5, 296;; Hillî, Sharâ’i’, vol. 2, 440.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

34

Thus the milk retains its ability to generate kinship while it remains in its original form and is absorbed as such by the infant. The milk of the dead is effective if considered separately from where it came from, but ineffective given the rule that a corpse is not a matter of the law.

The Milk Must Come From a Woman

In order to clarify their thinking, Muslim jurists even considered that a man could have—miraculously—produced milk and thereby have the capacity to feed a newborn. This is why they require that the milk must come from a woman to create

of a young virgin’s milk.32

considered as effective in creating kinship bonds because of the community of

her, whether she is married or not. According to them, it is essential that the milk 33

married nor pregnant, have milk, and if they breastfeed a child with this milk, this child will belong to both of these girls as their milk-son, even though he will

instance, the child has no father because the milk with which he was nourished does not derive from sexual commerce;; in the second instance, the child has no father because his mother is not legally married.34 The Hanbalis defend a similar viewpoint. The virgin’s milk leads to matrimonial impediments, as it is the milk of a woman. The prohibitions come from any female’s milk, whether it derives from sexual intercourse or not.35In this vein, it seems logical to deduce that the milk of an animal or a man

could never cause impediments. The milk must come only from a woman, because 36

not constitute breastfeeding. This milk has the same status as any other food they would have shared. Matrimonial impediments, they argue, can only come from an honorable thing, which is characteristic of human milk and is completely lacking in animal milk. In addition, the community of substance may not be drawn between humans and animals by means of absorption of milk. This is based on an analogy with sexual intercourse: while coitus with women creates marital impediments,

32 Sahnûn, Mudawwana, vol. 2, 410.33 Sarakhsî, Mabsût, vol. 5, 138–9.34 Umm, vol. 5, 30.35 Mughnî, vol. 11, 324.36 Sahnûn, Mudawwana, vol. 2, 410 and 415.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


coitus with animals does not. Similarly, suckling from a woman produces marital impediments, in contrast to drinking milk from an animal.37

or girl drinks milk from an animal, they are not breastfeed. No impediment exists between the two who shared it. Only the milk of women leads to prohibitions.

mothers have the same legal status or that they be mixed when God has set them apart.38 According to the Hanbalî school, neither the milk of an animal or of a man can create impediments. They believe in maternity, of which blood relationships are a manifestation. Impediments do not follow because of fatherhood.39 The Twelver also believe that animal’s milk does not create impediments, even though they express some hesitation.40 “A woman is nursing a doe until weaning. Later, it mates and gives milk. Is it permissible to drink the milk, to sell it or kill the animal and eat it? These are permitted but blameworthy acts.” According to another tradition, a calf was fed with a woman’s milk until its skeleton consolidated and

41 If only a woman’s milk is capable of creating marital impediments, it is because only a woman can be a mother: motherhood is restricted to the female gender.

Conclusion: There is no Motherhood without Fatherhood

The concept of milk kinship that medieval Islamic jurists formulated was unknown

implies that men have nothing to do with milk kinship. This notion must have

replacing it with a more consistent concept of their own. Certainly, what troubled them most was the fact that there could be a mother without a father—or was it, rather, the fact that some women lead licentious lives? Without a doubt, the revision of milk kinship was part of a broader process, in which all the legal authorities

all performances related to kinship, including the concept of fatherhood and the relationship between maternal and paternal lines. With this in mind they advanced an important innovation, namely, the analogy between childbirth and breastfeeding. This led them to consider milk kinship in analogy to consanguinity, without forgetting that agnatic kinship was a different institution in civil society. Far from being a “savage” development, the invention of milk kinship by the

37 Sarakhsî, Mabsût, vol. 5, 139–40.38 Umm, vol. 5, 26 and 36.39 Mughnî, vol. 11, 233.40 Tûsî, Mabsût, vol. 5, 215.41 Tûsî, Tahdîb al-ahkâm (Beirut, 1981), vol. 7, 324–5, nos. 1337 and 1338.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

36

jurists of the second century AH was the result of an explicit reasoning: if there is a milk mother, there needs to be a milk father, because there cannot be motherhood without fatherhood. Lawyers thus introduced a dynamical principle: the notion of laban al-fahl, the “milk of the male.” As we have seen, this concept led to two

husband as the primary element in a causal chain, the triggering agent of a process that leads from the wife’s fertilization and pregnancy to her delivery and lactation. For others, it is the nurse’s husband who transmits milk kinship;; women transmit kinship only in terms of consanguinity. This substantial difference between the two great families of Islam has often gone unnoticed. With respect to nursing, the Sunnis recognize the roles of women and men, but Twelver Shiism almost totally negates the role of women, perceived as simple channels for the passage of

second, it is exactly the opposite: motherhood becomes an accidental consequence of fatherhood.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Chapter 2 Why Could Early Modern Men Lactate? Gender Identity and Metabolic Narrations

in Humoral Medicine

Barbara Orland

The Father-Mother

In September 1799, on one of his journeys to South America, Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) encountered a curious physiological phenomenon. The widely travelled German naturalist was introduced to Francisco Lozano, a laborer from the small village Arenas in Venezuela, who was said to have suckled his child with his milk. The 32-year-old man told the foreigner how he once, because he wanted to quiet the infant, the mother having fallen sick, took him into his bed, and pressed him to his breasts. The baby immediately started suckling, and because of this irritation of the nipples, a liquid leaked from his father’s breast. The continuation of suckling caused the breast to increase in size and the liquid to accumulate, which transmuted into a thick and sweet milk. Altogether, the

aware of the curiosity of his remarkable ability, the young man had asked some

that the child had had no other nourishment than the milk of his father. Aimé Bonpland (1773–1858), Humboldt’s travel companion, examined the father’s breasts and found them not only wrinkled like those of a woman who has given suck but also enlarged. Under these conditions, the two travellers kept faith with the young man’s report. Back in Europe, Humboldt communicated the event in his travelogues, and one of his biographers later found “The Father-Mother” to be the perfect heading for this extraordinary story of indigenous life.1Humboldt himself was not all too astonished about the suckling father. He

humankind and animals, whose breasts contain milk;; and the climate does not

secretion.”2 He authenticated the common occurrence of such an event with tales

1 Richard Henry Stoddard, The Life Travels and Books of Alexander von Humboldt (New York, 1819), 71.

2 Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, Personal Narrative of Travels to the (3 vols, London, 1818), vol. 3, 48.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

38

from other countries—about a he-goat in Hanover, for example, who was milked every day for a number of years, or certain people in Russia, where anatomists reported that they had found milk in the breasts of men. Humboldt disagreed with the opinion of other travellers to America that the weakness of the native American caused male lactation. In contrast to these beliefs, he emphasized the historical evidence of lactating men in Europe. Referring to Aristotele’s History of Animals as well as anatomical textbooks from the Renaissance—such as Helkiah Crooke’s Microcosmographia from 1615—Humboldt declared beyond doubt that men could suckle a child if their nipples were stimulated.3Early modern medical authors—in addition to Aristotle and the Corpus

Hippocraticum—quite often reported cases of male lactation. The story of a man from Genua was particularly famous. Dutch anatomist Adriaan van den Spieghel (1578–1625) mentions that “… Cardanus writeth that hee knew one Antonie Buzus at Genua, who being thirtie years of age, had so much milk in his breasts

this case from French physician Ambroise Paré (1510–1590).4 Helkiah Crooke (1576–1648), however, claimed that Hieronymus Cardanus (1501–67), court physician to the King of Denmark, got his evidence from travellers’ accounts. He, too, was convinced that in some places, especially America, “… almost all the [indigenous] men have great quantity of milk in their breasts.”5 Over time the idea of milk-giving men in the New World transformed into a persistent prejudice. Encyclopedias of the native American men had milk in their breasts.6 Consequentially, Humboldt’s observations from Venezuela only seemed to prove what was already known. Many travelogues ascertained that men might nourish infants if their breasts were sucked. In the “Physical Essays” from 1734, written by an unknown author, one

3 According to Aristotle, males after puberty sometimes produce a little milk and with consistent milking can even nourish a child. Aristotle, History of Animals [HA in future reference], Books I–III (Loeb Classical Library No. 437), trans. A.L. Peck (Cambridge, 1965), 3.20.522a19–22.

4 Ambroise Paré and Adriaan van de Spieghel, The workes of that famous chirurgion Ambroyse Parey, translated out of Latin and compared with the French, by Tho. Johnson. Whereunto are added three tractates of Adrianus Spigelius of the veines, arteries, & nerves (London, 1649), 640. Another physician who quoted from Cardanus was Andreas Laurentius. Andreas Laurentius, Historia anatomica humani corporis et singularum eius partium multis (Frankfurt, 1600), 341.

5 Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia. A Description of the Body of Man, together

the best Authors of Anatomy, especially out of Gasper Bauhinus and Andreas Laurentius (London, 1615), 193.

6 Daniel Schneider, Allgemeines Biblisches Lexicon: In welchem nebst denen Namen, das Wesen derer Sachen, das ist, so weit davon in heiliger Schrifft Erwehnung geschiehet (…), Dritter Theil (Frankfurt, 1731), 724.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Why Could Early Modern Men Lactate? 39

could read: “If what Travellers say, that Men nourish their own Children be true, we could not then say that the Breasts were entirely unuseful.”7

Variations in Gender Identity

Historians investigating the concept of the humoral body in the early modern period mention lactating men only rarely. Representations of breastfeeding or childbearing men, both in folk tradition and in literary texts, are more often of

these narratives and their broad circulation in different cultures.8 Charlotte Furth, historian of Chinese medical history, found accordant tales from ancient China and interpreted them as “representations of family devotion.”9 Other scholars examined the medieval Christian tradition of painting Jesus as the lactating mother of the Church, or analyzed saints’ cults that feature suckling men.10 Art historians investigated Jusepe de Ribera’s portrayal of an Italian “bearded lady” who looks like a man with one big breast nursing an infant.11 Yet apart from devotional writings and art works, scholars have only rarely analyzed medical manuals and textbooks on the topic of lactating men—although those same texts have been extensively studied with respect to maternal lactation.One rare but also controversial exception, Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex,

explains the curious phenomenon of the nursing father as a result of what he calls the one-sex-body in early modern humoral medicine. Among different anatomical features that account for this model of quantitative sexual difference based on

He explains: “Endless mutations, a cacophonous ringing of changes, become

7 Physical essays on the parts of the human body and animal oeconomy (London, John Clarke, 1734), 209.

8 Lianne McTavish, Childbirth and the Display of Authority in Early Modern France (Aldershot, 2005), 159;; Kirk Read, “Mother’s Milk from Father’s Breast: Maternity without Women in Male French Renaissance Lyric,” in Kathleen P. Long, ed., High Anxiety: Masculinity in Crisis in Early Modern France, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies (Kirksville, 2002), 71–92.

9 Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin. Gender in China’s Medical History, 960–1665 (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, 1999), 221.

10 Carolyn W. Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1982);; Mary E. Fissell, Vernacular Bodies. The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England (New York, 2004), 86;; Philip M. Soergel, ed., Sexuality and Culture in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (New York, 2005), 206.

11 Susanne Thiemann, “Sex trouble: Die bärtige Frau bei José de Ribera, Luis Vélez de Guevara und Huarte de San Juan,” in Judith Klinger and Susanne Thiemann, eds, Geschlechtervariationen. Gender-Konzepte im Übergang zur Neuzeit, Potsdamer Studien zur Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung, N.F. 1 (Potsdam, 2006), 47–82.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

40

entities.”12 No sharp boundary between the sexes existed on the level of bodily

the various excrements are fungible in that they turn into one another and whose processes—digestion and generation, menstruation and other bleeding—are not so easily assignable to one sex or another as they became after the eighteenth century.”13Barbara Duden made a similar argument based on her research on Johann Storch

(1681–1751), physician in Eisenach, and his female patients: “No morphological

14 Femininity and maleness were not realized as qualitatively different or incommensurate corporealities, and Storch, too, recounts the case of a man who “had milked so much milk from himself that he made cheese from it.”15 Because the male body resembled the female body in characteristics that would seem to be exclusive to women, even menstruation was not viewed as exclusively feminine, as Gianna Pomata’s article “Menstruating Men” made clear.16 Not until the nineteenth century, she argues, were menstruating men seen as abnormal cases of hermaphroditism. In early modern Europe, physicians did not judge male menstruation to be a sign of a sexual pathology. Instead, the bleeding male body reacted according to nature’s rules in a very healthy way. In analogy to female menstruation, it was a form of

No doubt, the early modern body was not a stable entity. In the words of Gail Kern Paster: “We fail to recognize how the porous and volatile humoral body, with its faulty borders and penetrable stuff, interacts differently with the world than the “static, solid” modern bodily container.”17 But what does it mean precisely if bodily

become “entirely fungible”? What kinds of mutations are at work? How did early modern physicians and anatomists explain these physiological transformations of

12 Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, 1990), 35.

13 Lacqueur, Making Sex, 19–20.14 Barbara Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-

Century Germany (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 117.15 Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin, 117.16 Gianna Pomata, “Menstruating Men. Similarity and Difference of the Sexes in

Early Modern Medicine,” in Valeria Finucci and Kevin Brownlee, eds, Generation and

Early Modern Europe (Durham/London, 2001), 109–52;; Gianna Pomata, “La meravigliosa armonia: il rapporto fra seni ed utero dall’anatomia vascolare all’endocrinologia,” in Giovanna Fiume, ed., Madri. Storia di un ruolo sociale (Venice, Marsilio, 1995), 45–81.

17 Gail K. Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Sage (Chicago, 2004), 23.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


physiological replaceability of different substances. To early modern authors, moreover, substances like blood and milk were by no means the same—neither in appearance, in composition, nor in function. Nevertheless, the physical identity as it was accessible to the senses was instable, because persisting substances always differ with respect to their momentary stages. Sensual experiences therefore had to be complemented by the wisdom and knowledge of practice, reason, and tradition such as references to the Bible and the theories of ancient philosophers. Yet the different knowledge traditions were based on the same logic found in physiology.

from their coming into being, their uses during life, and their corruption over time. In this respect, male lactation was viewed as a gender variety that could be well explained from the generative and regenerative processes of matter transformations that occur invisibly inside the body. Historical narrations of early modern gender difference, hence, have to draw more attention to the logic of metabolic procedures.

18 Blood was blood,

its typically wise, teleological foresight, ordered the generative process in two distinct and hierarchically different bodies. Pregnancy and nurturing were sex-

men nevertheless were able to generate milk, this capacity was the outcome of nature’s sometimes peculiar order. It was an exception that, on the one hand, was

populations in Europe’s colonies was, in general, considered to be of a weaker “feminized” nature. The physical body changed in conjunction with the external environment, climate, territory, food, and so on. Humboldt, however, doubted these arguments. Arguing against the alleged weakness of the Americans, he wrote: “It is however improbable, that it has ever been observed in a whole tribe (…) and I

old.”19 To him, the phenomenon was neither an isolated nor an extreme issue but an expression of gender variations that can occur everywhere at any time. “In every age examples are cited of young girls not marriageable, or women withered by age,

18 Barbara Orland, “White Blood and Red Milk: Analogical Reasoning in Medical Practice and Experimental Physiology (1560–1730),” in M. Horstmannshoff, H. King, and C. Zittel, eds, Blood, Sweat and Tears: The Changing Concepts of Physiology from

, Intersections. Yearbook for Early Modern Studies, vol. 18 (Leiden/Boston, 2012), 443–78.

19 Humboldt, Personal Narrative, 48.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

42

and after numerous researches, I have not found above two or three.”20In keeping his view that the manifestation of male lactation was a rare event—

which nature does nothing in vain—Humboldt implicitly accepted the possibility

words, the male body could convert or transform its humors into nourishing milk if necessary. This ability was a sign of the “one-sex body”;; it was the physical power of the circulation of humors that determined this conversion. Especially the theories of blood generation and nutrition, which had come forth from classical Galenic humoral physiology but were profoundly changed since the seventeenth century, explained this conversion. In fact, without explicitly mentioning it, Humboldt refers to a centuries-old common-sense knowledge that milk and blood were the only aliments that most living beings (plants, animals, humans regardless of age, gender or status) were able to produce by themselves for the maintenance of life. For centuries, milk was said to be generated from blood, but during the second half of the seventeenth century a remarkable shift in the theoretical explanations of milk generation occurred, which made the phenomenon of male lactation even more conceivable. Harvey’s theory of blood circulation (1628) had forced doctors and philosophers to rethink the Galenic model of nutrition. According to the physiology of circulation, the blood could no longer be the only nutriment that drained away within the body. Instead, it was posited that chyle—the milky substance produced during digestion—circulates through the body as well. As I will show in the following, the phrase “we all live by our own milk” became a basic tenet of eighteenth-century physiological thinking.21

Generation and Nutrition

In order to understand how pre-modern medical theories conceived of the existence of male lactation, it must be stressed that the demarcation and radical distinction of generation and nutrition is of very recent origin. Anatomical and physiological theories of older age did not know such harsh differentiations as are common in the present age. The British physician Walter Charleton (1619–1707) eloquently expressed the contiguousness of generation and nutrition. In 1659 he wrote:

To forme, and nourish, are not only acts of one and the same soul;; but so alike, that it is no easie matter to distinguish betwixt them. For, Generation and Accretion are not performed without Nutrition;; nor Nutrition, or Augmentation, without Generation. To nourish, is to substitute such and so much of matter,

manner, Accretion is not effected without Generation;; … and those new parts

20 Ibid., 49–50.21 Gerard van Swieten, Commentaries upon Boerhaave’s aphorisms concerning the

knowledge and cure of diseases (18 vols, Edinburgh, 1776), vol. 13, 199.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


conclude, that Nutrition is nothing else but continual Generation.22

Charleton referred to Aristotle, who had described both processes as the proper functioning of the vegetative soul. The generation, growth, and nutrition of plants, animals, and human beings are governed and preserved by one and the same soul, which is the most elementary principle of life.23The physiological features of menstruation and lactation express this idea in

feeding of the newborn. Blood was generally considered to be the ultimate nutritive

the heart even to the smallest and most peripheral parts of the body. Concerning the formation of the fetus, however, it seemed obvious that the nutritive and generative functions of blood were intermingled. Until the middle of the seventeenth century, most medical writers would have argued that maternal blood provides the raw material for nourishing the unborn, after the vis plastica of the semen and the innate heat of the womb had caused fetal development.24 Again, they would have taken this argument from Aristotle, who described the catamenia as the female

The action of the semen of the male in “setting” the female’s secretion in the uterus is similar to that of rennet upon milk. Rennet is milk, which contains vital heat, as semen does, and this integrates the homogeneous substance and makes

of rennet upon milk. Thus when the “setting” is effected, i.e., when the bulky

membranes form all round its outer surface.25

One of the authors whose writings transmitted Aristotelian ideas throughout the Middle Ages well into the early modern period was Albertus Magnus (1193–1280).26 In Pseudo-Albertus’s book on Women’s secrets from around 1300, the early formation of the fetus in the womb is divided into three stages:

22 Walter Charleton, Natural history of nutrition, life, and voluntary motion: Containing all the new discoveries of anatomist’s and most probable opinions of physicians, concerning the oeconomie of human nature: Methodically delivered in exercitations physico-anatomical (London, 1659), 2–3.

23 Charleton, Natural history, 8. On the crucial role of the “vegetative soul” in Galenic physiology, see Jacques Roger, The Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century French Thought, trans. K.R. Benson (Stanford, 1997), 56–7.

24 Roger, The Life Sciences, 41–4.25 Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. A.L. Peck (Cambridge, 1943), II.4, 739b20.26 Needham credits Albertus Magnus (also known as Albert of Cologne) for the

A History of Embryology, 2nd ed. (New York, 1959), 86.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

44

days, for the natural heat in the male sperm and in the womb causes it to become white as milk. Then that matter is changed to the nature or color of blood that is thickened, as if it were well cooked, and this lasts nine days. During the next twelve days the members of the fetus begin to be formed.”27

In any case and regardless of the question whether both sexes generate seeds or not, Albert and his disciples believed that after the coagulation of the generative seeds with the menstrual blood, much like cheese, a kind of milky substance provided the nutrition necessary for proper development.In the middle of the seventeenth century, physiologists described this material

or “constitutive principle” of the maternal blood that nourishes the embryo against 28

certain sweet, mild and balsamical Liquor, analogous to the white of an egge, out of which the chicken is formed,” argued Charleton. Referring to the axiom that

goes on to explain, “we may conclude, that the Succus Nutritius is in all qualities respondent to the of the white of an Egge.”29 Those authors who think that the aliments are as diverse as the parts of the body misconceive the various processes of matter transformation—concoction, assimilation, apposition, and transmutation. The animal body does not select but transforms the aliments

found in the chicken egg.Charleton’s ideas resemble those of famous William Harvey (1578–1657)

who had expressed similar notions in his De generatione animalium from

“primigenial moisture” found in the ovum for the nourishment and development

the crystalline colliquament, from which the foetus and its parts primarily and immediately arise, may be designated the radical and primigenial moisture.”30 Since the time of Galen, most philosophers and physicians had variously referred to the concept of “radical moisture” illustrated by the metaphor of a lamp. The “radical” or “innate moisture” fed the “innate heat” of every living being in the way oil fed a lamp. As the radical moisture dries up, the innate heat decreases, and

27 Womens Secrets: A Translation of Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’ de Secretis Mulierum with Commentaries, trans. Helen Rodnite Lemay (New York, 1992), 78.

28 Needham, A History of Embryology.29 Charleton, Natural History, 9.30 William Harvey, The Works of William Harvey, trans. from Latin by Robert Willis

(London: 1847), 513.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


the body gradually becomes cold and dry.31 In other words, the perfectly prepared matter of nutrition, the ultimate food, in the end attains the state of the initial rudiments of the fetus—bringing life full circle.If, with respect to conception and embryogenesis, the source of this succus

nutritius was the maternal blood that normally was discharged as menstrual blood, the question emerges how this transformation occurred. The subtlety of the Aristotelian theory of generation and the many controversies about the impure state of menstrual blood prompted physiologists to seek an understanding of this idea in all its details. Many questions had to be answered: Which parts of the embryo are produced by the seed, and which by the menstrual blood? Can blood generally be thought to be an impure and poisonous as well as nourishing material? In Helkiah Crooke’s view, only the purest part of the mother’s blood was used for the nourishment of the fetus. Pregnant women often had a “greenish pallid” complexion because they lacked their purest blood, now used to feed the infant.32 Jean Fernel (1497–1558), eminent physiologist from Paris, noted that it is impossible to imagine how healthy food can be produced from menstrual blood, if it kills herbs, makes trees barren, or drives dogs mad. Not before the fetus has developed its own liver to clean and prepare pure blood from its mother’s raw material, he went on, can menstrual blood become suitable nourishment.33 If a woman’s heat is naturally weak, as most scholars would have agreed upon on the basis of Aristotelian biology, how can a woman transform her blood into embryonic organs?34 The concept of menstrual blood as the raw material from which the essential embryonic food was produced led to the formulation of different theories seeking to explain this transformation. Among those, the evaluation of different parts of the disposable blood was the most common.35 According to this theory, the

31 Michael Stolberg, “Die Lehre vom ‘calor innatus’ im lateinischen ‘Canon Medicinae’ des Avicenna,” Sudhoffs Archiv, 77 (1993): 33–53.

32 Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, 317.33 Jean Fernel, The Physiologia of Jean Fernel, trans. John M. Forrester (First Latin

ed. 1567;; Philadelphia, 2003), 589. Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente, who also believed in the impurity of menstrual blood, came to the conclusion that monthly blood is bad because “it is packed in and does not readily exude,” but the blood in the pregnant

bad.” Hieronymus Fabricius Aquapendente, The Embryological Treatises of Hieronymus , trans. Howard B. Adelmann H.B. (First ed. 1621;; Ithaca N.Y.,

1942), 291. 34 Aristotle argued that women have less “vital heat” and therefore will be smaller

and weaker than men. Because of her colder metabolism, a woman consumes food less fast, thus leaving residues of blood in the body, which is necessary for the nutriment of the offspring. On Aristotle and women, see Sabine Föllinger, Differenz und Gleichheit: Das Geschlechterverhältnis in der Sicht griechischer Philosophen des 4. bis 1. Jahrhunderts v. Chr. (Stuttgart, 1996).

35 Jacob Rueff had differentiated among three parts of the menstrual blood: one which the foetus extricates;; a second part needed for the replenishment of the placenta;; the third, and least pure, part would remain in the womb and be discharged post partum. Jacob


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

46

maternal blood contained different materials—the residues or “waste” of the body as well as the healthy and fresh nutriment deriving from the heart.

The Hippocratic Idea of Milk Generation

Yet there existed another theory, which Crooke explained in great detail, even though he considered it to be quite obscure. Could it be possible that the mother’s chyle provided the material for the nourishment of the unborn? Crooke traced this idea back to the Hippocratic acknowledgment of blood and milk as the two main prenatal foods.36 According to Hippocrates, Crooke argued, the fetus is nourished

grows and begins to move in the womb, some blood is directed to the breasts and converted into milk. Part of this milk remains in the breasts, part of it returns to the womb, as if the blood were circulating—a theory which in 1615 was unimaginable. Crooke consequentially concluded that Hippocrates was wrong, because there was neither a need to feed the embryo with milk nor an instrument to do so.With respect to male lactation, however, it is useful to read the original text of

Hippocrates’ description of the mammary glands:

The glands in the chest are called breasts, and they swell in those producing milk, but not in those [who do] not. Women produce milk, men do not. Women’s

change the food, which they draw into themselves, into milk. It goes from the womb to the breasts as nourishment for the child after birth, which the omentum squeezes out to parts above it, if it has an excess, cramped by the fetus.37

The female glandular tissue differs from the male in its soft, loose, fatty, and white texture. It is like wool, with many ducts containing an oily stuff which resembles

Rueff, De conceptu et generatione hominis, lib. primus (Frankfurt, 1580), 9. Riolan gives a summary of the debates around 1600. Jean Riolan, Riolan, conseiller, medecin, & professeur du roy en anatomie & en pharmacie, reveuës &

(2 vols, Paris, 1629), vol. 2, 935–43.36 Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, 317;; see also Rueff, De conceptu et generatione

hominis, 10;; T[homas] C[hamberlayne], et al., The compleat midwifes practice, in the most weighty and high concernments of the birth of man. Containing perfect rules for midwifes and nurses, as also for women in their conception, bearing, and nursing of children: From the Experience not onely of our English, but also the most accomplisht and absolute Practicers among the French, Spanish, Italian, and other Nations ... (London, 1656), 69.

Vernacular Bodies, 63.

37 The Hippocratic treatise On glands, ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Craik (Leiden/Boston, 2009), 81.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


well as a generative origin;; milk’s material can be drawn from chyle as well as menstrual blood.The male body, in contrast, is relatively dense, “like cloth,” not retaining any

moisture. At the beginning of his treatise on Diseases of Women, the Hippocratic author describes an experiment to mark the difference. In the words of translator Elizabeth Craik: “when cloth and wool of similar weight are soaked in water for a period of forty-eight hours (or rather for two days and two nights) their relative

water each can absorb.”38 The male and female bodies differ in texture, their usual

Accordingly, lactation cannot happen inside the male body, because the dense

breasts.Notwithstanding the unmistakable opinion of the Hippocratic Corpus regarding

the role of chyle in the production of milk, later physiologists disagreed with this

proved the rule. Among the many medical authors discussing the anomalies of nature, Thomas Bartholin (1616–80) wrote that men’s breasts ordinarily do not

dug’d, and cold of constitution, a milky humor, and as it were milk is frequently seen;; especially if there Nipples be frequently suck’t, and their Dugs rubbed, as the

39

concoction of its substance can transform, turning the humors into a white liquid.Thus, although Hippocrates did not believe in male lactation, he gave an indirect

answer to the question why men, virgins, and post-menopausal women sometimes have milk in their breasts. There was some evidence to support the assumption that milk could be generated before delivery, or even without conception. Milk was not always produced in the breasts from uterine material, but could be derived from a liquid other than menstrual blood.40 In this sense, milk in a male breast was not a sign of humoral imbalance—viewed as the general cause of all illnesses. Instead,

system. The baby’s need was able to amend the order of nature. If there was a

extraordinary task.

38 Ibid., 31.39 Thomas Bartholin, The anatomical history of Thomas Bartholinus, doctor and

kings professor, concerning the lacteal veins of the thorax, observ’d by him lately in man and beast publickly proposed by Michael Lyserus answering (London, 1653), 88–9;; see also Anton Deusing, Genesis Microcosmi seu de generatione foetus in utero dissertatio: Accesserunt curae secundae de generatione de nutritione (Amsterdam, 1665), 131–81.

40 Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, 193–6.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

48

The Plethora Argument

The plethora model of cyclic congestion and discharge of humors played a decisive role as well in theories of milk production. With reference to menstruation, historian of medicine Michael Stolberg has argued that until the late sixteenth century, the cathartic theory dominated discussions. Menstruation served primarily as a means of freeing women from the poisonous, morbid, impure matter that constantly accumulated in their bodies.41 By about 1600, this set of explanations had been largely replaced by the new “plethora model.” In a healthy woman, medical writers now declared, menstrual blood usually would not acquire poisonous characteristics. Non-pregnant and non-lactating women had to get rid of this blood at regular intervals because of its sheer volume. Quite the same happened to men, as plethora frequently occurred in men, too. Cases

Although during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, iatrochemical theories ferments

to drive the blood or humors into intense commotion, stretching and expanding the vessels involved to their utmost limits, they did, in Pomata’s view, not question the traditional theories of male menstruation.42 As in the plethora model, the vessels gave way at the point of least resistance, and fermentation asserted that the impure

43

With the same logic one could explain other natural or preternatural evacuations. Helkiah Crooke considered it to be in principle conceivable that virgins and other non-pregnant women could generate milk. Because women have a greater abundance of blood in their bodies and develop veins in their chests after the age of 14—veins that “water the dugs”—as well as glands that can boil and alter the blood, disorders can develop, that is, virgins’ breasts start lactating as a way to get rid of the humoral surplus. Male lactation, however, was explained differently by Crooke. It could only happen if Hippocrates was right about the “double generation of Milke (…) and a double nature thereof.” Thus, Crooke knew about the Hippocratic idea that lactation is not only produced by transforming menstrual blood but also set in motion by the swollen womb that presses against the stomach

with the fatty parts of food and drink, it produces a prototype of chyle to be

41 “Due to her colder and more humid constitution, woman constantly accumulated crude, peccant, excremental matter in her body. In the case of conception, it served as the substrate for the powerful semen, but when no conception occurred, the “expulsive faculty” of the uterus got rid of it via menstruation.” Michael Stolberg, “The Monthly Malady: A History of Pre-Menstrual Suffering,” in Medical History, 44 (2000): 301–22, esp. 304.

42 Pomata, “Menstruating Men.”43 Michael Stolberg, “Menstruation and Sexual Difference in Early Modern Medicine,”

in Andrew Shail and Gillian Howie, eds., Menstruation. A Cultural History (Basingstoke/New York, 2005), 94.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


of large quantities of oil for smearing a hide. The pressure from the womb causes the chyle to be absorbed by the omentum just as the pressure caused by rubbing makes the hide absorb the oil. The fatty substance in a woman’s chest, warmed, sweetened, and whitened, is pumped into the breasts. In case of a pregnancy, this would happen as soon as the embryo started to move.44 Yet in case of any kind

imaginable that a similar process could occur, and that men would discharge liquid from their breasts.Thus, the Hippocratic theory knew two kinds of milk, but only one of them

could be found in the male body. If the “breeding of the humoral material of concoction in the breasts, the milk is

other milk, which could also be found in men’s bodies, “is white indeed because it

the true nature of a nourishing Chymus or humour, nor the sweetnes nor the power or vigour of nourishment, and therefore it deserveth the name of Milke, not by his

45

from uterine blood that was brought from the womb to the mammary glands, by chyle

produced during the process of digestion in the stomach, which only occasionally would be directed to the breasts. “True” and “perfectly concocted” milk, Crooke concluded, will not be generated before conception, but sometimes a thin and

nourishment of the breasts.The raw milk or chyle that Crooke mentions was the product of digestion.46

The term chylus (from the Greek chylos, succus) as such was the synonym for

the Hippocratic theory ended up as an analogy between chyle and milk. Chyle was considered to be “milk” only insofar as it looked like barley cream or milk. However, if milk was made of chyle, it necessarily must have been colder than blood, because the nutritive liquid in this case was not brought to the heart but directly to the breasts. Similar to menstrual blood, chyle had to be “twice-concocted” within the mammary glands in order to become real milk. To physiologists of the early seventeenth century, this seemed to be quite unnatural. But shortly thereafter, two important discoveries gave new evidence to the fact that every body, regardless of sex, age, or fecundity, was theoretically able to produce milk.

44 Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, 194. See also Iain M. Lonie, The Hippocratic Treatises “On Generation” “On the Nature of the Child” “Diseases IV” (Berlin/New York, 1981), 13.

45 Ibid., 149.46 Ibid., 196.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

50

The Milk Veins

Two basic discoveries of the early 1620s had far-reaching consequences on the prevailing views on reproduction and nutrition during the later part of the seventeenth century. Later generations of medical historians would celebrate these discoveries as “wonders of anatomy.”47that contributed to the revolution in physiological theory was William Harvey’s formulation of the theory of blood circulation, the second one Gaspare Aselli’s (1581–1626) discovery of the so-called milk veins or lacteals (vena albae et lacteae).48 Aselli’s genere appeared in 1627;; Harvey’s Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis in 1628. Both authors, who knew nothing about one another (Aselli, professor of anatomy in Padua, died in 1625, and his work was published posthumously), had been working independently on these questions. Harvey promulgated his views about the circulatory system over a period of nine years in his anatomical lectures held in

sought further proof and in fact found evidence that lacteals existed in a variety of quadrupeds but not in humans.One of the assumptions that led William Harvey to his discovery of blood

circulation resulted from ideas about the role of the liver as the “factory of blood” ( ). Harvey, in fact, called for a reconsideration of theories of nutrition. Like his contemporaries, he believed (in keeping with Galen’s teachings) that all of the juice of the ingesta (chyle) could pass through the veins of the mesentery and from there to the liver. Chyle was inserted into the veins that surrounded the stomach and the entire gut, the “mouths” of which ended in the mesentery, the “coat” that enclosed all of the digestive organs. In the liver, the “juice of food” was changed into venous blood. On the one hand, the thicker cream of the chyle was intermingled with the liver’s substance, blood;; on the other hand, chyle’s whey was separated to yield urine (which then passed to the bladder).49

valves in the heart and the large veins. Hence, he calculated that the quantity of

47 Karl E. Rothschuh, Geschichte der Physiologie (Berlin, 1953), 55. 48 Historians of medicine have described the discovery of the so-called lacteals or

milk veins as the starting point of a long process culminating in the understanding of the lymphatic system. See John M. Howard and Walter Hess, History of the Pancreas: Mysteries of a Hidden Organ (New York, 2002), 14–20;; Richard S.A. Lord, “The White

Medical History, 12, 2 (1968): 174–84. Before the end of the eighteenth century one cannot speak of the lymph system.

49 When it came to the heart, the new blood was heated and mixed with air and became the lighter-colored arterial blood that travelled through the arteries, bringing life to the rest of the body. More on this can be found in Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge, 2000), 17–19.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


blood discharged by the heart into the arteries in a given period and the quantity of ingested material had to be more or less equivalent. However, the quantity of blood infused into the arteries was larger than the portion of fresh blood supplied by the ingested food. Among the many examples he drew on as evidence to substantiate his point was the physiology of milk production in the mammae, “for a cow will give three, four, and even seven gallons and more in a day, and a woman two or three pints whilst nursing a child or twins.”50 This comparison entailed a cunning rhetorical strategy. A simple mathematical sum could illustrate what

nutrition, a negative argument in support of his theory of circulation. Until then,

less proportionate to the quantity of food ingested and digested. The proportion of milk that a woman or female animal was able to give hence depended on her diet. But it was not Harvey’s intention to revise and reformulate the old theories of blood formation in the liver. His main interest was related to the understanding of the heart’s beat and pulse.Gaspare Aselli’s discovery of the lacteal veins, too, pertained to existing

theories about the relationship between diet and blood production. With respect

veins originate in the intestines, where they received and conveyed the products of digestion—chyle. Aselli unhesitatingly labeled these veins milk vessels (venas lacteasengendered only at one location inside the body. Galen had located the product

the case of lactating men, the white liquid travelled throughout the body. In other words, the new concept of blood circulation strengthened the old assumptions about materials moving within the body. The milk veins seemed to be evidence

passages from one organ to the next.51In the decades after Aselli’s discovery became public, the nutritive juice became

a hot issue among researchers, and subsequently a whole generation of anatomists developed a new description of what might be called experimental resorption by mechanical forces. Likewise, the processes of digestion and nutrition awakened the interest of experimentally working physiologists. The location and passages of the

of the intestine muscles and from there by way of suction into the vena mesenterica

50 Harvey, The Works, 53. Walter Pagel, New Light on William Harvey (Basel, 1976), 11–16.

51 Aselli’s two editions of 1627 and 1628 were not widely mentioned;; the spread of the discovery appears to have been fairly slow. Not before the third edition of Aselli’s dissertation in 1640 was the question of chylous vessels put high on the agenda of physiologists.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

52

(the lower surface of the liver, the portal vein), and so on were explored step by step. It goes far beyond the scope of this chapter to describe this new fascination with the digestive process in all its details.52 Here, I only want to emphasize that following the discoveries of Harvey and Aselli, new theories explained how not

Reliance on the centrality of the circulation of blood as a cornerstone of physiology led many physicians to re-envision the humoral body as a hydraulic

through the body. Chyle was now viewed as a carrier of nutritive material

surprisingly, during the next decades, several anatomists believed to have found “Milky channels reaching to the Breasts, from whence a great plenty of Milk succeeded.”53 In different locations of the body, they also observed a more or less

in relation to a continually improved vascular topography. Although advancing within a hydraulic instead of humoral model of generation and nutrition, the revision of physiology did not question the Hippocratic arguments that so far had explained male lactation.In fact, the old argument was renewed. Thomas Willis (1621–75), for instance,

since the passages of milk transport now lay open to the eyes of the anatomist, it seemed more convincing to postulate

that from the Mothers stomach, a portion of the Chyle thence made, is presently supped up into the veins, which having obtained the vehicle of the Blood, before it be assimilated by it, is laid up in the Glandulas, destinated here and there for the receiving of it, being carried by the Arteries, and lastly separated from the mass of Blood;; for as it appears, that drink being plentifull taken, presently passes thorow the whole mass of Blood, and is rendered by Urine like water.54

“mechanical, mathematizable, observable entities”—now became the basis of a renewed plethoric model of milk generation developed by Newtonian

the eighteenth century in mainly Scotland and England, was James Keill (1673–1719). His description of a hydro-mechanical theory of lactation goes like this:

52 Nikolaus Mani, Die historischen Grundlagen der Leberforschung: Die Geschichte der Leberforschung von Galen bis Claude Bernard (Basel, 1959), vol. 2, 87ff.

53 John Browne, Adenochoiradelogia, or, An anatomick-chirurgical treatise of glandules & strumaes (…) (London, 1684), 93.

54 Thomas Willis, Dr. Willis’s Practice of Physick, being all the medical Works of that renowned Physician. Containing these ten several Treatises (London, 1681), 148.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


The Use of the Breasts is to separate the Milk for the Nourishment of the Foetus. The Tubes which compose the Glands of the Breasts in Maids, like a Sphincter Muscle contract so closely, that no Part of the Blood can enter them: But when the Womb grows big with the Foetus, and compresses the descending Trunk

Force through the Arteries of the Breasts, and forces a Passage into their Glands,

by Degrees, as the Womb grows bigger, the Glands receive a thicker Serum;; and

to the Foetus, and for three or four Days afterwards by the Uterus, beginning then to stop, does still more dilate the Glands of the Breasts.

According to this model, the breasts functioned like forcibly contracting, pushing, and sucking bellows, but they also served as storage containers of milk before discharging it through the nipples. Obviously, the male breast was too small to

sentence we read: “I have seen some Men who have had Milk in them.”55

Conclusion

just one unquestionable organ. Also, milk did not have only one physiological function, that is, to be the food for the newborn. Instead, milk was characterized by a remarkable physical and symbolic malleability. It could be found at many

it, such as the bodies of virgins, post-menopausal women, and men. Every creamy,

viewed as similar to the substance female bodies were able to secret: lymph, chyle (which in German is called Milchsaft), and any kind of mucilage were regarded as analogous to milk;; even the nerves were conceptualized as lactiferous ducts belonging to the circulatory system of matter transformation. The same can be said for some of the excretory organs. The breasts, which were conceptualized as reservoirs for milk storage and not as production facilities, belonged to a lacteal network that also included some glands and tubes (for instance, the lactiferous duct or lactiferous vessels of the uterus). Even certain solid bones were connected to the milk circulatory system.Milk was supposed to be a derivative of chyle, or, in the words of Herman

medicine, milk was that animal part which “has felt the vital forces of the body, mixed with the blood, passed thro’ the arteries and the veins, and been soon separated again. And this can be no other than chyle from vegetables, turned to

55 James Keill, The anatomy of the human body abridg’d: or, a short and full view of all the parts of the body. Together with their several uses, drawn from their compositions and structures, 7th ed., corrected (London, 1723), 119–20.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

54

milk, and separated in the breasts.”56 This notion of a chyle-milk-analogy remained the standard argument during the eighteenth century. The phrase “we all live by our own milk” became a basic tenet of eighteenth-century physiological thinking, because some sort of milky substance circulated through all bodies, even some plants (e.g., milk-trees).57In nuce, this idea can be traced back to the Corpus Hippocraticum. Chyle

represented a step in the multi-staged process of blood production and nutrition. Fresh material was incorporated through the mouth, went through different stages of digestion, turned into blood in the liver, and was heated in the heart before it served as the ultimate nutriment in all parts of the body. According to this theory, the milky substance, produced during digestion, was seen as an intermediary

During pregnancy, the white liquor would be directed from the digestive apparatus to the breasts, due to the increase of pressure on the growing child’s omentum. The

takes place as a result of the movement of the humoral material. According to the

the body of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was viewed instead as a kind of sewerage and network system, in which diverse liquids circulate through the body.The classic argument had been that the warmness or coldness of the body

caused motions. This argument was now complemented by assertions about mechanical and chemical operations, which produced different liquids and kept

idea of kinematic motions, complex material transformations (e.g., coagulation, liquefaction, assimilation) generated new humors and removed or corrupted others. According to this hydro-mechanical theory, it became plausible that some kind of white substance circulated through the body like blood or lymph or the

on the theories of milk generation: No longer did it seem persuasive that breast

physicians preferred to think of breast milk in analogy to chyle. They argued that milk was generated from chylous material conveyed to the blood stream and circulating throughout the body. Instead of imagining a transition from chyle to blood to milk, they now stressed a direct transition from chyle to milk. This idea lent additional support to the long-standing observation that men occasionally could give milk, because one stage of matter transformation could be omitted.

56 Herman Boerhaave, A new method of chemistry;; including the theory and practice of that art: Laid down on mechanical principles, and accommodated to the uses of life, trans. P. Shaw, and E. Chambers (London, 1727), 180.

57 Gerard van Swieten, Commentaries upon Boerhaave’s aphorisms concerning the knowledge and cure of diseases (18 vols, Edinburgh, 1776), vol. 13, 199.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Chapter 3 The Mother and the Dida [Nanny]: Female Employers and Wet Nurses in Fourteenth-Century Barcelona1

Rebecca Lynn Winer

On 11 May 1339, Joaneta, widow of Pere d’Hort, citizen of Barcelona, paid

installment of her salary. Theirs was probably a tearful parting. Gueraula had cared for Joaneta’s daughter, Sibil·∙la, since August 1333. She had breastfed the infant

Maybe Joaneta thought little Sibil·∙la was mature enough now at almost six years of age not to require her own nursemaid, perhaps the family had come upon hard times and needed to reduce their household;; or, maybe, Gueraula wanted to go back home to her husband. Whatever the reason she was leaving, it is not strange to think that Dida [wet nurse, nanny] Gueraula would have been missed by both her young charge and former employer.2The domestic triangle of a wet nurse, her charge, and the infant’s mother

might seem an obviously important and intimate arrangement in the upbringing of an infant and young child. What is striking about this brief glimpse into the lives of Joaneta, Sibil·∙la, and Gueraula, however, is the apparent directness of the

1 I thank Villanova University for the Summer Research Fellowship, Research Support Grant, and Faculty Development Grant and the American Philosophical Society

research for this article in the Arxiu Capitular de la Catedral de Barcelona (ACB), the Arxiu Històric de Protocols de Barcelona (AHPB), the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona (AHCB) in Spain and the Archives Départmentales des Pyrénées Orientales (ADPO) of Perpignan in France. I also thank Clifford Backman, Adriano Duque, Debra A. Salata, Núria Silleras-Fernández, Andrew G. Scott, Julian Yates, and the members of the Department of History and Art History at Villanova University for their comments.

2 ACB, Notaris, vol. 38, f.35. The receipt of payment is summarized on p. 69 as entry #22 in Josep Hernando i Delgado, “L’alimentació làctia dels nadons durant el segle XIV, les nodrisses o dides a Barcelona, 1295–1400, segons els documents dels protocols notarials,” Estudis històrics i documents dels arxius de protocols, 14 (1996): 39–157. Hernando provides a digest of the contents of the 271 surviving entries in notarial registers concerning free and enslaved wet nurses from Barcelona 1295–1400. I have generally followed his translation from Latin into Catalan of the names of places and people, but have updated all


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

56

relationship between mistress and wet nurse, unmediated by a male presence. The female management of the nourishment of an infant and the later care of a young girl were common phenomena in medieval Barcelona. Child care was considered women’s work in medieval Europe. From the later thirteenth century on, however, male medieval religious and medical authorities attempted to invade the sphere of child care by explaining to male lay readers that it was potentially unhealthful or immoral for a young child if women caregivers were left to their own devices without the male head of the household carefully overseeing them.3 Among other

for the laity in Barcelona, the Catalan-speaking regions and beyond, advised that the hiring and oversight of wet nurses, like all domestic servants, was to be the responsibility of the child’s father, the master of the house. Thus it seems that fourteenth-century mothers faced moralized encroachments on their autonomy in what had been a female sphere of action;; at least in the normative world of vernacular medical tracts and lay devotional manuals. According to Llull, a father was to decide how long an infant or toddler was to be breastfed, when he or she was to be weaned, and with what other foodstuffs the growing child was to be nourished. He was to make sure that his wife did not leave their children at home under the care of unworthy servants, and he was to keep unworthy men and women from entering the family residence, let alone being employed within his home. The father’s watchful eye was imperative for the child’s proper physical and moral development.4Given the relationship that obtains between Joaneta and Gueraula as employer

and wet nurse, it is tempting to conclude that ideal and practice did not line up where the care of young children was involved. Some evidence concerning the employment of wet nurses from late medieval Europe, however, seems consonant with the idealized portrait of paternal control found in the normative literature. In her classic article on wet-nursing in Florence circa 1300–1530,

negotiations surrounding the care of their nursing infants and toddlers as recorded in the ricordanze

The agreement was usually reached by the natural father and the balio [the wet nurse’s husband] “alone” [word used by Eliseo Marmelini, a Bolognese father writing in the early 1500s], sometimes between the father and the couple of the

3 See Rebecca Lynn Winer, “Conscripting the Breast: Lactation, Slavery and Salvation in the Realms of Aragon and Kingdom of Majorca, c. 1250–1300,” Journal of Medieval History, 34, 2 (2008): 164–84;; William MacLehose, “A Tender Age”: Cultural Anxieties Over the Child in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (New York, 2006), chapter 1.

4 For an analysis of ideas about child care in Llull’s works, Doctrina Pueril, and , see Winer, “Conscripting the Breast,” 164–6.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

The Mother and the Dida [Nanny] 57

nursing parents, and sometimes between the father and the nurse alone. Hardly ever is the mother mentioned.5

Klapisch-Zuber concludes that the wet-nursing system as practiced in late medieval Florence had much more to do with the lineage strategies of fathers than it did with the needs of mothers and infants.6 Florentine Fathers seemingly also managed the particulars of breastfeeding. Fathers decided whether a free or unfree wet nurse was best and whether the child should stay home or move into the residence of the nurse and her husband in the countryside. Fathers moved the child to a different

And fathers decided when the child should be weaned.

to the rest of the later medieval Mediterranean, however. Nor does the situation in

of the fourteenth.7 In fact, I will argue that the control that mothers exercised over the breastfeeding and care of their young children in fourteenth-century Barcelona

among the city’s families of the elite social ranks exerted active control over child care in fourteenth-century Barcelona. Fathers—and, what is more, notaries—often seem to have expected them to do so, indicating that such control by elite

local case studies of the history of wet-nursing across a broader geographical and chronological scope. It is to this project that my essay contributes. Based on some of the earliest documentation on wet-nursing in the urban context, preserved in Barcelona’s notarial archives, I argue that the social rank of employers, the social rank of the wet nurse, and the setting in which a young child was cared for in her

infant, and wet nurse. These variables shaped radically different experiences for mothers, caregivers, and young children. I begin by reviewing the types of sources available;; go on to consider the backgrounds and working conditions of those who served as wet nurses;; the sex, marital status, and social rank of those who employed wet nurses in my records;; and the reasons why employers hired wet nurses to feed their children. Finally, I focus in on what the documentation reveals and implies about the relationships between women employers and the wet nurses who nourished their children.

5 Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “Blood Parents and Milk Parents: Wet-nursing in Florence, 1300–1530,” in Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago, 1985), 143.

6 Klapisch-Zuber, ‘Blood Parents and Milk Parents.” See also idem, “The ‘Cruel Mother’: Maternity, Widowhood, and Dowry in Florence in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” in Women, Family and Ritual, 117–31.

7 Although the chronological scope of Klapisch-Zuber’s study runs from 1300 to 1530, only 16 of the total of 84 Florentine fathers came from 1399 or earlier. See Klapisch-Zuber, “Blood Parents and Milk Parents,” 133, n. 5.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

58

Employment Contracts and Terms of Service for Wet Nurses

The time frame chosen for this study begins in 1295, with the earliest reference to a wet nurse in a notarial register from Barcelona. It ends in 1380, before the last major demographic crisis of the city in the fourteenth century, precipitated by a new wave of plague in 1381. Initially I had thought to focus on pre-plague models, considering 1348 to be the watershed in the business of wet-nursing. Widespread mortality increasingly challenged societal norms of labor and, soon after the

as wet nurses in Barcelona. However, as will be explored in more depth below, the social ranks of employers and wet nurses appearing in the record do not seem to

There are a total of 122 references concerning 117 separate transactions extant in the surviving notarial protocols from 1295 through 1380.8 These entries relate to free wet nurses and their employers, their former employers, or other associates;; and to a much lesser degree enslaved wet nurses, with occasional references to the children of enslaved wet nurses.The sources on wet-nursing in Barcelona from the fourteenth century are

up 75 of the total 117 extant transactions. Of these, 75 total employment contracts, one-third (25) come from before the Black Death in 1348 (only six come from before 1330—with one or two contracts of hire per decade from 1290s–1310s). The remaining 50 employment contracts were made from the fall of 1348 to 1379. Most of the contracts of hire are complete, but a handful break off before all of the details of the contract were entered.9 After the employment contract, the next

instrument, the receipt—a document in which the wet nurse or her husband (or her parent if she is underage or her owner if she is unfree) acknowledged payment of her salary. Finally, a few other types of references also survive: bequests in testaments, slave sales of lactating women, slave rentals, and contracts concerning slaves working as wet nurses to earn their freedom.The employment contracts of wet nurses were labor contracts—like those of

apprentices, skilled laborers, or domestic servants—and accordingly share many

8 Hernando’s digest numbers 117 entries for this period, but entry #54 does not exist. See Hernando i Delgado, “L’alimentació làctia,” 74. (There are also two extant copies of the documents in entries 31, 48, 50, 72, and 94.) I have also included an additional wet nurse contract, which does not appear in Hernando’s digest;; the last section of the date is damaged, but what is legible appears as 11 January of a year in the 1360s: AHCB, Notarial, X. 1, s.n., cedula.

9 In fourteenth-century Barcelona, notaries drafted parchments for their clients and were legally obliged to register complete copies of these parchments into two additional protocols. Sometimes lax notaries gave no more than a partial summary in one of the additional protocols and only that copy has survived. See Laureà Pagarolas i Sabaté, “Introducció,” in Inventari de L’Arxiu històric de protocols de Barcelona, I Segles XIII–XV [Barcelona, 2001], 9–21.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


of the same features while also displaying some peculiarities of their own.10 Employment contracts relating to wet-nursing tend to include the following information: the name of the wet nurse (and, if she were married, the consent of her husband);; the name(s) of her employer(s);; the name of the child she was to

providing milk and statements that she was hired to care for the child in general,11 the length of time the wet nurse would be employed;; the penalties the wet nurse

way;; and the amount she was to receive as salary. Her wages were reckoned and usually paid annually or, less commonly, monthly (the norm for those nursing a child for a shorter term and/or caring for the child in their own homes). The salary payment was often supplemented with an additional sum to purchase a change of clothes;; plus the towels, cloths, and sheets that the nurse required for her work, or the grant of these necessary items themselves.The majority of wet nurses appearing in these employment contracts were to

reside in the homes of their employers;; in the exceptional cases where the nursling 12 Since wet

nurses were domestic servants in a position of some trust they also regularly state that they will faithfully discharge their responsibilities concerning the possessions of their employers as well as their charges.13 Additionally, like most employment contracts for domestic servants living under their employers’ roofs, the contracts include clauses concerning the provision of food, drink (and sometimes shoes), and promises to care for the wet nurse in sickness and in health.14

10 For more on labor contracts in the Catalan political orbit, see Josep Baucells i Reig, “L’estament dels aprenents dels segles XIII i XIV segons els contractes notarials de Barcelona,” Estudios históricos y documentos de los Archivos de Protocolos, 6 (1978): 85–142;; Stephen Bensch, “Apprenticeship, Wages and Guilds at Puigcerdà (1260–1300),” in Salvador Claramunt, ed., El món urbà a la corona d’Aragó del 1137 als decrets de nova planta (3 vols, Barcelona, 2003), vol. 1, 209–22;; “Apprenticeship and Work,” in Kathryn L. Reyerson and Debra A. Salata, ed. and trans., Medieval Notaries and Their Acts: The 1327–1328 Register of Jean Holanie (Kalamazoo, 2004), 38–44;; and an honors thesis by Elizabeth Comuzzi, “Apprenticeship and Wage Labor in Castelló d’Empúries 1260–1300” (Highest Honors, Thesis in Medieval Studies, Swarthmore College, 2011).

11 ACB Notaris, vol. 2, f. 125 (8 August 1295): “faithfully and diligently I will provide

her” [ ].

12 See Hernando i Delgado, “L’alimentació làctia,” 48 and ACB Notaris, vol. 38, f.128 (10 June 1339).

13 1300), f.11v: “I will take care of your daughter and manage your goods well and faithfully during the time in which I will be staying with you” [

]. 14


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

60

Since a woman’s marital status affected her legal agency, special clauses were included that relate to the marital status of the wet nurse. If the wet nurse were married, as was usually the case, it was the norm for her husband to give his legally binding approval of her employment. In some earlier contracts, moreover, the nurse’s husband swore explicitly that he would not engage in sexual relations with his wife while she was serving as a wet nurse.15 If the wet nurse were a single woman, she usually presented another person as her surety, ensuring the quality and reliability of her milk supply, her good behavior as caregiver, and her commitment not to abandon her position.16

charges: young children, the future of the families and patrician lineages that they served. Medieval parents wanted assurances that the wet nurses were truly reliable in attending to the welfare and needs of their charges. Promises of good pay and treatment were balanced by an intimidating clause in which the wet nurse acknowledged that her employer had the right to hunt her down and force her to return to her position should she desert it.17 Moreover, one entry in a notarial register reveals that this was not an empty threat. On 21 April 1337, the master draper Pere Duran went to the castle prison to take custody of Guillemona, who had been serving as a wet nurse in his home.18 Guillemona had been captured by the vicar of Barcelona on her master’s behalf and was being held until Pere Duran came to get her. The rights of a wet nurse, here not even given a surname, paled in comparison to the entitlements and resources of her elite employer. Moreover, in 1356, the patricians of the city legislated against wet nurses who deserted their nursling charges. The city’s ruling council, the Consell de Cent, set a penalty of 100 sous and 20 days in the castle prison for any woman who promised to serve

who had served as her surety or promised service on her behalf, such as her parent or husband.19Aspects of individual employment contracts provide possible explanations for

why a woman like Guillemona might try to run from her responsibilities. Wet nurses routinely left their own young families behind in order to enter service,

15 ACB Notaris, vol. 3, f. 11v (22 February 1300);; ACB Notaris, vol. 4, f. 74–74v (25 July 1301);; and ACB Notaris, vol. 32, f. 79v (10 January 1337).

16 As the wet nurse Guillema, daughter of Ramon Marg […], did Ramon Bistoch on 8 August 1295. ACB Notaris, vol. 2, f. 125 (8 August 1295): “Through faith;; Ramon Bistoch, dwelling at the dyeworks in the middle of the street of Sant Pere, will be bound to you concerning the aforementioned, etc.” [Fide. R. Bistocii tincturarium commorante in carria

] 17 As ACB Notaris, vol. 2, f. 125 (8 August 1295): “… that I will be faithful and

lawful to you and that I will not depart from you within the aforementioned time period;; and if I do [depart] you may seize me whereever [I am] and lead me back into your power” [

].18 ACB Notaris, vol. 35, s.n. (21 April 1337).19 AHCB Libre de Consell, XIX, f. 73.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


and the temptation or need to return must, at times, have been great. This is why on 13 April 1314, Brunissén, daughter of Gueraula, an unmarried seamstress from the diocese of Girona, was required to swear to her employer, Bernat de Puigventós, that she would not stop nursing his son, Llorenç, in order to feed her own daughter, Margarida.20 We get a further sense of the desperation that some women may have felt in a later document, from 7 July 1391.21 Maria, daughter of Gonzalvo de Triacastela, was a young, unmarried mother of eighteen years of age from far-off Castile. Somehow Maria found herself in Barcelona with her three-month old son, seemingly without any other family. This woman entered into a contract to breastfeed the six-month-old Joanet, son of Isabel, widow of the honrat merchant, Hug de Montagut, for two years. Maria promised that she would continue to reside with Isabel and her household whether in Barcelona, Valencia, or elsewhere in the Realms of Aragon. This peripatetic existence would have made

being cared for at the home of another wet nurse (the most affordable option, and thus the one available to women like her). Maria, however, added that she would agree to the terms of employment only if she had the right to break her contract

milk for some other reason. Maria could only break her contract if these conditions were substantiated through the testimony of two elite men, a merchant and a local canon. In her situation, it seems that Maria could not easily choose to turn down the salary she would receive as a wet nurse. It also appears that Maria was trying

son to someone else’s care.Other wet nurses, possibly with toddlers of their own as opposed to young

infants, were more fortunate;; their circumstances may help us to understand the reasons that motivated single or even married women of limited means to become wet nurses. Two mothers were able to secure the ability to bring a child with them when they entered service as wet nurses.22 As long as these mothers swore not to give their own children their breast milk—the milk they had contracted away to their employers’ children —they enjoyed the favorable circumstance of being allowed to feed their daughter or son from their employers’ larders. In times of economic hardship for their families this may even have secured the survival of the wet nurse’s child. Two other wet nurses obtained promises from their employers that their husbands could come to live in their employers’ households while their wives cared for them should they fall ill. Provisions for the husbands, however, were to be paid out of the wet nurses’ salaries.23

20 ACB Notaris, vol. 13, f. 30v–31 (13 April 1314).21 AHPB Bernat Nadal, Manual (7 June 1391–2 January 1392), 58/8, f. 18v–19.22 AHPB Pere Borell, Manual (13 June 1363–17 August 1364), 13/2, f. 38v–39v and

ACB Notaris, vol. 203, s.n. (1 October 1379). 23 ACB, Notaris, vol. 107, s.n. (4 November 1367) and AHPB Guillem de Santilari,

Sexagesimum tercium capibrevium notu[larum] (16 January 1369–11 June 1369), 20/10, f. 72v–73.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

62

For fourteenth-century Barcelona, employment contracts are the most common type of notarial entry concerning wet-nursing to survive. Overall these concern wet nurses who were freeborn women;; domestic servants who resided in the homes of their employers and were bound tightly to the families they served. Wet nurses were entrusted with great responsibilities and often had to make even

searching out the most advantageous situations for themselves and their families.

Service as a Wet Nurse

From 1295 to 1380, wet nurses in Barcelona could expect to receive higher salaries than other adult women in domestic service. And wet nurses’ salaries more than tripled after the Black Death, moving from a range of 40 to 96 sous of Barcelona per annum before 1348 to that of 140 to 360 sous soon afterward (1348 to 1362) and continuing to rise, reaching 240 to 420 sous in 1363 to 1370.24 Even though freeborn wet nurses became increasingly expensive to hire, they were still in the majority in the notarial entries in 1380. It seems that the preference for freeborn women over slaves survived the demographic crises and the ensuing economic re-adjustments of the labor market that hit Barcelona after the plagues of 1348, 1362, and 1370/71.Indeed, in the surviving notarial documentation, free wet nurses outnumber

the enslaved by 13 to one: in 117 references, there are only nine mentions of slaves (and two of freedwomen) working as wet nurses. Furthermore, the details of the record imply that several of the enslaved wet nurses were not ordinary domestic servants, but their masters’ concubines. Three enslaved mothers worked as wet nurses, breastfeeding their own children by their masters to gain their freedom;; they were to be manumitted upon weaning the nurslings. If the enslaved breastfeeding mothers are removed from the group, only around 7 percent of wet nurses working in Barcelona before 1381 were enslaved. This small percentage of enslaved wet nurses raises the question as to how desirable it was to have these women, many of them newly baptized into the Christian faith, breastfeed the elite children of Barcelona.Moreover, anecdotal evidence implies that the enslaved were not elite masters’

enslaved woman Margarida was rented out by her master, the merchant Berenguer

agent, for only two and a half months.25 Perhaps Ramon’s child was on the verge of weaning (his age is not given), but it is also possible that Margarida was used as a “stop gap” wet nurse while Ramon and his family were looking to hire a more suitable freeborn woman long term.

24 Hernando i Delgado, “L’alimentació làctia,” 52–3.25 AHPB Felip Gombau, Llibre comú (10 January 1370–30 March 1370), 37/4,

f. 7v–8.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


The preferences concerning wet nurses for one prominent family can be surmised from a case study of this elite household’s staff. The ciutadà honrat En Pere Conamines, listed as a member of the Consell de Cent in 1356, was one of the most wealthy and powerful men in Barcelona.26 Like most elites, Conamines and his wife Serena owned slaves;; an enslaved wet nurse would not have been a complete anomaly in their household,27 however, the names of the six freeborn women who breastfed the couple’s six children are preserved. On 21 April 1368, six local women who had served as wet nurses collected bequests left by the late Serena, wife of Pere de Conamines.28 All of these wet nurses had been married

The Conamines could easily have purchased women to care for their infants, but instead chose to employ freeborn wet nurses whose families (and thus sureties)

glean reliable information concerning their reputations. The wealthy and powerful Conamines, of all employers, would have had the ability to choose the best wet nurses available. And it would seem that the Conamines family preferred freeborn married women from the city over unmarried mothers, the enslaved, and rural women.The Conamines family’s preference for freeborn, married wet nurses seems

to have been shared by their contemporaries. Sixty-one out of the 74 wet nurses in the employment contracts were married. The vast majority of wives entered into their contracts as the primary actors but with the attendant consent of their husbands (52 of 61). Married women usually acted on their own (only eight of the

promised that Ferrer would report in at a later time to approve her transaction.29 Only once, in 1378, was a married woman, Maria, wife of Bernat Carabaça, put into service by her husband, like a child apprentice, under-aged domestic servant, or enslaved wet nurse might be—and Maria Carabaça declared that she was quite young, just 14 years old.30 In sum, married wet nurses were expected to produce

26 Carme Batlle i Gallart, El “llibre del consell” de la ciutat de Barcelona XIV (Barcelona, 2007), 500. His daughter Joaneta, listed below as a nursling, would grow up to marry the vice admiral Galceran Marquet.

27 A former slave of Pere Conamines’s family appeared as a freedman on 29 May 1370, purchasing an enslaved woman and then marrying her. See Josep Hernando i Delgado, Els esclaus islàmics a Barcelona: Blancs, negres, llors i turcs: De l’esclavitud a la llibertat (s. XIV) Milà i Fontanals, Departament d’Estudis Medievals), 241.

28 ACB Notaris, vol. 182, s.n. (21 April 1368);; see below.29 AHPB Francesc de Ladernosa, Tricesimum secundum capibrevium (4 May 1364–4

December 1364), 23/15, f. 48v–49. 30 AHPB Berenguer Escuder, Primum Manuale (30 December 1377–22 November

1378), 46/1, f. 27–27v.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

64

their husbands as sureties for their transactions, but they almost always appear in the contracts as legal adults primarily responsible for their own actions.

The Employers

On 20 October 1374, Eulàlia, wife of Guillem Oliver of the king’s household, acting alone, employed Joana, wife of Joan Ferran, of Barcelona, to wet nurse her infant son, Joanot Oliver, for two years for a salary of 18 pounds.31 After that initial period of service ended, Eulàlia reserved the right to set the future salary and extend the time Joana was to care for her son as she wished. Eulàlia seems to have chosen her son’s wet nurse herself, and she was to decide on her own when the boy would be weaned. Many women in fourteenth-century Barcelona wielded similar authority. Yet mothers do not always appear as employers of wet nurses;; indeed, fathers act more frequently. Thus it is important to evaluate and contextualize the agency of mothers as employers of the women who cared for their babies and young children.

the types of mothers and fathers who appear in the documentation. Again, the

employment contracts and receipts for salary payments. Here is the breakdown on who appeared hiring wet nurses:

Table 3.1 Employers of wet nurses in employment contracts from 1295–1380

Fathers 50

Married Mothers 19

Widowed Mothers 2

Father and grandmother 1

Parents jointly 1

Grandmother 1

Unknown/Incomplete 1

Total 75

The other common document concerning wet nurses was the salary payment receipt, typically drawn up when the wet nurse was paid at the end of the term of service but sometimes given several times during service. Among the receipts mothers appear over one-third of the time (in nine of 25), and fathers appear in

31 AHPB Pere Martí, Llibre XXX (7 September 1374–1 January 1375), 17/19, f. 61.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


slightly more than half (13 of 25 receipts).32 Thus in receipts, as in employment contracts, mothers appear frequently negotiating and settling accounts with their

children’s wet nurses, but fathers appear more often.Given the autonomy of many mothers in this sphere, an explanation is in

surrounding wet-nursing. For widows, like Joaneta, widow of Pere d’Hort, who appeared settling accounts with the wet nurse Gueraula at the beginning of this chapter, their legal status as widows can account for their autonomous oversight of their servants. Joaneta probably had custody of her daughter and control over her assets as her sole guardian, an administrative position that gave Joaneta full power

documents, twice as many widows appear paying wet nurses their salaries than wives.As a married woman, Eulàlia, wife of Guillem Oliver of the king’s household,

did not share such complete legal autonomy, but she acts with regard to her child’s wet nurse as if she did. And she was not alone, when examining the total of 75 employment contracts for wet nurses;; married women are found much more often than widows acting as employers (19 wives and 2 widows). Wives are the initial employers of wet nurses in around one of four employment transactions.From a legal standpoint, it is surprising to see married women appear hiring

at all. If a married woman hired a wet nurse in her own name, she renounced the protections of the Senatus Consultum Velleianum—that is, she made her dowry funds and paraphernalia [extra dotal possessions sequestered from her husband’s control] liable for repayment of the wet nurse’s salary.33 Thus on 3 April 1336. Lady Sibil·∙la, wife of the honorable knight Humbert de Fenollar, and her son’s wet nurse, Saurina, wife of Bartomeu de Solanet, concluded their legal arrangements with both married women renouncing the Senatus Consultum Velleianum and swearing to act in good faith towards each other.34 A pair of documents makes

herself crystal clear. On 14 March 1374, ciutadà honrat and widower, Ramon de Màrgens, received an acknowledgment from his child’s wet nurse, Benvinguda, wife of Guillem Torra, for the receipt of her salary. An earlier contract between the parties, made on 1 March 1374, reveals that the wet nurse Benvinguda, wife of

32 Three receipts belong to two male guardians of the nursling and one legal heir of a late nursling. In 1355 one father, Pere de Casavella, appears three times with the same wet nurse, perhaps weighting the percentage of fathers in the receipts more heavily than need be. See ACB Notaris, vol. 102 (16 April), 103 (21 May), and 151 (25 October), all s.n.

33 For the legal rights of married women and the Senatus Consultum Velleianum, see Rebecca Lynn Winer, Women, Wealth, and Community in Perpignan, c.1250–1300: Christians, Jews and Enslaved Muslims in a Medieval Mediterrean Town (Aldershot, 2006), 35–6, and Marie Kelleher, The Measure of Woman: Law and Female Identity in the Crown of Aragon (Philadelphia, 2010), 58–61.

34 ACB Notaris, vol. 32, f.11–11v (3 April 1336). See appendix, document one.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

66

Guillem Torra, had originally contracted with Clareta, wife of Ramon de Màrgens, to come and live “with her” and care for “her” infant.35 There de Màrgens describes his legal position as that of legal administrator of the estates of his children, who are his deceased wife’s heirs. This means that de Màrgens took over Clareta’s debts to

Clareta negotiated the terms of employment for Benvinguda she contracted to pay Benvinguda’s salary out of her own personal funds (her dowry and paraphernalia).

married women hiring and paying wet nurses should be read as a testament to how seriously these mothers took their responsibilities surrounding the feeding and care of their infants and young children, and even as an indication that in

activity served to hide their social importance in selecting, hiring, and managing the wet nurses of their children. Although the Florentine ricordanze paint a picture of male control over the business decisions involving wet nurses, Klapisch-Zuber

Prato gives a slightly different impression of the day-to-day responsibilities.36 In her correspondence, the married Margherita Datini describes helping her friends and

knowledge about judging a prospective candidate’s milk supply. It thus seems likely that many more elite Italian women were also involved in the process of interviewing,

documentation alone implies.Furthermore, mothers are not the only female kin of nurslings found hiring

wet nurses;; two grandmothers also appear.37 Grandmothers were called in to help raise grandchildren who had lost one or both parents in other contexts;; paternal grandmothers sometimes served as legal guardians alongside their daughters-in-law and upon the deaths of both parents, paternal grandmothers were considered good choices as guardians for underage children in the Catalan law codes.38 In the employment contracts, grandmothers worked with widowed fathers to hire wet nurses. The fact that these grandmothers had living adult sons implies that these men called on their mothers to help in choosing caregivers for their infants. Widower fathers needed advice in the absence of their wives and realized that their mothers knew more about hiring wet nurses than they did.Mothers were actively involved in the employment of wet nurses for their

children. Wives were more likely than widows to have infants and toddlers in need of wet nurses, and so, even if they had to guarantee salary payments with their own

35 AHPB Felip Gombau, Manual (17 October 1373–2 May 1374), 37/1, f. 27 and f. 30. See the appendix 3a and 3b for complete texts.

36 Klapisch-Zuber, “Blood Parents and Milk Parents,” 140.37 ACB Notaris, vol. 71., s.n. (22 October 1332) and AHCB Notarial X:6, s.n. 38 Winer, Women, Wealth, and Community, 50.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


both in general and personally to a married woman, it is not surprising that the mothers who were so visibly active in the oversight of their children’s caregivers came primarily from the political and economic elite. They were women with

Social Rank and Wet-nursing

It is now time to answer the question of exactly what kinds of families decided to employ wet nurses in fourteenth-century Barcelona. If the normative literature is our guide, it would seem that widespread concerns about the possibly harmful milk of a pregnant woman made the choice of allowing any wife to breastfeed her own child an unattractive prospect, if the family hoped to have more children in the near future.39 Among royalty and high nobility, wet nurses were the rule by 1200 at the latest, so much so that instances in which royal or noblewomen breastfed their infants after this date are worthy of comment in the chronicles, and are the subject of note in chansons de geste and saints’ lives.40 Much lower down on the social spectrum, there is evidence from the Catalan-speaking region of Roussillon, adjacent to Catalonia, of a wealthy peasant employing a wet nurse for his infant. On 12 May 1343, the prosperous farmer Antoni Blanquet, of the walled village of Clairà, paid 80 sous as an installment of the salary of Astruga, wife of Pere Sayg, the wet nurse of his infant son Francesc.41 In all of his three-generational family’s papers this is the sole record of a payment to a wet nurse. Other documents in the Blanquet family archives relate to marriage, inheritance, and the purchase of land. The receipt reveals that Antoni Blanquet was a widower;; his major concern in hiring a wet nurse may have been the recent death of his wife, Arnalda, and the need for a woman’s milk to keep their infant son alive.42 Perhaps the Blanquets as mid-fourteenth-century prosperous farmers were now in the social rank to desire a wet nurse for status reasons;; the Blanquet women received dowries of thousands of sous making one an attractive partner for a wealthy artisan in Perpignan. Given

39 See Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “Le dernier enfant: fécondité et vieillissement chez les Florentines XIVe–XVe siècles,” in Jean-Pierre Barder, François Lebrun, and René Le Mée, eds, (Paris, 1993), 277–90.

40 Winer, “Conscripting the Breast,” 183, and Valerie Fildes, Wet-nursing: A History (Oxford, 1988), 34–7, 41–3.

41 See the second document in the Appendix. For more on the Blanquet family, see my “Agents or Pawns? The Experiences of the Peasant Women of Roussillon in the Blanquet Family Parchments, 1292–1345,” in Writing Medieval Women’s Lives, ed. Charlotte Goldy and Amy Livingstone (New York, forthcoming 2012).

42 ADPO Series 1B 55, parchment, s.n. (12 May 1343). The ADPO Series 1B 55 is the Blanquet family archive consisting of 24 pieces of parchment preserved from 1292–1344 with a few additional parchments that concern the town of Clairà.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

68

the fact that Arnalda was no longer alive, however, the possibility that she and Antoni were seeking to increase the size of their family through having a wet nurse feed their son is non-existent. It seems more likely in this case that the

was safe for the infant to be weaned. Other motherless infants, less fortunate than Francesc Blanquet, were fed coddles and animal milk, but judging from the high infant mortality rate from bottle feeding before pasteurization as well as the medieval complaints of Ramon Llull against introducing animal milk before the baby reached the age of one year, the rate of gastrointestinal illness and mortality

43 So, poor fathers needed to convince a neighbor to feed a motherless child out of charity and

44

The high social rank of those who employed wet nurses in Barcelona from 1295 to 1380 can be inferred from their occupations and the fact that some explicitly describe themselves as members of the urban elite. Social status is easiest to discern for fathers. Fifty different fathers employed wet nurses during this period and all

marker of elite social rank.45 Their social spectrum spans the lower nobility to the more common artisanal crafts. At the top of the social ladder were fathers who were knights, royal courtiers, and royal or noble administrators (elite personnel attached to the household of the count-king of Aragon and Barcelona and his nobles), who make up nine of the 50 (18 percent). At the bottom, artisan fathers make up the smallest group at seven of the 50 (around 14 percent). These include three furriers,

in the urban Mediterranean, but, while some of their children climbed the social

43 For infant mortality from diarrhea during an era of bottle feeding before pasteurization, see Jacqueline H. Wolf, Don’t Kill Your Baby: Public Health and the Decline of Breastfeeding in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Columbus, 2001), especially 206–9.

44 The desperation of one widowed farmer father searching for breast milk for his infant is captured for seventeenth-century Maryland. See Lorena S. Walsh, “‘Till Death Us Do Part’: Marriage and Family in Seventeenth-Century Maryland,” in Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman, eds, The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society (New York, 1979), 141. I thank Catherine Kerrison for this reference.

45 The term appears as “venerabilis” in Latin for which the Catalan is “honrat.” A “ciutadà honrat” was a member of the urban aristocracy of later medieval and early

Cent. See Charles-Emmanuel Dufourq, “Honrats, mercaders et autre dans le Conseil des Cent au XIVeme siecle,” En la España Medieval, Norteamérica, 7 (1985): 1361–95;; http://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/ELEM/article/view/ELEM8585221361A, accessed 11 September 2011;; and James S. Amelang, Honored Citizens of Barcelona: Patrician Culture and Class Relations, 1490–1714 (Princeton, 1986).


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


ladder, they themselves were not always regarded as members of the urban elite. The other trades of miller, saddler, and carder were undistinguished. These men might have been unusually successful and prosperous as individuals, but it seems unlikely that as a group those from the less distinguished artisanal trades employed wet nurses to “keep up with the Joneses”. When their wives were deceased or too

burden.The largest group of the fathers in my records was made up of members of

the urban elite: 19 of them state explicitly that they were merchants, drapers, and notaries or term themselves “venerabilis.” An additional three did not give

as members of elite families from additional sources. For example, members of the wealthy and powerful Gualbes family, whose names are usually preceded by “venerabilis,” since they served regularly in the city’s oligarchic governing

of Barcelona in two documents.46certainty as urban elites, and with the nine from the knightly group this means

In fourteenth-century Barcelona, elite non-nobles regularly employed wet nurses.

Elite Women Employers and Wet-nursing in Barcelona

A typical woman of the elite class engaged in hiring a wet nurse was Valensona, wife of Joan d’Agres of the king’s household. Valensona was responsible for the hiring, oversight, and replacement of her child’s wet nurses. In the late spring of 1364, she acted alone to hire one wet nurse for her son Joanet, and then again a month and half later to employ another.47 Initially, on 1 May 1364, Valensona hired Saurina, wife of Pere Vives, shoemaker of Barcelona, to nurse her son for two years. Valensona may have done so with some degree of trepidation, because Valensona promised not to “expel” Saurina and her son from the household as long as Saurina had milk to nurse little Joanet. Valensona also allowed Saurina to bring her young son Francescó [Francisconus] with her and to feed him out of the household larder. Perhaps Saurina lost her milk or there was some other reason that the relationship soured, because on 16 June 1364, Valensona hired a replacement: Barcelona, wife of Guillem Gassull, from a village in the diocese

46 For the Gualbes see Batlle i Gallart, El “llibre del consell,” and also her Els Ciutadans Honrats de Barcelona: L’exemple dels Gualbes (segle xiv) (Barcelona, 2007). The entries that involve the “citizens” Gualbes are in ACB, Notaris, vol. 34, f. 41v–42 (10 January 1337) and ACB, Notaris, vol. 241, s.n. (28 Febuary 1355). In ACB Notaris, vol. 104, f. 167v–168 (26 January 1362): Jaume de Gualbes is “merchant” but not “venerabilis” as three Gualbes are in ACB Notaris, vol. 182, s.n. (21 April 1368).

47 AHPB Pere Borell, Manual (13 June 1363–17 August 1364), 13/2, f. 38v–39r and f. 118v.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

70

of Urgell. Valensona acted completely without her husband’s approval of these transactions;; she did not even renounce the Senatus Consultum Velleianum—the standard legal move of any married woman concerned about losing her own personal assets when entering business contracts.

concerns. The autonomy of elite women, knightly and merchant, has recently attracted a lot of attention among historians. This is not to say that medieval aristocratic and urban elite women were not circumscribed in their actions by the legal, economic, and social strictures of patriarchal society, but that within those

among members of their own class and great power over their inferiors as long

their allocated feminine responsibilities. Elite women thus struck a “patriarchal bargain.”48 Harris also points out that women began exercising authoritative roles in managing family estates and large households immediately after they had passed their teenage years. Married women, mothers especially, were the most

Harris’s conclusions relate well to the surviving accounts of elite women all over Europe, as well as conduct manuals which expect elite women to know how to run their extensive households, including overseeing their female servants.49 That elite medieval women, married or widowed, were key legal and economic players in their societies is increasingly supported in the context of the Iberian Peninsula.50 Research into health care has revealed for medieval Iberia that elite women were often respected for their medical knowledge.51 Noblewomen took the lead in caring for the members of their households, both relatives and servants, when they fell ill. This was part and parcel of their responsibilities as great ladies and mistresses, just as many such ladies were in charge of managing great feasts in their halls. Likewise, Barcelonines, wives and widows, who were established mistresses of elite households, participated in the hiring and oversight of their wet nurses. This appears to have been especially true of the wives of the ciutadans honrats and of men associated with the royal court.

48 Barbara Harris, English Aristocratic Women, 1450–1550: Marriage and Family, Property and Careers (New York, 2002), 9.

49 The Goodman of Paris is the most famous of these;; see Le Ménagier de Paris, ed. Georgine E. Brereton and Janet M. Ferrier (Oxford 1981).

50 Núria Silleras-Fernández, “Between Expectation and Desire: Widowhood and Sexuality in Late Medieval Iberia,” Viator, 42, 2 (2011): 353–70.

51 Cabré, Montserrat, “Medieval Women’s Writing in Catalan: Textual Inscriptions of Feminine Authority,” La Corónica, 32, 1 (2003): 23–41;; idem, “Women or Healers? Household Practices and the Categories of Health Care in Late Medieval Iberia,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 82, 1 (2008): 18–51.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


Long-term Relationships between Women Employers and Wet Nurses

A very rich and established employer could plan to hire a wet nurse for her infant hoping to keep her on for years as a nanny for her growing child. The enduring relationships that might develop between an elite woman and her children’s wet nurses are sometimes implied in the record. Serena, wife of Pere Conamines, appreciated the good care wet nurses provided for her children when they were young. On 21 April 1368, the ciutadans honrats Pere Conamines, Pere Gualbes, and Na Isabel, widow of the ciutadà honrat Ferrer Gualbes, appeared in the

will and testament. The backgrounds of Serena’s executors, her patrician husband and three members of the equally powerful Gualbes family, perhaps her own natal family members, indicate that Serena was a woman of real importance in Barcelona.52 Serena remembered all six wet nurses of her children, mentioning each one with the name of the child she breastfed:

Saurina, wife of Joan Soler, citizen of Barcelona, tanner, and the former wet nurse of Serena, junior, received 20 sous.

Sibil·∙la, wife of Pere Poal, citizen of Barcelona, innkeeper, and the former wet nurse of Isabel, received 20 sous.

Guillemona, wife of Pere Lléo, citizen of Barcelona, tailor, and the former wet nurse of Joaneta, received 20 sous.

Maria, widow of Jaume de Pedrolo, inhabitant of Barcelona, and former wet nurse of Constança, received 20 sous.

Maria, wife of Pere Sa Costa, citizen of Barcelona, shoemaker, and former wet nurse of Joan, received 20 sous.

Antònia, widow of Duran Solà, farmer of Sant Vicenç de Calders, and former wet nurse of Isabel, now dead, received 20 sous.53

Serena granted each wet nurse the same sum of 20 sous—no preference was given to the nurse of her son Joan or slight to the nurse of her daughter Isabel who had

52 The third of Serena’s executors, Bernat Gualbes, was absent that day. 53 ACB Notaris, vol. 182, s.n. [The Latin for the wet nurse Saurina, wife of Joan

Soler, reads: recognosco vobis venerabilibus Petro de Conomines, Petro de Gualbis et domine Isabeli

una cum Bernardo de Gualbis absentis testamenti seu ultima voluntatis domine Serene

]


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

72

the towels and sheets required annually for her work (ranging around 10 or 15 sous between 1295 and 1380);; and thus a nice, if not life-changing, gift. Serena’s last will and testament has not survived, making it impossible to determine the entirety of what she left in charity for the redemption of her soul. Other receipts from the same day do reveal that Serena’s legacies to her children’s wet nurses

gave more to each wet nurse than she did to feed the poor (15 sous). She left more to the Dominicans to say masses for her soul (33 sous);; to the shamefaced poor (28 sous and one denier);; to clothe the poor (70 sous);; and for the dark green cloth (expensive and often used in mourning) to clothe the men who bore her corpse to the grave (40 sous). But, although 20 sous per wet nurse was not the largest donation Serena made, as a whole the donations to the wet nurses at 120 sous total seem to have been her largest type of grant to non family members. Serena wanted the wet nurses of her children each to be remembered and rewarded for their faithful service, and these charitable acts ranked as almost as important to her as the orchestration of charity around her funeral.Some mistresses served as greater benefactresses for their former wet nurses.

On 15 February 1355, Caterina, wife of the ciutadà honrat Romeu Llull, acted to settle a family debt while her husband was absent from Catalonia. Caterina Llull promised to pay ten pounds of Barcelona to Guillem de Vilar, a blanket- maker [late Ponç Torner. The money was owed from the wet nurse’s salary, as Caterina acknowledged to the bridegroom, and these ten pounds were all that remained to be paid of Sibil·∙la’s total dowry of 45 pounds.54 It seems likely that Caterina helped to arrange this marriage and that a larger portion of the dowry than those ten

around the marriages of their wet nurses in other cases.55 Caterina appears to have been Sibil·∙la’s benefactor, rewarding her good services as wet nurse by helping her settle into a suitable marriage after her term of service was up.

Conclusions

Blanca, wife of Burguet de Sarrià, lay gravely ill on 2 July 1375,56 and one of her main priorities was to provide for her young daughter Antígona. Blanca bound her slave Caterina, who was currently acting as Antígona’s wet nurse, to the girl as her caregiver for the foreseeable future. As recompense and incentive for Caterina’s

54 AHPB Jaume Ferrer [Secundus Liber…] (8 July 1355–12 December 1360), 19/21, f. 23–23v.

55 See also ACB, Notaris, vol. 32, f. 79v (21 April 1336): The jurist Francesc de Vallseca pays dowry funds to a freedman who was the intended bridegroom of his child’s wet nurse, Margarida.

56 AHPB Guillem de Santilari, Secundus liber testamentorum (8 May 1364–19 August 1383), 20/12, f.61v.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


solicitous care of the growing girl she would be freed when Antígona reached the age of ten, or upon her death, if Antígona did not survive to that age. Caterina, the slave who nursed Blanca’s child, was considered to be this married woman’s personal property;; perhaps Blanca brought Caterina with her into her married life as part of her dowry. Blanca’s testament reveals not only that she chose who would care for her child while she was alive but also that when gravely ill she mandated that Caterina would continue in this role after her death, which came just a few days later, on 6 July 1375. Blanca judged Caterina to be a worthy person to entrust this great responsibility to on multiple levels, since Blanca did not fear to insert the clause that Caterina would be freed even if Antígona died before the age of ten, and further Caterina was to be rewarded well for her work, with her freedom.The story of Mistress Blanca, wet nurse Caterina, and nursling Antígona

differs somewhat from the mainstream in that Caterina was not free, but otherwise embodies the importance of women employers in managing the process of wet-nursing in fourteenth-century Barcelona. Elite mothers in Barcelona from 1295 to 1380 employed freeborn married women as their wet nurses and expected these women to come and live with them. This domestic situation seems to have afforded female employers with a good degree of control over their children’s caregivers. Relationships of patronage sometimes developed, when elite women intervened to improve the lives of faithful wet nurses. Blanca’s relationship to Caterina was close and long-term, like that of the freeborn wet nurse Gueraula and her employer the widow Joaneta, with which this article began. Had she not died, Blanca might have eventually become her freedwoman’s patron, helping her to

nurses did. Elite women were not expected to breastfeed their children themselves, and indeed the literature attempted to convince them that they would retain their good looks and youthfulness by not breastfeeding and instead becoming pregnant more often. Choosing and managing their wet nurses was part and parcel of the privileges and responsibilities such elite women enjoyed.The authority that elite women possessed over their wet nurses rested upon

their close, even presumably quotidian, contact with these women and with the nurslings whose care they shared. When babies and toddlers were sent out to the homes of wet nurses instead of cared for in their mothers’ homes, the mother could not have maintained the same kind of close relationship. And perhaps elite women’s authority in this area was a privilege that eroded somewhat over time. This chapter forms part of a larger project to compare wet-nursing practices in Barcelona’s Crown of Aragon, and its appanage Kingdom of Majorca, before the

of the fourteenth century may have altered the situation on the labor market and initiated an increased use of slaves as wet nurses as well as making the custom of sending infants out to the homes of peasant women to be nursed more widespread. If borne out in the notarial protocols, as my research thus far appears to indicate, such practices mark a sea change in Barcelonan society, altering the practice of wet-nursing and possibly reducing the role of the elite mother in overseeing the care


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

74

the labor of wet-nursing and altered a female employer’s relationship to the women in her household, who now were no longer free women of service with whom she frequently contracted herself but slaves whose purchase required different notarial protocols and actors. In addition, the desire to keep a wet nurse in service as a nanny for years after her charge was weaned was at odds with the needs and desires of a freeborn married wet nurse to return to her family. Hence, ideas about the importance of the good character of a free married woman and the consequent salutary effect of her milk on the child she nursed may well have given way to the desire to keep enslaved wet nurses because they could not leave their positions. The core economic and reproductive imperatives of the household remained the same, but the means deployed to ensure the family’s survival transformed the day-to-day practice of child rearing and the relationships that grew up around it. Such a state of affairs would seem to suggest that the modes of action acquired by women in different historical moments, as would also be true for men, were subject to the shifting social and economic pressures that faced the household itself as a key unit in the reproduction of families and their society at large.

Documentary Appendix (My English Translations and Latin Transcriptions)

1. ACB Notaris, vol. 32, f.11–11v (3 April 1336) [from the beginning through the terms of employment sections]:“I, Saurina, wife of Bartomeu de Solanet, of the parish of Sant Pere d’Abrera

freely etc. agree and promise to you Na [“Lady,” a polite term, not necessarily connoting nobility] Sibil·∙la, wife of the honorable knight Humbert de Fenollar, that for the next two years reckoned from today continually I will stay with you as wet nurse and nanny of Guillemó de Fenollar, your and your husband’s son, promising you that during that time I will breastfeed and take care of the said Guillemó and that I will be diligent and careful concerning the good and utility of the said Guillemó and that the things pertaining to you and the goods of yours and your husband’s which might come into my hands and my control I will keep faithfully and hand over to you. Also, I promise to you that during that time I will neither depart from you and the vicinity of the said Guillemó,nor cease suckling and caring for him. And if I do, I give you the power that you can bring me back under your control. Moreover, I promise to you that after the said time I will buy back from you all of that time during which I was absent from you by reason of

restore and buy back, according to a judicial inquiry by the prohoms [leading men of the city] if I will have done anything wrong that is missing from you.

my goods to you and yours. And so that the aforementioned pleases with greater


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


forward with any right or legal case or any reason. Concerning this I, Sibil·∙la, wife of the honorable knight Humbert de Fenollar, consenting and approving the aforementioned, promise to you Saurina that I will give you every year of the

to hand over to you and pay at your will. Further, I promise you that I will give you every year of the same two years in addition to your salary two towels and

sous. And furthermore that I promise you that during the period of the two years

you. And that during this time I will take care of you in health and in sickness, according to the use and custom of Barcelona. And in order that these things be

this renouncing freely etc. the protection of the Senatus Consultum Velleianum and all other rights etc). …”[Ego Saurina uxor Bartholomei de Solanet de parrochia Santi Petri de Brera

gratis etc. convenio et promitto vobis domine Sibilie uxor venerabilis Umberti

computandis manebo vobiscum pro lactatrice et nutrice Guillemoni de Fenollario

provincie dicti Guillemoni non recedam nec desistere eum lactare et nutrire. Et

non vi nec dolo set sponte juro per dominum deum etc. predicta attendere et

jure causa vel etiam racione. Ad hoc ego Sibilia uxor dicti venerabilis Umberti de Fonollario predicta laudans et approbans predicta promitto vobis dicte

tovalliolas et duas camisas bonas et idoneas sicut vos deceat. Et unam vestem seu mudam valentem xv sol. monete. [f.11V] vel ipsos xv sol. Ita (above: cum)


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

76

Et pro hiis complendis et attendendis. Obligo vobis et vestris omnia bona mea

consulti et omni alii juri etc.) ..]

2. ADPO 1B55, s.n. (12 May 1343), Clairà, Roussillon, France. A small parchment.“When the most serene lord, our lord prince and by the grace of God, most

illustrious king of the Majorcas [Balearic islands] was reigning, in the nineteenth year of his reign and the seventh after his coronation and in the year of the Incarnation of Our Lord, the twelfth day of the month of May 1343, let all men know that I, Pere Sayg, of Clairà, for myself and all of mine, aknowledge and in truth recognize to you Antoni Blanquet, of the same village of Clairà, and yours that you paid to me fully and completely according to my will, by various payments, four crowned pounds of Barcelona de tern [eighty sous]—of which

Perpignan—of those one hundred sous of Barcelona of the said value, for which Astruga, my wife, must breastfeed for one full year Francesc, your son and that of Arnalda your late wife, in addition to those seven months and ten days my wife has now breastfed your son. And thus concerning the four pounds from you through stipulation not bound to me [I am] renouncing thence every objection on the grounds that the money was not paid out making thence to you and yours a pact and perpetual agreement not to seek anything more on account of the aforesaid and not to undertake any additional legal suit, statutory law, or legal claim on account of the aforesaid, nevertheless, I promise, agree and make a contract to you, Antoni Blanquet, and yours, in conformity with the pact between me and you being kept, that my wife will breastfeed your son for the year during which she had to breastfeed your son and is bound during those seven months and ten days during which now she has breastfed your son on account of each and every aforesaid thing

future goods to you and yours. And I, Antoni Blanquet, approve all these things under the aforementioned pacts and conditions. This is enacted and approved at Clairà on the aforementioned day, month and year with the witnesses Joan Castell and Pere Roig and Ramon Guirandi, scribe, present, all from the village of Clairà. I the aforementioned Ramon Guirandi, notary of the said village of Clairà, by the authority of our illustrious lord, king of the Majorcas [Balearic Islands] made the

made this mark.”[Serenissimo domino nostro domino Jacobo principe et illustrissimo dei gratia


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


renuncians inde omni exceptioni peccunie non numerate faciendo inde tibi et tuis

pactis et conditionibus predictis haec omnia laudo. Quod est actum et laudatum Clayrani die mense et anno predictis presentibus testibus Johanne Castilionis Petro Rubey et Raymundo Guirandi scriptor omnibus dicti loci de Clayrano. Ego prefatus Raymundus Guirandi scriptor publicus dicti loci de Clayrano auctoritate

recepi et scripsi et in formam publicam redegi et hoc signum feci.]

3. Pair of Related Protocol Entries: AHPB Felip Gombau, Manual (17 October

entry is 1 March 1374 and of the second is 14 March 1374.a. “I, Benvinguda, wife of Guillem Torra, shield maker, citizen of Barcelona,

acknowledge and recognize to you, the honorable Ramon de Màrgens, citizen of Barcelona, as father and legal administrator for your children and [also] the heirs of your late wife Clareta, by right of their being her children, that you paid me nine pounds, two sous and six diners of Barcelona de tern from those twenty pounds of the money of Barcelona which the lady your late wife promised to give me as salary for one year during which I promised to stay with her to breastfeed, which [period] began in the middle of last July until one year following. Releasing, [my claim to the sum paid] with rights in tact for the remainder. [The] witnesses [are] Ferran Marquet and Bernat Piles, members of the household of the honorable Ramon de Màrgens.”[a.

recognosco vobis venerabili Raimundo de Marginibus civi Barchinone patre et


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

78

preteriti ad unum annum proximum venturum renuncians et salviis juribus pro

Raimundo de Marginibus. ]b. “Tuesday, the 14th day of the month of March, in the year of the birth of

the lord 1374. I, Benvinguda, wife of Guillem Torra, shield maker and citizen of Barcelona, acknowledge and recognize to you the honorable Ramon de Màrgens, citizen of Barcelona, that you paid me twelve pounds, 14 sous and six diners of the money of Barcelona de tern as salary for the seven months and nineteen days during which I stayed with you to breastfeed prorated from twenty Barcelonine pounds;; releasing [my claim to this sum]. And I Guillem Torra, husband of the said Benvinguda, agree. [The] witnesses [are] Pere Girona and Picò Roig, citizens of Barcelona.”b. [Die Martis xiiij die mensis Marcii anno a nativitate domini MCCCLxxiiij

et recognosco vobis venerabili Raimundo de Marginibus civi Barchinone

Barchinone de terno de solidata septem mensium et decem et novem dierum per

Renuncians et Guillemus Torra maritus dicte domine Benvenguda [sic: Benvengude] consentio. .t. Petrus Gerona et Piconus Rubei cives Barchinone. ]


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Chapter 4 Peasants at the Palace:

Wet Nurses and Aristocratic Mothers in Early Modern Rome

Caroline Castiglione

Among the visual riches of the stunning Villa Aurora belonging to the Boncompagni

be easy to overlook (Figure 4.1). Long and narrow but colorfully decorated, the room was once used for the family donkey, which provided milk for the Boncompagni Ludovisi children. In the early twentieth century, Princess Nicoletta Boncompagni Ludovisi believed such milk to be safer and more nutritious for the children than any other type of animal milk.1research, the theory of the princess (which has had some adherents since ancient Greece) was indeed correct, and donkey milk is now known to be closer to human milk than any other animal alternatives and better for children with allergies than any other source, including soy milk.2 The eventual acceptance of animal milk substitutes as viable alternatives to human milk was one of the most profound transformations in the rearing of infants and toddlers in western Europe.3 For most of the preceding centuries, human milk was considered the only truly acceptable sustenance for newborns and toddlers.4 By incorporating donkey milk into child

1 Personal communication, Princess Rita Boncompagni Ludovisi and Prince Nicolò Boncompagni Ludovisi, 30 June 2011.

2 Stephanie Hegarty, “Donkey Milk Can Help Children with Milk Allergies,” BBC News Health (12 May 2011): http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-13208989 [25 February 2011].

3 The advent of sterilization, the use of the modern bottle, and the rubber nipple in the late nineteenth century doubtless fueled the acceptance and the safety of breast milk substitutes. See George D. Sussman, Selling Mothers’ Milk: The Wet-Nursing Business in France, 1715–1914 (Urbana, 1982), 11. Successful use of animal milk in the feeding of foundlings in Paris in the nineteenth century also contributed to the shift in attitudes toward animal milk. Valerie Fildes, Breasts, Bottles, and Babies: A History of Infant Feeding (Edinburgh, 1986), 268–77;; Barbara Orland, “Enlightened Milk: Reshaping a Bodily Substance into a Chemical Object,” in Ursula Klein and E.C. Spary, eds, Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe: Between Market and Laboratory (Chicago, 2010), 163–97.

4 Animal milk had been maligned due to the erroneous belief that through it the child would imbibe the qualities of the animal into her or his character. Fildes, Breasts, Bottles,


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

80

Fig. 4.1 Villa Aurora, detail, “The Donkey Room.” Photo Credit: © Marco Mancini.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Peasants at the Palace 81

nutrition, the Boncompagni Ludovisi family could rely upon milk providers

generations of the family who did not breastfeed their offspring had instead to seek a large number of human milk providers, or wet nurses, in order to rear the next generation of the dynasty. Into noble domiciles therefore once came many women to breastfeed the children, a widespread practice that this article will illuminate from its remaining traces in the documents of Roman noble archives.

nurses, and children in such families, even though such exchanges were crucial in the rearing of children in aristocratic, well-to-do, and even some artisanal families. The recourse to wet nurses was common among elite classes and had been practiced since antiquity, despite the opposition of some critics.5 Sexual intercourse, pregnancy, and menstruation were thought to ruin the milk for the baby’s consumption, hence the reliance by elite parents upon a lactating woman to succor their offspring, so that they could return to the task of procreation.6 European women of more modest means typically sustained their own offspring with their breast milk.7 Until the enthusiasm for breastfeeding one’s own children swept

and Babies, 53–4;; 179–82;; Orland, “Enlightenend Milk,” 172. Animal milk substitutes were clearly used, however, in a situation of emergency. Valerie Fildes, Wet Nursing: A

(Oxford, 1988), 73. 5 Early attention to wet-nursing in modern scholarship includes the work of James

Bruce Ross, “The Middle-Class Child in Urban Italy, Fourteenth to Early Sixteenth Century,” in Lloyd De Mause, ed., The History of Childhood (London, 1974), 183–228. The important interpretive and archival work of Christiane Klapisch-Zuber has shaped a generation of thinking about mothering and wet-nursing, “Blood Parents and Milk Parents: Wet Nursing in Florence, 1300–1530,” in Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 1985), 132–64. The study of wet-nursing has received the most comprehensive treatment in the wide-ranging work of Valerie Fildes: Fildes, Breasts, Bottles, and Babies;; Fildes, Wet Nursing. For an essay that outlines the basic dimensions of wet-nursing and breastfeeding in early modern Europe, see Sara Matthews Grieco, “Breastfeeding, Wet Nursing and Infant Mortality in Europe (1400–1800),” in Historical Perspectives on Breastfeeding (Florence, 1991), 15–62. For a summary of the sixteenth-century literature in the vernacular on breastfeeding, see Rudolph M. Bell, How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians (Chicago, 1999), especially 124–53.

6 These beliefs had been repeated since antiquity and continued in the writings of

Fildes, Breasts, Bottles, and Babies, 12, 179–81. 7 Class differences in breastfeeding practices were remarked upon by contemporaries.

See Bernardino Ramazzini, (Diseases of Workers), trans. Wilmer Cave Wright (New York, 1964), 177. Fildes insists that in parts of northern Europe the

likely of an even more ancient origin. By contrast, breastfeeding was more common in Mediterranean Europe. Fildes, Breasts, Bottles, and Babies, 264–5. In the more populous cities of France (and especially Paris) Sussman has documented that recourse to wet nurses


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

82

the literate classes of the continent in the eighteenth century, many aristocratic women carried out their public and domestic roles as mothers while delegating the breastfeeding of their youngest offspring to wet nurses.8 Yet the eighteenth-century equation of breastfeeding with maternal love has obscured other forms of maternal care during earlier periods, and has deemed inferior the contributions of breastfeeding women to the well-being of infants and toddlers in their care. Not all milk mothers were indifferent to their charges;; not all biological mothers were distant mothers because they did not breastfeed.9 Mothering required the collaboration of at least two women in order to be successful.This article investigates the dynamics of breastfeeding in the Roman aristocratic

household by examining epistolary evidence left by women involved in the raising of young children. Typically such evidence is fragmentary, since knowledge about breastfeeding and childrearing was shared in person and taught by showing rather

the relations between wet nurses, their employers, and the children in their care. The distance of mothers from daughters created contexts in which women wrote

10 In the late seventeenth century, one mother, Eleonora Boncompagni Borghese (1642–95), long past the years of intense childrearing, advised her much younger sister-in-law, Ippolita Ludovisi Boncompagni (1663–

circumstance that created Eleonora’s voluminous correspondence was the physical distance between her and her younger sister-in-law Ippolita, who in 1681 had married Eleonora’s twin brother, Gregorio (1642–1707). Eleonora resided in Rome (where in her youth she had married into one of the wealthiest and most prominent

could descend very far down the social order, due to the need for women’s labor. Sussman, Selling Mothers’ Milk, 9. Recently Marsha Urban has explored the advice books by women and analyzed their discussion of the recourse to wet nurses, and the encouragement on the part of some authors of maternal breastfeeding. Marsha Urban, Seventeenth-Century Mother’s Advice Books (Gordonsville, 2006), 14–18, 54–6.

8 The timing of the shift to maternal breastfeeding in the eighteenth century pertains to continental Europe, and as Sussman insists, may have been of rather limited duration. He also posits that in France the eighteenth century was “the heyday of wet-nursing.” Sussman, Selling Mothers’ Milk, 13, 19, 27, 30. Valerie Fildes underscores the extent to which in England the renewed interest in maternal nursing occurred in the seventeenth, rather than the eighteenth century. Fildes, Breasts, Bottles, and Babies, 98–9, 114–15, 117, 399. For more on the rejection of wet-nursing in the eighteenth century, see Orland, “Enlightened Milk,” 176–7.

9 Fildes. Fildes, Breasts, Bottles, and Babies, 203.

10 Marina D’Amelia, “Becoming a Mother in the Seventeenth Century: The Experience of a Roman Noblewoman,” in Anne Jacobson Schutte, Thomas Kuehn, and Silvana Seidel Menchi, eds, Time, Space, and Women’s Lives in Early Modern Europe (Kirksville, 2001), 223–44.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


families, the Borghese), while her brother and his new wife Ippolita lived about 70 miles from Rome, in the Duchy of Sora, the Boncompagni’s most prestigious territory. Although the responses of Ippolita to Eleonora’s lengthy missives have not survived, it is evident that the correspondence was mutually enthusiastic and that the younger mother’s epistolary output was similarly detailed.Eleonora’s barrage of maternal advice provides a glimpse into the lives

of the wet nurses, who, though derided by Eleonora as mere “peasants,” were fundamentally important in the successful rearing of children.11 Because the milk

of good moral standing and temperament were considered the only adequate

their character was subject to debate among Roman aristocratic women. Eleonora was skeptical about this centuries-old belief, and evaluated wet nurses in terms of the quality of their milk, rather than in terms of their moral character. Such a shift was necessary preparation for the acceptance of animal milk rather than exclusively human milk in the succoring of infants, although we know relatively little about how changes in women’s views may have contributed to its eventual acceptance. Some of Eleonora’s views anticipated modern developments by many decades, yet she also resisted the new intrusions of physicians into the sphere of rearing infants and young toddlers. A key goal of her correspondence was to tutor Ippolita in this female-centered domain as well as to sustain the superiority of milk against the broths and medicines proscribed by physicians. Thus this article will capture a view of breastfeeding in which both novel and ancient ideas were intertwined. Both were sustained by Eleonora’s respect for breast milk, which was not only food but also medicine, the best barrier against the illness and death of the child. In a world where animal milk was not yet considered safe or advisable for children, feeding infants and toddlers could not be accomplished by allocating a room for the family donkey. An aristocratic mother therefore sought many women who could make the milk that, according to Eleonora, might make the difference between the life and death of the child.

Making Milk and Raising Babies in the Aristocratic Household

Well-born and wealthy women’s involvement in childrearing has been undervalued partly due to the recourse to wet nurses, who, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber argued,

century.12 As female literacy increased, however, aristocratic women in particular began to generate considerable epistolary evidence that indicates a deep level of involvement with the growth and development of their children, even if other women nursed them as infants. Such correspondence underscores the intense role

11 Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Arch. Boncompagni Ludovisi, b. 899 [11 August 1685]. 12 Klapisch-Zuber, “Blood Parents and Milk Parents,” 143–4, 153, 156.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

84

mothers played in the wet-nursing of children during the seventeenth century, in

nurses.13 The mother’s successful pairing of her child with his or her wet nurse was

in the seventeenth century, Anna Colonna, wife of the pope’s nephew, struggled through interviews and physical reviews of a variety of potential wet nurses in

14 Pouring out her troubles to her husband, Taddeo Barberini, Anna acknowledged the stresses not only of choosing but also of changing the wet nurse, when the child no longer appeared to be thriving, or worse still, when the family physician cautioned that unless the wet nurse were replaced, the child’s life might be in danger.15 For inexperienced mothers the dilemmas were especially disconcerting, even more so when the woman felt isolated and without familial support in the household. One young such young woman, Olimpia Giustiniani, wrote a desperate letter to her grandmother, Olimpia Maidalchini,

having trouble with her supply of milk.16 Selecting the wet nurse was thus only the beginning of the mother’s work, not the end.Since aristocratic women tended to bear a large number of children, they

years of childbearing. Due to complications related to her last pregnancy, Eleonora herself bore only four children who lived to adulthood. But Eleonora’s mother, Maria Ruffo Boncompagni (1620–1705), had borne 13 children in 16 years, a high rate of fertility enhanced by the birth of three sets of twins. Aristocratic women’s generally high fertility was in part the outcome of the reliance upon wet nurses. Since they did not breastfeed, aristocratic women did not experience lactational amenorrhea, and could thus become pregnant not long after giving birth. Further fuelling their household’s need for wet nurses was also the fact that children were weaned between two and three years old. Hence the frequency in Baroque paintings of images of the Madonna nursing a child who appeared to be a toddler rather than an infant, as can be seen in Artemisia Gentileschi’s Madonna Feeding the Christ Child (Figure 4.2). The other popular image of nursing appeared in the

to several (sometimes impatient) children in turn (Figure 4.3).17 Such benevolence

13 Ibid. 14 Caroline Castiglione, “Mothers and Children,” in John Jeffries Martin, ed., The

Renaissance World (New York/London, 2007), especially 390–391. 15 Castiglione, “Mothers and Children.” 16 Archivio Doria Pamphilj, Archiviolo, Busta 349, folio 197r. [4 August 1657]. 17 See also additional images of the female life course analyzed by Caroline P.

Murphy, “Il Ciclo della vita femminile: Norme comportamentali e pratiche di vita,” in Sara F. Matthews-Grieco, ed., with the assistance of Sabrina Brevaglieri, Monaca, moglie, serva, cortigiana: Vita e imagine delle donne tra Rinascimento e Controriforma (Florence, 2001), 14–47.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


Fig. 4.2 Artemisia Gentileschi, Madonna Feeding the Christ Child, 1610–

Soprintendenza Speciale per il Patrimonio Storico, Artistico ed Etnoantropologico e per il Polo Museale della città di Roma.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

86

had limited relevance in the noble nursery, where mothers attempted to provide one wet nurse per child when possible, allowing for the sharing of the wet nurse between children only in cases of emergency.Thus the practice of nursing children until they became toddlers and allowing

each child her or his own nurse greatly raised the number of wet nurses required. The case of Maria Ruffo Boncompagni, who bore two sets of twins early in her marriage, suggests the parameters of the problem.18 Between giving birth to the twins Gregorio and Eleonora in 1642, and weaning them about three years later,

18 Maria Ruffo Boncompagni bore two sets of twins early in her marriage: Gregorio and Eleonora (b. 7 July 1642) and Jumara and Costanza (b. 29 August 1644). Her very last two children were also twins: Antonio and Filippo (10 April 1658). For detailed genealogical information on the Boncompagni and Ludovisi families, see Gianni Venditti, ed., with the assistance of Beatrice Quaglieri, Archivio Boncompagni Ludovisi: Inventorio (5 vols, Vatican City, 2008), vol. 5.

Fig. 4.3 Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (Il Guercino), Christian Charity, c. 1625–26;; oil on canvas (93.3 x 109.9 cm), The Dayton Art Institute, Museum purchase with funds provided by Miss Anne Chapman and the Junior League of Dayton, Ohio, Inc. 1958.99. Photo Credit: The Dayton Art Institute.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


under the age of three. Breastfeeding was thus a constant activity in the noble household, and even weaned children were unlikely to give up easily on getting milk in a nursery world where breastfeeding was likely a continuous activity. Thus noblewomen supervised the care of multiple nursing children at their neediest phase of childhood while simultaneously supervising the considerable demands of older children, as did Maria Ruffo Boncompagni, who, within a decade of her marriage, had 9 children under her care.19Too few children could create stresses of another kind on the noble mother,

especially a lack of male heirs, as was the case in Gregorio Boncompagni’s generation. Due to the fact that only one of his siblings, his twin sister, Eleonora, had been allowed to marry, Ippolita’s task of bearing boys was particularly high pressured. Her husband Gregorio had fathered only one illegitimate daughter as a

Gregorio was the heir-apparent, determined to have a son, and later obsessed with worry about the boy that Ippolita eventually bore him.20 Eleonora Boncompagni Borghese wrote frequently and enthusiastically to her young motherless sister-in-law, during her years of high-pressured procreation and especially after Ippolita had provided Gregorio what he had long desired: a son, Ugo, born on 6 May 1684.

continue intermittently until his untimely death on 19 October 1686.21Initially there were only what Eleonora considered minor problems with his

Ippolita, however, warned that Lucia should be terminated immediately from service as wet nurse. He underscored that Lucia was “smutty, cantankerous and wanted her husband and was too young to be a wet nurse.”22 Since antiquity, medical texts had repeated the necessity of the good character of the nurse, even if a slave or a social inferior, since such traits were believed to have an impact upon the wet-nursing and the future character of the child.23 In other letters Lucia was referred to as “colerica,” a term the physician may have used to suggest that she literally had too much bile from the liver, putting the humors of her body out of balance (i.e., that she was too hot and dry rather than hot and moist, as

19 Venditti, ed., Archvio Boncompagni Ludovisi: Inventorio, vol. 5. 20 Arch. Boncompagni Ludovisi, b. 899 [27 June 1684]. 21

him having a seizure, mentioned in a letter from Eleonora, to her brother Gregorio.22 Ibid. [27 June 1684].23 Fildes, Breasts, Bottles, and Babies, 30–32. The qualities of a good wet nurse were

European culture until the nineteenth century. Ibid., 168–73.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

88

was the ideal humor of the wet nurse).24 Eleonora acknowledged the potentially devastating impact upon the child should Lucia damage her milk due to sexual intercourse or pregnancy.25reason so she was certainly well aware of the risks.26 Eleonora also recognized that Lucia had her shortcomings, especially in her swaddling abilities, an important

to a general decline among wet nurses, since in the old days, she observed, wet nurses made some good-looking babies, and they knew how to swaddle.27 Later, however, Lucia’s swaddling abilities evidently improved, and this seemed to the older mother another positive point in her favor, and a reason to keep her.28

that if she were in Ippolita’s place, these habits “would kind of annoy her.”29 She primarily regarded this problem, however, as an inevitable one, since the wet nurse’s youth and her desire for a husband went together.30 It was a dilemma that required the mother’s skills of diplomacy. Ippolita had to use some tact and “foresight” in keeping the wet nurse away from her husband but doing so in such a way that the wet nurse “did not get into a huff.”31 Eleonora was sanguine about the potential

mothers could control the situation: “As long as the wet nurses have our children in their hands we have to behave with them as though they were the boss.”32 She

aspect of labor relations inevitable between well-born aristocratic women and the wet nurses they employed, especially the younger wet nurses. Eleonora reduced the wet nurses to “the peasants in our houses,” with whom aristocratic women must inevitably expect some trouble.33 That the peasant wet nurse might at times have the upper hand over her aristocratic employer was evidently keenly resented

baby. Eleonora traced the behaviors of the child, Ugo, to his father, Gregorio.34 At a young age, Ugo already demonstrated a good character, and Eleonora had little doubt that he would continue to demonstrate some of the traits of his father.35

24 Arch. Boncompagni Ludovisi, 899 [23 June 1684]. On the ideal humor of wet nurses, see Fildes, Breasts, Bottles, and Babies, 172.

25 Arch. Boncompagni Ludovisi, 899 [27 June 1684].26 Ibid. [23 June 1684].27 Ibid. [27 June 1684;; 9 September 1684]. 28 Ibid. [8 July 1684]. 29 Ibid. [27 June 1684]: “...questo mi darebbe un poco di fastidio.” 30 Ibid. [8 July 1684]. 31 Ibid. [23 June 1684]. On the necessity of “prudenza,” see ibid. [8 July 1684].32 Ibid. [23 June 1684;; 8 July 1684].33 Ibid. [11 August 1685]. 34 Ibid. [8 July 1684]. 35 Ibid. [19 September 1684].


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


Boncompagni children does not seem to have appeared plausible to Eleonora and merited no mention on her part. She thus anticipated the most controversial and innovative ideas about wet-nursing by about 50 years: physicians in London would later express similar doubts, but not until the 1730s.36Rather than focus on the wet nurse’s morality, Eleonora gave greater

getting strong and big was the sign that the milk suited him.”37 Ugo’s weight gain was a source of joy for Eleonora.38 She believed that the physical formation of the child’s body at an early age would have an important impact on his future health.39 The mother must take this as the positive proof of the “quality and the quantity of the (wet nurse’s) milk,” and for Eleonora this was the most critical factor in evaluating a wet nurse.40 By comparison, the “personal matters” of her character were irrelevant in the child’s development.41 Eleonora thus rejected the centuries-

child through the consumption of her milk. The noblewoman considered the wet nurse exclusively in terms of the material quality of the milk that she provided.The physician advising the Boncompagni, however, was not without his

own devotion to material clues, and he introduced other physical evidence in his advice to dismiss Lucia, namely, that Lucia’s own daughter was not thriving. The condition of a potential wet nurse’s own offspring, that is, whether her children were physically well and well-formed, had long been a concern of noblewomen and physicians alike. Earlier in the seventeenth century, the noblewoman Anna Colonna had rejected wet nurses on this basis alone.42 Eleonora cautioned, however, that such clues had to be evaluated with care, since children’s defects could have other sources besides their mother’s milk. Although this series of potentially contradictory assessment of reading children’s bodies might have confused as much as enlightened Ippolita, Eleonora’s general principle was that the child’s preliminary good reaction to a woman’s breast milk had to be taken as the surest indication of the success of the wet nurse.43 Such success outweighed other elements, including the wet nurse’s moral character or the appearance of her offspring. Subsequent negative developments in the breastfeeding child’s health might prompt the re-evaluation of the wet nurse’s milk, but primarily according to its material outcomes in the infant.44

36 Fildes, Wet Nursing, 111–13. 37 Arch. Boncompagni Ludovisi, 899 [27 June 1684].38 Ibid. [26 August 1684].39 Ibid. [11 August 1684].40 Ibid. [27 June 1684]. 41 Ibid.42 Castiglione, “Mothers and Children,” 390–391. 43 Arch. Boncompagni Ludovisi, b. 899 [27 June 1684]. 44 Ibid.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

90

Eleonora thus had a time-honored method of evaluating the child’s well-being, which relied upon a careful reading of the child’s body. In order for the wet nurse to successfully succor the child, the mother also had to pay close attention to the wet nurse’s physical health and the conditions in which the wet nurse lived and nursed the child. Heat and cold were an important factor in her view. Although Eleonora’s attention to the cold as early as September might seem odd, her notion of the seasons was that of southern Italy, where the year divided into only summer and winter and winter could come as early as September.45 The arrival of winter posed potential physical problems for regulating the temperature of both wet nurse and child. Eleonora believed that a “temperate” room was the ideal. The child’s head, she argued, should not be kept too hot, even in winter. Wet nurse and child were to be similarly well tended temperature-wise for both to thrive.46 Yet Eleonora also attempted to console the obviously nervous new mother, and she advised Ippolita that she could relax her vigilance somewhat since Ugo’s health was generally good. Eleonora thought that some exposure to different temperatures would be good for him and would ensure that Ippolita would not spoil his good temperament with too much scrupulous attention.47As summer gave way to the chill of September, Ippolita evidently faced

increasing pressure at home to let Lucia go, while Eleonora continued to voice her skepticism about whether this was a wise choice. She underscored the very young age of Ugo (only a little over four months old) and observed that changing the nurse so early in his life could have a negative impact, since the introduction of a new

48 In addition to plunging the mother back into the task of evaluating new candidates, the infant’s health could deteriorate rapidly in such transitions, as had apparently already started to happen to Ugo that autumn.49a suitable candidate. Eleonora expressed disbelief that in the presence of so many potential nurses in the area of Sora, none could be found who would in the short term be at least minimally satisfactory. She counseled Ippolita to take if necessary

50 Such a wet nurse would ideally see Ugo through his remaining years of breastfeeding.51 Even in the quest to secure this perfect wet nurse, Eleonora counseled patience,

45 Ibid. [7 September 1684]. On the seasonal dualism of the south, see John A. Marino, (Baltimore, 2011), 67.

46 Arch. Boncompagni Ludovisi, b. 899 [19 September 1684]. 47 Ibid.48 Ibid. [27 September 1684]. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. [27 September 1684;; 20 October 1684].51 Ibid. Children in early modern Europe often moved through several wet nurses.

Fildes, Breasts, Bottles, and Babies, 51. Even among French kings, multiple wet nurses were the rule. Sussman, Selling Mother’s Milk, 3–4.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


offering a contract of 40 days as a test period for the successful interaction of the wet nurse and the child.52Her advice for the selection of the new wet nurse underscored her evaluation

of Lucia—the abundance of milk generated by the woman was the most important factor. Ippolita should not be fooled into thinking that a potential wet nurse with milk-supply problems could be coaxed into making more milk with “various remedies.” One might take such a wet nurse in the interim, but there was no point in keeping her in the long term. A woman who truly made a good quantity of milk was not likely to lose it, and it was (in her view) futile to hope that one might hope to restore abundant milk production to the wet nurse who lacked it.53To secure and maintain a successful wet nurse required that the mother closely

observe the lactating woman’s body and be aware of its limitations. A woman with abundant milk who also had engorged breasts, for instance, might not be a good choice, since she believed that infants showed reluctance to nurse from such women.54 The wet nurse’s body was not acquainted with certain products, and thus though there might be some solutions to the diminishment of a wet nurse’s milk, such remedies required ingesting substances (eggs and medicine) that were not part of the wet nurse’s usual diet. Such additions were likely to spoil her digestion and thus weaken the nutritional value of her milk for the child.55The child, however, was also a critical variable in successful breastfeeding.

Eleonora observed with some pride that Ugo knew how to take milk from the beginning.56the rejection of a new wet nurse, however necessary their mothers might have viewed such a change. Eleonora was well aware of this dilemma, and thus hoped that a long-term successful wet nurse might be located.57 At about 10 months old, Ugo showed himself to be particularly resistant to accepting a new wet nurse. The technique counseled by Eleonora was to introduce the new wet nurse at night, when the child was sleepy and the room dark.58 Alternatively, the new wet nurse might be tried before the child was fully awake. A change during the day was likely to make him suspicious: the evening was the easiest time to fool him into accepting the change.59 Since Ugo was still under a year old, Eleonora hoped that the switch could be made.60

52 Arch. Boncompagni Ludovisi, b. 899 [28 October 1684;; 3 November 1684].53 Ibid. [13 October 1684]. 54

have in latching onto a breast that is engorged with milk.55 Ibid. [27 March 1685]. See Orland on the further elaborations in the eighteenth

century of the connection between diet and breast milk. Orland, “Enlightened Milk,” 173–4.56 Arch. Boncompagni Ludovisi, b. 899 [19 August 1684].57 Ibid. [13 October 1684]. 58 Ibid. [30 March 1685]. 59 Ibid.60 Ibid.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

92

Eleonora’s acknowledgement of the child’s resistance to a new wet nurse suggests the preference children could demonstrate for wet nurses that they knew and for whom they likely felt affection, as opposed to unfamiliar women, whose milk the adults had judged superior but who inspired suspicion in the child. In contrast to the views of children, Eleonora tended to reduce the wet nurses to the produce they provided—the milk. The only wet nurse that she referred to by name was Lucia. The rest of the women were referred to in her letters as the “balia” [wet nurse]. The process of terminating one woman and taking on another is simply referred to as “changing the milk.”61 Such generic references underscore the extent to which Eleonora undervalued the wet nurses’ personalities and moral character and emphasized their milk-production potential. Clearly the child’s assessment could be quite different, since he was likely to have viewed the wet nurse as a source of comfort as well as food, an issue even Eleonora acknowledged since she discouraged the frequent change of wet nurses if it could at all be avoided. As Ugo grew up, he entered the dynamic between wet nurse and mother as an independent variable that neither the mother nor the wet nurse could necessarily predict or completely control. Thus Eleonora counseled the necessity of tricking the child if it meant he could obtain better milk.The comings and goings of Ugo’s wet nurses were not an unusual phenomenon

in the aristocratic household. While critics of wet-nursing would later stress the extent to which it negatively affected the bond between mother and child, it is

in the child’s life. Even Eleonora’s bitter comment that the “wet nurses were the bosses of the mothers” was combined with the counsel that mothers nonetheless should never be far from their children, especially when they were in the wet nurses’ care.62 The mother’s presence was thus critical in Eleonora’s view, as was the physical manifestation of the affection of the mother for the child.63 Eleonora assured Ippolita that she herself would caress Ugo if she were there, and encouraged Ippolita to do the same. The older mother emphasized the importance of this activity toward male and female children alike: girls and boys were all children and a gain to “our Casa.”64 Whereas breastfeeding would later be the activity most associated with bonding between mother and child, Eleonora’s comments underscored the importance and the practice of other forms of maternal bonding that could occur through holding, caressing, attending to the infant’s needs, and following his or her development. Ippolita and Gregorio evidently needed little encouragement in demonstrating their affection for Ugo, as parents and child evidently engaged in co-sleeping in the chilly nights of September. Eleonora acknowledged the attraction of this practice (pronouncing it a “delight” of childrearing) and underscored its utility since their bed was obviously warmer than Ugo’s cradle. Yet Eleonora’s

61 Ibid. [20 April 1685]. This letter is from Eleonora to her brother Gregorio. 62 Ibid. [8 July 1684]. 63 Ibid.64 Ibid.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


sympathetic praise was accompanied by the precaution against allowing their co-sleeping to make Ugo “an enemy of the cradle.”65

Mothering Expertise in Milk and Medicine

Eleonora’s attitudes toward medicine further illuminate other aspects of the role of the wet nurse and her product in the noble household. Eleonora’s medical opinions defy simple characterization, since relative to the physician advising Ippolita, some of Eleonora’s views on wet-nursing were innovative. Yet in other respects she resisted new trends in the seventeenth century that challenged the place of breast milk in child nutrition and allocated new roles for the physician in the treatment of very young children. In the event of the illness of the child,

simultaneously assigning a greater value to the breast milk provided by the wet nurse. The noblewoman’s thoughts on childhood illness thus open an additional perspective on wet-nursing and mothering in the seventeenth century.Given the high infant mortality rates in the early modern period and the limited

medical knowledge of diseases that were especially devastating for children, the rearing of infants and toddlers was fraught with anxiety for parents, especially in the case of a long-awaited male heir. Ugo’s father, Gregorio, was intensely involved with the rearing of Ugo and the health of his spouse, Ippolita. He communicated directly to his sister Eleonora the news of the return of Ippolita’s menstrual cycle, an important matter in assessing her fertility.66 In the tense days following what appeared to be a seizure experienced by Ugo, Eleonora wrote directly to her brother who was evidently overcome with anxiety about the health of his son.67 While Eleonora evidently bore great affection for her brother, she had a rather dismal view of men’s abilities in general to manage their own health, much less to tend to the health of their offspring. She maligned Gregorio, for instance, for his failure to tend to his ailments.68 Many of the men mentioned in her

69 She attributed the long-standing health problems of a particular Roman cardinal to his excessive consumption of food and drink and a generally out-of-control lifestyle.70

65 Ibid. [7 September 1684]. Eleonora expressed no concern about co-sleeping as a possible moment for suffocation, as did some medical authorities. See Fildes, Breasts, Bottles, and Babies, 195–7.

66 Arch. Boncompagni Ludovisi, 899 [3 August 1684]. 67 Ibid. [20 April 1685].68 Ibid. [9 September 1684;; 19 September 1684;; 22 September 1684;; 29 September

1684;; 13 October 1684;; and passim]. 69 Her comments on her brother are particularly harsh in this regard. See note 68. 70 For her comments on the cardinal’s ailments, see Archivio Boncompagni 899 [10

October 1686;; 26 October 1686;; 1 January 1687].


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

94

The men in the aristocratic household to whom mothers were encouraged to defer were the physicians, to which the noble family had great access. Eleonora’s household had a physician on call as part of its staff.71 Yet Eleonora could be as skeptical of physicians as she was of other men when it came to the treatment of

regarding the care of adults, she carefully demarcated the care of young children from the domain of their expertise, since their advice could pose particular dangers to young children.72 Medical attention by physicians to very young children had been scant between antiquity and the Renaissance.73 The care of such beings was largely the domain of mothers, midwives, wet nurses, and, in some cases, surgeons. In the seventeenth century, however, the general trend was for the greater involvement of the physician into the care of infants and toddlers. Eleonora was skeptical about such interventions and their claims to superior knowledge in this area.For instance, although Eleonora was a great proponent of bloodletting, she

nonetheless shared Ippolita’s dilemma at having Ugo bled, since it might cause 74

According to Eleonora, leeches did not work better with children than other methods.75 Surgeons were well aware of the problem and sought to distract children during bloodletting.76 Bloodletting was a complex procedure in the early modern period: from discerning the correct site from 22 possible sites to discerning the right method (leeches, knives, or cupping glasses), it required considerable skill.77 It is thus perhaps not surprising that Eleonora was skeptical about its application to children.

71 Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Arch. Borghese, 3972 “Rolli della famiglia: 1682–1683” [January 1682].

72 Arch. Boncompagni Ludovisi, b. 899 [9 June 1685;; 13 October 1685]. 73 On the role of surgeons in the treatment of infants through the sixteenth century,

see Fildes, Wet Nursing, 69. On the limited attention of English physicians to children in the Middle Ages, see Fildes, Breasts, Bottles and Babies, 47;; for similar limitations among Italian physicians, see James Bruce Ross, “The Middle Class Child in Italy,” 210. Care of infants is treated in most detail in midwifery texts until the eighteenth century, when pediatric texts begin to appear. See Fildes, Breasts, Bottles and Babies, 134.

74 Arch. Boncompagni Ludovisi, b. 899 [30 March 1686]. On leeches not being much easier to use than cups, see ibid. [6 June 1686]. Eleonora had a variety of comments on the

and medicine, see Caroline Castiglione, Accounting for Affection, forthcoming, especially “At the Nexus of Impossibility: The Medical and the Maternal in the Seventeenth Century.”

75 Arch. Boncompagni Ludovisi, b. 899 [6 June 1686;; 13 August 1686].76 Evelyn Lincoln, “Curating the Renaissance Body,” Word and Image: A Journal of

, 17, 1 & 2 (2001): 42–61. 77 Sandra Cavallo captures the complexity of bloodletting in the early modern period.

Sandra Cavallo, Artisans of the Body in Early Modern Italy: Families and Masculinities (Manchester, 2010), 43.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


Ippolita associated the physician’s medications with outcomes that were bizarre and sometimes deadly. She maintained that there were numerous issues that neither physicians nor men in general could understand, which were intelligible only to those who, like Eleonora, could write from the perspective of a “true mother.”78 Her own son’s care had once been supervised by a physician whose medical

care and after much time did he return to his former healthy self.79 Too often the

that it should do no harm if it did no good.80 Eleonora offered instead her tried and true remedies for childhood ailments, including powders and syrups, which she sent to Ippolita herself. She recommended the virtues of sweating over the risks of bloodletting, at least where children were concerned.81 She legitimized these remedies with reference to her numerous observations of other children, including her younger siblings, her own children, and the children of the aristocratic women with whom she had contact during her childrearing years.

Eleonora summoned her medical insights from these sources to help Ippolita. At such times Eleonora did tend to blame the wet nurse, but generally she attempted to teach Ippolita a more measured view of the relationship between milk and illness .82 Not all the ills of the child, she reminded Ippolita, came from breast milk, since colds, coughs, and teething also had their impact.83 If the child grew, gained weight, and appeared to be thriving, then the wet-nursing was going well—that was all a mother could hope for.84 Eleonora counseled the longest possible use of breast milk as the primary food of the child, pronouncing skepticism about the over-use of solid foods even though Ugo was already about one year old.85 She was not opposed, however, to giving Ugo some wine at about that age and she had a much-praised gruel with olive oil that she also recommended.86 But breast milk

78 On things neither men nor doctors understand, see Arch. Boncompagni Ludovisi, b. 899 [23 March 1686;; 19 August 1686;; 21 August 1686;; 1 November 1686];; on the perspective of a “vera madre,” ibid. [23 March 1686].

79 Ibid. [11 August 1685]. The story is retold again with more details in ibid. [13 October 1685].

80 Ibid. [27 June 1684]. 81 Ibid. [28 July 1684]. 82

April 1685;; 28 April 1685]. 83 Ibid. [27 June 1684].84 Ibid. 85 Ibid. [27 March 1685].86 On the use of wine, ibid. [11 May 1686;; 23 May 1686]. On her favorite pap for

babies, ibid. [11 August 1685;; 13 October 1685;; 30 March 1686;; 5 April 1686]. Medical writings since antiquity had differed on the use of wine for infants, though it was preferred in the early modern period, due to problems with the sanitation of water. Fildes, Breasts, Bottles, and Babies, 34–5, 236–7


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

96

was to be continued as much as possible in his diet, which would have mitigated the dangers associated with the introduction of food.87Eleonora judged as a profound error the physicians’ advice to withdraw milk

temporarily from the diet of the child in favor of a regimen of medications and broths. It was the intervention that she most resented. Local physicians, however, may have only thought they were following some of the latest medical thinking, including the widely published and translated work of the Flemish physician Johann Van Helmont (1579–1644), who promoted the use of broth-based gruels and pronounced his skepticism about the hygiene and safety of breast milk, believing it to be spoiled by the inevitably bad passions of the nurses.88 Eleonora, as we have

the milk. She too, had her praise for broths, but she believed that they were no substitute for milk, thus rejecting the contemporary trend of relying on broth or gruels made without milk, which, as we now know, would have drastically reduced the child’s intake of protein and vitamin D.89 Faced with Ippolita’s concerns about a lack of strength and development in Ugo’s legs, Eleonora underscored the critical role breast milk played in the physical future of the child, including his ability to walk. She summarized her approach with a proverb, “the mouth carries the legs.”90 A good supply of breast milk was the best barrier against rickets, as was later recognized when the promotion of broths instead of breast milk was connected to the increase incidence of rickets during the seventeenth century.91According to Eleonora, milk was not only food but also safe medicine, in

contrast to the prescriptions of the physicians, who evidently had no idea how to dose infants and toddlers. Physicians thus tended to overmedicate children as her once multicolored son had shown her.92 Since physicians’ medicines were particularly hard on children’s digestion, she urged the use of the smallest possible quantities of medications for children.93 She also argued against the rapid changing of medicines in infants.94 In medicine, as in eating, she recommended a measured approach, “una

87 Diarrhea usually accompanied the introduction of solid foods. Fildes, Breasts, Bottles, and Babies, 253.

88 Fildes chronicles the success of Van Helmont’s views in converting some English aristocrats and members of the gentry to hand feeding. At a minimum he publicized new (if unfounded) concerns about breast milk. Fildes, Breasts, Bottles, and Babies, 290–291. Skepticism against his recommended hand feeding re-emerged in the eighteenth century, when its potential to raise infant mortality was eventually recognized. Ibid., 301.

89 Arch. Boncompagni Ludovisi, b. 899 [6 June 1686;; 16 June 1686]. 90 Ibid. [15 April 1685]: “la bocca porta le gambe.” 91 On the increasing recourse in the seventeenth century to broths (and the potential

link to the rise in the increase of rickets) see Fildes, Breasts, Bottles, and Babies, 214–15. 92

the treatment of diseases. For a summary on this literature, see Fildes, Wet Nursing, 73–4;; on eighteenth-century investigations of animal and human milk’s medicinal properties, see Orland, “Enlightened Milk,” 183–6.

93 Arch. Boncompagni Ludovisi, b. 899 [6 June 1686;; 16 June 1686]. 94 Ibid. [7 September 1686].


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


buona regola,” rather than excessive dosages or abrupt alternations in treatment.95 Milk combined with baby food should be continued at all times, even if the child was taking medications.96 She thought it best that, if medicines were necessary, the wet nurse ingest them;; and thus she would pass the medicine through her milk to the child, which we now know does occur in the case of some substances. This was a course of action recommended by medical authors since antiquity.97 Her insistence on the continuation of this ancient practice underscores her skepticism of contemporary medical practices. On one occasion she recommended purging the wet nurse in order to assist the child.98 One has to wonder whether Eleonora was more unpopular with the wet nurses or with the physicians. The sighs of both must have been heavy when either she or her missives arrived.The circle of female medical knowledge that Eleonora judged superior to male

physicians’ knowledge was also delineated by Eleonora’s concepts of class. While she cited the opinions of other aristocratic mothers, she disparaged the opinions and the sayings of the “donne,” perhaps referring to wet nurses, servants, and midwives.99 She urged Ippolita to remember her superior status as noble mother, since the wet nurses were, after all, just “peasants.”100 Yet wet nurses occupied a unique niche in the noble household, in comparison with other servants. In addition to their wages (which were higher than most servants), wet nurses were provided with decent clothing, bedding, and shoes.101 Both the wet nurse and her offspring might continue to receive gifts from the family long after the term of her service.102 Their intimacy with their charges, as well as their likely proximity to

95 Ibid. 96 Ibid. [27 July 1685]. 97 Ibid. [20 April 1685]. On the treating of the child’s ailments through administration

of medicine to the wet nurse, see Fildes, Breasts, Bottles, and Babies, 41;; Fildes, Wet Nursing, 34.

98 Arch. Boncompagni Ludovisi, 899 [19 September 1685]. On the use of purges on newborns to remove meconium from their intestines, see Fildes, Breasts, Bottles, and Babies, 83.

99 Arch. Boncompagni Ludovisi, b. 899 [19 October 1685]. The correspondence of Madame Roland, in France, who breastfed her daughter, underscores the role that a variety of servants in the household might attempt to play in the rearing of the child. Sussman, Selling Mother’s Milk, 83–4.

100 She refers to them as peasants in Arch. Boncompagni Ludovisi, b. 899 [11 August 1685].

101 Fildes, Breasts, Bottles, and Babies, 49. 102 Wet nurses in the Barberini family in the 1630s were paid approximately six scudi

per month according to Patricia Waddy, Seventeenth-Century Palaces: Use and the Art of the Plan (New York, 1990), 376, notes 11 and 12. Other expenses related to wet-nursing are in

di Taddeo Barberini (1630)” [31 May 1630] (for expenses for the damask bedding);; 4 April 1630 (for her shoes). These appear to be related to his child’s wet nurse. Taddeo’s records


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

98

other young children of the family, provided them with insights that they shared with their employers. Eleonora’s diatribe reveals the reality rather than her ideal of the nursery. Wet nurses were not in the habit of silently nursing and swaddling, but offered opinions of their own, to which some aristocratic women, especially

illnesses. Any members of the lower classes holding opinions contrary to their superiors were typically disparaged by the latter. Nobles had particularly harsh words for peasants under their jurisdiction who challenged their authority. Yet in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, peasants challenged noble prerogatives with increasing frequency in papal law courts.103 Eleonora’s censure of peasant wet nurses is related to this increasing class tension in Rome. The so-called “cantankerous” wet nurse may have been no more than a peasant woman with ideas of her own.Although Eleonora positioned her knowledge as superior to that of lower-class

women, the source of her knowledge would have been similar to theirs—it was acquired through observation and experience, and such experience was doubtless formed through interactions with many wet nurses. According to Eleonora, the

not be left alone with the child,104 and the mother had to follow her movements, keep track of her diet, and keep her warm (but not too warm) in the winter.105 In the

manage as best she could, privileging the quality of her milk over the quality of her interactions with the mother. An aristocratic mother was to rely upon her skills as diplomat, her fellow noblewomen’s collective wisdom, and her great patience in raising children from the perils of infancy to the boundaries of childhood.Ippolita’s involvement in the care of children and the supervision of wet nurses

was thus to be predicated upon careful observation and a wide-ranging medical

remember with two annual payments. On the latter, see ibid. [5 June 1630] and Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Computisteria, 187 “Giornale” (1629–30) [8 June 1630]. I thank Dr Luigi Cacciaglia of the Vatican Library for assistance with these sources. On gifts to, and remembrances of, wet nurses, see Fildes, Breasts, Bottles, and Babies, 162.

103 As the advocacy of the peasants on their own behalf through the law courts of Rome grows stronger in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the critique of the peasants

Patrons and Adversaries: Nobles and Villagers in Italian Politics, 1640–1760 (New York, 2005), especially 147–80. For a more general picture of the upsurge in legal activity in the Papal States, see Irene Fosi, Papal Justice: Subjects and Courts in the Papal State, 1500–1750 (Washington, DC, 2011). For the increasing number of lawsuits in Roman aristocratic families, see Maura Piccialuti, L’Immortalità dei beni: Fedecommessi e primogeniture a Roma nei secoli xvii e xviii (Rome, 1999).

104 Arch. Boncompagni Ludovisi, b. 899 [27 June 1684;; 8 July 1684].105 On keeping the wet nurse covered, see ibid. [9 September 1684;; 19 September

1684]. On the recommended diet of wet nurses, see Ken Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley/Los Angeles, 2002), 151–3.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


knowledge of which the mother was supposed to be the master. The mother had to

the breastfeeding was going and whether the milk might contain some defect. In

opinion, which might be acquired with a number of physicians both at hand in the household as well as those consulted at a distance through the report of the child’s symptoms. She should seek such input but be skeptical of it, drawing instead upon the repository of female medical knowledge represented by women like Eleonora and her peers. From all this, the mother was to extract what would be the best course in the medical scenario she was facing with the child. Regardless of the nature of the situation, the mother was to defend the child’s ingestion of milk, regarded by Eleonora as the best guarantee of the good health of the child.With her child, the aristocratic mother should show physical and emotional

affection, and she should form a strong and continuous relationship that would counterbalance what could at times become a rapid turnover of the wet nurses. Increasingly confronted with physicians’ interventions, Eleonora considered their prescriptions less valuable than a wet nurse’s fresh milk. As food and medicine, milk was critical. In this regard Eleonora supported some of the longest practiced aspects of breastfeeding against seventeenth-century novelties introduced by the medical establishment. She therefore enthusiastically defended the wet nurse’s product even as she maligned its maker. She simultaneously elevated the circle of female care that had sustained children, centered upon the production and evaluation of milk, even as she disparaged the insights of wet nurses into the treatment of childhood illnesses. Class trumped the long-held view that a wet nurse’s character mattered. Their role was limited to the supply of a product with an enormous impact on the body of the child, but not upon his character or upon his personality. In the case of Eleonora and other women in her circle whose opinions she valued, the hierarchy of class and the devotion to milk in terms of its

that physicians had reiterated for centuries. The reduction of the wet nurse to a provider of material sustenance of the child, rather than as a partial contributor

animal milk as a viable human milk alternative, if it could be shown to have positive physiological impact upon an infant.


Proof Copy


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Chapter 5 “With My Daughter’s Milk”:

Wet Nurses and the Rhetoric of Lactation in Valencian Court Records

Debra Blumenthal

On 9 October 1441, Maria, the wife of the farmer Francesch Aznar, who resided in Canet, a village located about 27 kilometers north of Valencia City, recalled how 26 years ago she had given birth to a son—an event which took place a few weeks prior to the birth of Jacme Jofre, the son of the nobleman, Nicholau Jofre. Recounting how this nobleman’s wife, “knowing that she had recently given birth and had ‘fresh’ milk [fos tendrera],” dispatched one of her servants to her, asking her to come to their household and breastfeed their son, Maria explained how, “being mindful of the status of the person who had made this request of her,” she (seemingly without demur) went to this nobleman’s household and “gave the aforementioned Jacme Jofre her breast to suck.” Maria’s visit to the Jofre household was, in essence, an audition for the position of Jacme’s salaried dida [wet nurse]. Proudly recalling how Nicholau’s wife “and the other women who were present were extremely pleased with [the quality of] her milk and her breasts,” Maria described how they had pressured her to become Jacme Jofre’s

Thus, Maria continued, since “they had promised her that by doing this she would win a great many advantages,” namely, that she would “secure herself a place in

become Jacme’s dida.”1Maria’s appearance before the Justicia Civil of Valencia had been prompted by

a standard request made by this nobleman’s son that the court collect testimony verifying that he was more than 20 years old, hence, legally of age to manage his own affairs. Jacme’s request as well as the court appearance of his wet nurse, thus, was hardly unique. The records of the civil magistrate of the city of Valencia (the

to act independently of their court-appointed guardians and/or tutors, wet nurses—since they had known the petitioners, more or less, from birth—were regarded as

from 1435–45, 1450–1452, 1469–79, 1488–91, and 1500–1511, I encountered

1 Arxiu del Regne de València (hereafter ARV JCiv) 899: M. 14: 47r–48r.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

102

the testimony of 59 wet nurses in 53 separate age-of-majority hearings. Indeed,

than one wet nurse testifying on their behalf.2The prominence of wet nurses as witnesses in these hearings buttresses the

claims of scholars such as Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Sara Matthews Grieco, and, more recently, Elisheva Baumgarten and Rebecca Lynn Winer, that wet-nursing was widely practiced in late medieval and Renaissance Europe—particularly, it seems, among urban professionals (i.e., merchants, notaries, and pharmacists) and members of the nobility.3 Their consistent appearance in these hearings—held

however, in preserving and recording statements that came, purportedly, however mediated, from the mouths of wet nurses, these records offer historians the rare opportunity to consider how these milk mothers and comares themselves described and characterized their relationships with their nurslings.In an essay summarizing extant research concerning infant feeding practices in

to know exactly how women—mothers or wet nurses—actually breastfed infants in pre-industrial Europe.” Noting how most of the extant sources from this period (i.e., medical treatises, advice books, ricordanze) were written and produced almost exclusively by and for educated elite men, and how the earliest extant texts written by women for a feminine audience date, generally, from the eighteenth

2 See, for example, ARV JCiv 897: M. 22: 40r–42v;; ARV JCiv 899: M. 11: 37r–v;; and ARV JCiv 904: M. 11: 44r–46v. The 53 age-of-majority hearings that featured testimony from one or more of the petitioner’s former wet nurses—and are the primary sources analyzed in this chapter—were extracted from a total sample of 91 age-of-majority hearings.

3 Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “Blood Parents and Milk Parents: Wet Nursing in Florence, 1300–1530,” in Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Chicago, 1985), originally published as “Parents de sang, parents de lait: La mise en nourrice à Florence (1300–1530),” (1983): 33–64. Sara F. Matthews Grieco, “Breastfeeding, Wet Nursing and Infant Mortality in Europe (1400–1800),” in Historical Perspectives on Breastfeeding (Florence, 1991), 15–62. In addition to the aforementioned works by Klapisch-Zuber and Matthews Grieco, see also, more recently, the work of Rebecca Winer, “Conscripting the Breast: Lactation, Slavery and Salvation in the Realms of Aragon and Kingdom of Majorca, c. 1250–1300,” Journal of Medieval History, 34 (2008): 164–84;; and Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton, 2004), especially 126–34. For an alternative view, questioning the extent to which wet-nursing (particularly, the practice of putting out infants to a distant wet nurse) “was the norm for middle-class children in urban, Renaissance Italy,” see Rudolph M. Bell, How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians (Chicago, 1999), 131–7.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

“With My Daughter’s Milk” 103

the extent to which pre-modern “women follow[ed] medical theory as opposed to the advice of their friends and family.”4The testimony of wet nurses like Maria, indeed, is valuable precisely because

it calls into question assumptions made by the previous generation of scholars that wet-nursing was “men’s business,” driven and dictated predominantly by masculine desires. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, for example, has argued that the practice of putting an infant out to nurse was rooted almost exclusively in patrimonial concerns. Given the widespread consensus among medical experts that sexual intercourse weakened and corrupted breast milk, Klapisch-Zuber held that the practice of putting an infant out to nurse had been adopted to permit elite males’ continued sexual access to their wives without jeopardizing the good health of their progeny.5 Furthermore, since breastfeeding was also known to affect fertility and inhibit conception, delegating the responsibility for suckling a child to a wet nurse would also facilitate the continuous, uninterrupted production of (ideally male) heirs.6Although, as we have just seen, Maria cited her own reasons for opting to

suckle someone else’s child—and, in fact, made no mention of her husband or Jacme’s father, as having taken any part in this negotiation—it bears emphasis that previous scholars have contended that the decision whether or not to breastfeed by and large was not the mother’s decision to make. Sara F. Matthews Grieco, for example, begins her essay summarizing extant research concerning infant feeding practices in pre-modern Europe with the query, “why would a mother deprive her infant of the nourishment which all authorities since Classical Antiquity had agreed to be best suited for her children?” While she acknowledges that “there are a variety of reasons why a mother would not breastfeed,” she nevertheless maintains that “one of the most weighty [reasons was] the fact that the decision

4 Matthews Grieco, “Breastfeeding, Wet Nursing,” 20.5

form of uterine blood, conveyed by veins linking the womb to a woman’s breasts, contemporary medical treatises, citing Aristotle, Galen, the Gynecology of Soranus

breastfeeding, in order to prevent her breast milk from reverting to uterine blood. Soranus, thus, advised that the wet nurse should “abstain from coitus” as it “spoils and diminishes the milk or suppresses it entirely by stimulating menstrual catharsis through the uterus or by bringing about conception.” Owsei Temkin, ed., Gynecology of Soranus of Ephesus (Baltimore, 1991), 92–3.

6 Klapisch-Zuber, “Blood Parents and Milk Parents,” 132–64. Matthews Grieco articulates the dilemma faced by premodern elite males as follows: “How was a man to maximize his progeny if his lactating wife was sexually taboo and, even if this taboo were ignored, most probably infertile (i.e., not ovulating) as long as she was breastfeeding ‘on demand’, as was the custom, and with no additional foods being fed to the child? The solution chosen by the majority of those who could afford it was wet-nursing.” Matthews Grieco, “Breastfeeding, Wet Nursing,” 19.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

104

was usually not hers to make. It was generally the father who decided whether to send his children out to a wet nurse or not.”7What is noteworthy then about the records under analysis here is that in contrast

with records produced by male notaries or the ricordanze examined by previous generations of scholars, they uncover what seems to be a distinctly female form of social networking and suggest that women played a far more active role in the selection of the wet nurse than has previously been acknowledged, particularly, as

8

While Maria’s appearance before the Justicia Civil of Valencia in 1441 had

exploring the perspective of pre-modern women regarding breastfeeding, Maria took advantage of Jacme’s age-of-majority hearing to justify her decision to deny her own son her breast and, instead, suckle someone else’s child.9Emilie Bergmann has decried the fact that while extant notarial records and

account books from foundling hospitals shed light on the treatment of, respectively, newborn children of the elite and orphans, such records are frustratingly silent regarding the fate of these wet nurses’ own children.10 Thus scholars have generally been left to speculate as to their fate: Had they died? Were they abandoned? Were they put out to nurse with another wet nurse?11The testimony of wet nurses like Maria, therefore, is doubly valuable since

it also helps to illuminate how the experiences of the newborn children of elites compared with those of the sons and daughters of lower-class artisans and laborers. Indeed, in stark contrast to the aforementioned silence concerning a wet nurse’s own progeny evident in notarial records and in the account books of foundling hospitals, in their testimony before the Justicia Civil, wet nurses often mentioned

7 Ibid., 20.8

scholarship is Matthews Grieco’s assertion that while “there are a variety of reasons why

constraints), “the decision was usually not hers to make. It was generally the father who decided whether to send his children out to a wet nurse or not.” Matthews Grieco, “Breastfeeding, Wet Nursing,” 19.

9 Ibid., 20.10 Emilie L. Bergmann, “Milking the Poor: Wet-nursing and the Sexual Economy of

Early Modern Spain,” in Eukene Lacarra Lanz, ed., Marriage and Sexuality in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (London, 2002): 90–115.

11 Matthews Grieco, in fact, assumes that, in most cases, they must have died or been abandoned. Insisting that “it was not until the late 18th century that women were permitted to take in more than one child or to nurse both their own child and that of another woman,” she maintains that “one of the ineluctable facts about wet nursing” was that “it was based on the death of the nurse’s child, on farming out the nurse’s child to a poorer woman who was paid out of the wet nurse’s salary, on the risky alternative of substitute feeding, or even on the abandonment of the wet nurse’s child to a foundling home.” Matthews Grieco, “Breastfeeding, Wet Nursing,” 33–4.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


their own children (both living and dead) and talked about their respective fates. Thus, for example, on 21 August 1450, the Justicia Civil received testimony from the wet nurses Caterina, the wife of the Valencian carpenter, Pere Vinyals, and Ysabel, the wife of the Valencian ropemaker Johan Gilart, recounting how since Caterina had agreed to become the dida for Johan Ros, the son of Domingo Ros, Caterina had put her own daughter (who was about three weeks old at the time)

of na Caterina, the wife of Pere Vinyals, to nurse, since the aforementioned na Caterina had taken in Johan Ros to nurse.” Ysabel, unfortunately, divulges nothing with respect to the fate of her own child.12Similarly, on 20 March 1443, Alvira, the wife of Alfonso Gonsalvez, appeared

merchant Francesch Barcelo, was 15 years old and therefore legally “of age” to manage his own affairs without the supervision of a tutor. Alvira explained that she knew this because Vicent and her daughter, who appears to have been stillborn, shared the same birthday. Emphasizing how, “on that very same day, the 9th of February 1428, she had given birth to a daughter who, had she lived, would now be

intimately acquainted since, “due to the death of her daughter, she breastfed the aforementioned Vicent Barcelo, until the (pregnant) slave woman belonging to Vicent’s father, Francesch Barcelo (who presumably had been purchased for this explicit purpose) gave birth and could, from that moment forward, breastfeed Vicent.”13Maria’s, Ysabel’s, and Elvira’s testimony dovetails neatly with a number of

assertions that have been made by scholars regarding breastfeeding practices in pre-modern Europe. For example, Maria’s testimony illustrates Emilie Bergmann’s contention that contracting out one’s lactating services was a mechanism for social advancement.14 Maria, after all, explicitly stated that she had agreed to become Jacme Jofre’s wet nurses due to “the many (socio-economic) advantages” it would bring. In addition, all three wet nurses’ remarks seem to support a claim made by Klapisch-Zuber back in 1983: that breastfeeding was exclusive, that sharing milk was strongly disapproved of and considered a dangerous practice. Thus, Klapish-Zuber asserted:

There was one parental demand that anyone who proposed to nurse a tiny Florentine had to take into account: the parents took it for granted that a nurse could breast-feed no more than one baby—their baby—at a time. “Milk brothers” are never spoken of in Florentine texts, and this absence seems to me to be explained by customs connected with breast-feeding. Either the Florentine’s baby followed a child of the nurse who had been weaned early, or the nurse’s child has died, “liberating its mother’s milk, or the child was itself put out to

12 ARV JCiv 915: M. 12: 14r–v.13 ARV JCiv, 903: M. 10: 22r.14 Bergmann, “Milking the Poor,” 139–76.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

106

nurse so that its mother could be hired by a Florentine. This last solution is attested in the ricordanze, and never does a nurse arrive under her employer’s roof with her own child.15

A more extensive analysis and evaluation of these records from the court of the Justicia Civil of Valencia, however, suggests that these latter assertions of Klapisch-Zuber’s—that contemporaries universally frowned upon infants “sharing” milk and that milk kinship bonds were unimportant or perhaps even

following testimony.On 11 November 1440, Jacmeta, the wife of Pere Aram, a cauldron maker

Valencian notary Pere Leopart, was more than 20 years in age. Noting how she had been present for the births of all four of Pere Leopart’s children (three sons and a daughter), Jacmeta emphasized that she “recalled well” how, in Jacme’s case, she

enconar]. Since, as the Catalan etymologists Antoni Maria Alcover and Francesc de Borja Moll have documented (in their entry for enconar in their Diccionari català-valencià-balearingested by a child “profoundly shapes his/her moral temperament and character,” in stressing her role as Jacme’s enconadora, Jacmeta underlined the especially close bond she, along with her sons and daughters, shared with him.16

been Jacme’s enconadoraadmitted that her memory, unfortunately, had become a bit fuzzy with respect to the exact timing of Jacme’s birth in relation to that of her own biological children. Jacmeta acknowledged that while Jacme’s biological mother, Gostanca (Pere’s wife), maintained that Jacmeta had breastfed Jacme “with the milk of a daughter

15 Klapisch-Zuber, “Blood Parents and Milk Parents,” 137–8. Later on in this article, Klapisch-Zuber cites a passage from the letters of Margherita Datini, the wife of the merchant of Prato, in which she advised a Florentine acquaintance who had charged her

shall I believe that when they have a one-year-old child of their own, they give not some [milk] to it.” Noting how “Margherita writes with disappointment that, alas, the child of one potential nurse recovered from his illness,” Klapisch-Zuber emphasizes how Margherita, “later, full of hope … reports that she made another woman promise to come as soon as her child was buried.” Ibid., 140.

16 According to Alcover and Moll’s Diccionari català-valencià-balear, “enconar” is

Alcover further elaborates “it is popularly believed that the origin and/or qualities of the

temperament and character.”


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


of hers who had died, but who if she were still living would now be more than twenty-one years in age,” she herself could not now recall “whether she had nursed him with the milk of her aforementioned daughter or with the milk of a son of hers who today is 19 years in age.”17In her testimony before the Justicia Civil, Jacmeta does not identify the breast

milk, as one might expect, as “hers” (much less her husband’s). Rather than labeling the milk that nourished and sustained the petitioner (Jacme Leopart) as “mother’s milk,” Jacmeta instead associated this substance (which had enabled him to attain the age-of-majority) with the biological child to whom it had naturally belonged, Jacmeta’s own biological daughter.In so doing, in referring to the milk that sustained a nursling as “her daughter’s

milk,” Jacmeta was hardly unique. To take just one example from among many, amid the testimony collected by the Justicia Civil for the very same age-of-majority hearing, we encounter, on 10 November 1440, Jacme Leopart’s other wet nurse, Ursola, the wife of the wool comber Salvador Segura, similarly specifying that in offering Jacme her breast to suck, she was “giving him her son’s milk [ ], who today was more than 22 years in age.”18 Ursola’s husband, who had likewise offered testimony on Jacme’s behalf,

milk of a son of theirs whom she was nursing, who, at that time, was about one year old.”19It could be argued that we ought not read too much into these references to a

wet nurse’s own children. It certainly may be that wet nurses mentioned them—particularly, the date of their birth relative to that of the petitioner’s—simply as

year of the petitioner’s birth. Nonetheless, this ought not invalidate the import of this particular turn of phrase in illuminating customary breastfeeding practices—namely, that sharing a son’s or daughter’s milk with the children of their friends,

for consumption), was a fairly common practice and does not seem to have been a cause of concern. Indeed, as will be demonstrated below, women seem to have embraced the practice as a means to extend their support networks.Noting how contemporaries regarded breast milk as an extremely malleable

substance—such that it could become a “pathological substance”—William MacLehose has shown how medieval medical authors expressed ambivalence towards women as “essential yet dangerous nurturers.” Although the Galenic, Hippocratic, and Aristotelian traditions concurred in “the belief that the mother’s milk was most appropriate for the child,” they also maintained that maternal milk

17 ARV JCiv 897: M. 22: 41r. 18 ARV JCiv 897: M. 22: 40r.19 ARV JCiv 897: M. 22: 40r.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

108

considerable danger to the newborn. For example, MacLehose notes how Mustio

strains of labor” and should not breastfeed her child only “until [her] complexion … is made temperate.” Thus, MacLehose explains, “given their apprehension over the maternal body’s inability to transform blood into milk just after birth, medical writers agreed a wet nurse (at least temporarily) was needed.”20 Thus, we read in physician Damián Carbón’s treatise, Libro del arte de las comadres o madrinas y del regimiento de las preñadas y paridas y de los niños (published in Majorca in 1541) that one of the most important criteria to be considered in the selection of a wet nurse was the amount of time that had elapsed since her own child’s birth. Listed as number one among the qualities that parents should look for in order to ensure that the breast milk ingested by their children was of the best possible quality was

should make sure that the prospective wet nurse had given birth at least a month ago.21 It is in this context, then, of serving as a necessary stand-in for the mother, that we ought to evaluate the decision of women like the aforementioned Jacmeta who, having been present at Jacme Leopart’s birth, took on the responsibility of being his enconadora and breastfed him immediately subsequent to his birth. It was a commitment, presumably, that might extend no longer than a few days, the period it took for his mother to recover from childbirth or for a suitable dida to be found who would breastfeed him on a more long-term basis. In choosing a newborn infant’s enconadora, moreover, it would seem that the mother sought out

milk was popularly believed to have in shaping the infant’s moral character.

Hierarchies of Wet Nurses

A child’s enconadora, therefore, often was subsequently replaced by another wet nurse, whose motives in taking up a child to nurse were likely to have been different and who typically was not of the same social status as the infant’s biological mother. In these cases, as Emilie Bergmann has suggested, the decision to take up a child

22 But did this mean that they were completely disinterested in simultaneously extending their own and their children’s support networks?

20 William F. MacLehose, “Nurturing Danger: High Medieval Medicine and the Problem(s) of the Child,” in John Carmi Parsons and Bonnie Wheeler, eds, Medieval Mothering (New York, 1996), 12. See also William MacLehose, A Tender Age: Cultural Anxieties over the Child in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (New York, 2006), 22–4.

21 “It is true that the mother’s milk should be given to the infant only if it meets certain

month, in order that she be cleansed of all impurities.” Daniel García Gutierrez, ed., Libro del Arte de las Comadres o Madrinas y del Regimiento de las Preñadas y Paridas y de los Niños por médico Damián Carbón (Zaragoza, 2000), 89.

22 Bergmann, “Milking the Poor,” 139–76.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


Scholars have long maintained that the medical consensus at the time had been that “women only have enough milk/blood to feed one child at a time.”23 Thus respected medical authorities such as Galen, Soranus, and Avicenna had advised that, in the event that a wet nurse became pregnant, she was to abstain from breastfeeding, as “a gestating foetus would ‘draw off’ the best available food supply, thus leaving the nursling with denatured milk.”24 Indeed, Klapisch-Zuber found in her analysis of wet-nursing contracts dating from the fourteenth and

prohibited wet nurses from nursing more than one child, or from engaging in sexual intercourse. Be that as it may, many of the wet nurses testifying before the Justicia Civil indicated that they had continued breastfeeding their own children while suckling someone else’s. In fact, they expressed very little ambivalence about sharing their breast milk (as social and/or economic circumstances required) with multiple nurslings. Thus, for example, in 1441, Yolant, the former wife of the

now the wife of the pharmacist Johan Ponc, was more than 20 years in age, Yolant explained that she knew this because she had been nursing Caterina Juhan, the daughter of Bernat Juhan, who was now 23 years in age, “with the same milk.”25

she had been hired to breastfeed Luis Scelles’ younger sister, she nonetheless had also given Luis her breast to suck “often and many different times” during this very same period.26Even though the period during which an enconadora actually breastfed a child

might have been relatively brief, the bond it established—judging from these wet nurses’ testimony—was enduring. In some instances, in fact, the child remained in the enconadora’s custody even after he had been weaned. In 1442, Ysabel, the wife of the sailor Guillem de Miga (now deceased), noted how about 16 years ago, “at the urgings of the [newborn’s] father,” she had agreed to breastfeed an infant named Miquel Vicent whose mother, according to the testimony of her midwife (Dolca, the widow of the farmer Matheu Garcia of Beniferri), was unable to nurse

23 Matthews Grieco, “Breastfeeding, Wet Nursing,” 22.24 Matthews Grieco, “Breastfeeding, Wet Nursing,” 22. After citing wet-nursing

engaging in sexual intercourse, Matthews Grieco further reasons that there was a marked preference on the part of wet nurses’ employers for widowed and unmarried women, “as they ran a smaller risk of getting pregnant.” Unfortunately, she does not cite any evidence to back up this latter statement. Ibid., 18–19.

25 “… Asked how she knew this [that Johan Ponc was more than 20 years old], she replied, because she had breastfed the honorable Caterina Juhan, daughter of the honorable Bernat Juhan, citizen, who has just turned twenty-three years old, and she breastfed the aforementioned Francescha with the very same milk.” ARV JCiv 898: M. 7: 42v.

26 ARV JCiv 922: M. 15: 3r–4r.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

110

her child “as she did not have any milk.”27 Stressing how “she had been the very e’l lo encona de la

sua propria llet], Ysabel recounted how she had breastfed him for more than two years, up until he had been weaned and began to eat [solid food and could feed] himself.”28 Although Ysabel makes no mention of the child whom she had carried in her womb and whose milk she gave to someone else, it bears noting, however, that at the time when Ysabel took custody of Miquel, her grown daughter, Caterina, who had just gotten married, was present to welcome the newborn infant upon his arrival in her mother’s home. Indeed, suggestive that Caterina, now the wife of the rope maker Pere Lop, regarded Miquel as a step-sibling, in her testimony Caterina proudly recounted how she saw how Miquel had been delivered, “swaddled and wrapped in both woolen and linen cloths,” from the village of Beniferri, located in Valencia’s huerta, to her mother’s house in Valencia. Likewise making no mention of her biological brother or sister, Caterina instead emphasized how the midwife who had accompanied Miquel’s father when he delivered the infant had told

woman in the world [ ].”29

Glossing over any mention of the child they presumably had carried in their wombs, these women instead stressed the strength of the bond that the act of breastfeeding had been forged between themselves and their nurslings, equating it with that between a “real” mother and child. Thus, for example, in 1435, Caterina, the wife of the broker Johan de Xativa, after describing how Johana Ferrer, the widow of the pharmacist/spice seller Johan Ferrer, gave birth to a daughter, also named Johana, in October 1415, she emphasized how following the child’s baptism, she had taken custody of her, bringing the newborn baby into her own home and breastfeeding her for a period of two years. Though Caterina acknowledged that she had been

goodness that she knows is in her, she loved her as if she were her own daughter [la ].”30

27 ARV JCiv 900: M. 9: 24v–25r. The midwife who delivered the child described how “immediately after he was born, since in the aforementioned place of Beniferri, there

milk, as his aforementioned mother did not have her milk yet, she, along with his father, had gone looking hither and yon for a woman who had milk and was willing to breastfeed him. Immediately, the very day he was born, they found a wet nurse in Valencia whom they called Ysabel, the wife of the sailor Guillem de Nuria, who, out of regard for the aforementioned father of Miquel Vicent and at their urging, agreed graciously to accept the child and, for a certain price, nourish and breastfeed the child for a certain period of time with her milk.”

28 ARV JCiv 900: M. 9: 22v. 29 ARV JCiv 900: M. 2: 23r. 30 ARV JCiv 888: M. 16: 30r.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


Similarly, in 1443, we encounter a household servant named Clara, in the service of the noblewoman na Banquena, the wife of Gabriel de Riusech, who, in identifying herself as Johan Guillem’s wet nurse [dida], stressed how “she suckled him with her milk” (emphasis added) inasmuch as Johan’s biological mother had, immediately subsequent to his birth, renounced the world and become a Third Order Dominican.31

hearings, however, in referring to the milk as that of their sons or daughters—also seem to be stressing the bond that this practice had forged between the wet nurse and the biological mother’s children.Recently, the social anthropologist Peter Parkes has called into question the

presumption that milk kinship or rida’a “was a uniquely Islamic jural invention.” While scholars such as Avner Giladi have suggested that the Islamic tradition is distinctive in the attention it devotes to the creation of kinship ties through wet nurses, Parkes (in a series of articles) has demonstrated how “equivalent infant fosterage and milk kinship was widely recognized as an informal adoptive relationship throughout the ancient Mediterranean.”32 In non-Islamic societies throughout western Eurasia, Parkes maintains, one encounters similar practices whereby “the ‘adoptive paternity’ of the fostering husband [Latin ] of a female nurse or ‘milk-mother’ [ ]” was broadly recognized.” Just as Muslim jurists debated the extent to which wet-nursing created bonds equivalent to blood relations that could be impediments to marriage, Parkes has noted how milk kinship was also treated as “a canonical impediment to marriage by several eastern Christian churches, notably among Jacobites, Syrians, Armenians, and

Islamic jurisprudence cannot be discounted in all these cases,” he nonetheless maintains that “it seems likely that these intercultural convergences … attest what Michael Mitterauer calls ‘incest norms from below” in the eastern Mediterranean, where milk kinship certainly predated both Christianity and Islam.” Indeed, Parkes argues, such cultural parallels “indicate common somatic notions of breast milk’s identity with female blood.”33 Indeed, as the works of medical authorities

31 ARV JCiv 904: M. 12: 37r. A subsequent witness in Johan Guillem’s age-of-majority hearing, Ysabel, the wife of the cloth maker Francesch Villar, noted how Johan’s mother, na Leonarda, “renounced the world and took on the habit of the friars preachers … [A]nd she said she had seen her go about the city in said habit many different times.” ARV JCiv 904: M. 12: 37v.

32 Thus, stressing how breastfeeding was practiced within the early Muslim communities “so as to broaden the network of kinfolk and relatives on whom one could rely for assistance and cooperation,” Avner Giladi asks, “Why did Islam remain unique in this regard, at least among monotheistic cultures?” Avner Giladi, “Breast-Feeding in Medieval Islamic Thought: A Preliminary Study of Legal and Medical Writings,” Journal of Family History, 23, 2 (1998): 107–23, especially 116.

33 Peter Parkes, “Milk kinship in Islam. Substance, Structure, History,” Social Anthropology, 13, 3 (2005): 307–29, especially 320–321. See also Avner Giladi, Infants, Parents and Wetnurses: Medieval Islamic Views on Breastfeeding and Their Social Implications (Leiden, 1999).


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

112

such as Soranus and Avicenna indicate, breast milk was widely considered to be a

the womb to a woman’s breasts.34 Thus Parkes concludes, “[milk kinship’s] similar elaboration as an impediment to marriage in the canon law of several eastern Christian churches, and its parallels in the juridical expansion of spiritual kinship elsewhere in (western) Christendom, demand its broader comprehension within a comparative historical anthropology of Eurasian adoptive kinship.”35

practices within the broader context of a comparative historical anthropology of Eurasian adoptive kinship is beyond the scope of this present study. Nonetheless, I would like to conclude this chapter by presenting evidence suggesting that the act of sharing a son’s or daughter’s milk with the children of one’s peers—be they distant relatives or fellow artisans engaged in the same trade—served as an alternative mechanism both to broaden and to reinforce existing kinship networks.Thus, for example, we see how, in 1442, when Toda, the wife of the merchant

Francesch Castellar, was called to testify in the age of majority hearing for the merchant Gaspar de Cervello, she recalled how, at the time of Gaspar’s birth, she had been breastfeeding her own son, who, at that time, was around ten months old. Acknowledging that she also was a distant blood relative of Gaspar’s, Toda recounted how she had frequently come to visit Gaspar’s mother during her lying-in period and that, on such occasions, she “sometimes breastfed [Gaspar] with the same milk that she was giving to her son [

].”36One could read the testimony given in 1452 by Anthoneta, the wife of a

brassworker named Ramon Diego, in much the same way. In calling attention to how she had breastfed Bernat Draper, the son of the sword maker Nicholau Draper “with the milk with which she was nursing her own daughter, who was

that now linked their two families, reinforcing, perhaps, the bonds that had already been forged between them by virtue of the fact that they were both engaged in the metal industry.37Similarly, in 1441, Elischen, the wife of the wool-comber Pere Gilabert, was

one of several witnesses called in to testify on behalf of Pere de la Vila, the son of the wool-comber Johan de Vila. After noting how she was breastfeeding her daughter around the time when Pere had been born, Elischen stressed how, as Pere’s enconadora, she had suckled Pere with this very same milk, her daughter’s

34 See, for example, Owsei Temkin, ed., Gynecology of Soranus of Ephesus (Baltimore, 1991), 92–3, and Mazhar Shah, The General Principles of Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine (Karachi, 1966), 286–9.

35 Parkes, “Milk kinship in Islam,” 308.36 Toda acknowledged that “she is a relative of the aforementioned Gaspar de

Cervello,” though she does not specify exactly how they were related. ARV JCiv 902: M. 26: 8r–v.

37 ARV JCiv 916: M. 15: 33r–v.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


38 Likewise, in 1477, the

encona), feeding him “with the milk with which she breastfed her son.”39

kinship ties with other women by asking them to breastfeed their children, indeed seems to parallel a practice observed by Louis Haas in Renaissance Florence in which women “used baptismal kinship to create friendship ties or to reinforce

ricordanze, Haas noticed that the (male) writers of ricordanze often failed to record the names of co-mothers/godmothers. He posits that one reason for this was that “wives chose the co-mothers, thus pursuing their own strategies and goals, and setting up their own baptismal kinship nexus.” Noting how the women named as co-mothers often times “had been present at the birth,” being either midwives, guardadonne [women hired to aid the mother in birth] or friends and relatives in attendance at the birth, Haas sees at work here a

more a female-oriented strategy than a male-oriented strategy … Wives utilized baptismal kinship for their own purposes with their own choices, who were not necessarily the choices or even the friends of their husbands. This explains why co-mothers appear in such few numbers in the male-oriented ricordanze. While these women were theoretically their baptismal kin, these men did not socially recognize that fact nor did they wish or need for the fact to be recorded for their male descendants. These were “her” friends who probably could not help the writer of the ricordanze all that much anyway. So why record her existence.40

termed today as “milk kinship bonds” is further suggested by testimony in a case heard by the Governor of Valencia in 1425 concerning the juridical status of a black male named Silvester, who contended that he had been mistaken for a slave. Now some 20 years in age, Silvester was the son of a black Muslim slave woman Axa owned by a Valencian grain seller named Anthoni Font, who subsequently converted and, just prior to Silvester’s birth, had been baptized Johana. In his testimony before the Governor (on Silvester’s behalf), Anthoni confessed that Silvester not only had been born in his household but also had been breastfed by Anthoni’s wife. Though, given the fact that it was common practice for masters

38 Elischen recounted how “she had been breastfeeding a daughter of hers” when

with that (i.e., her daughter’s) milk.” ARV JCiv 899: M. 15: 46v.39 ARV JCiv 928: M. 16: 27r–v.40 Louis Haas, “Il Mio Buono Compare: Choosing Godparents and the Uses of

Baptismal Kinship in Renaissance Florence,” Journal of Social History, 29, 2 (1995): 341–56, especially 348–9.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

114

to sexually exploit their female slaves, it was entirely possible that Anthoni was Silvester’s biological father, Anthoni nevertheless maintained that Silvester’s “free” status was not the consequence of a free paternity. Rather, Anthoni instead emphasized the milk kinship tie that had been established between Silvester and his wife. Insisting that he had always treated Silvester as a free person, Anthoni stressed the fact that whenever anyone tried to treat Silvester as a commodity (i.e., as a slave), encouraging him to put him up for sale, he had vehemently objected, declaring, “this would not be pleasing to God … It would not please God were I to sell him because I have already made him free. He was born in my household and my wife suckled him at her breasts, having nourished him with milk coming

since I have made him free!”41Though certainly much more research needs to be done concerning milk kinship

relationships in late medieval Spain, this chapter nonetheless has demonstrated

sisters.” Not only did the practice of sharing milk bind women together as comares and establish milk kinship bonds between wet nurses and their nurslings, but it also created bonds between their children. It was a tactic employed by women—perhaps independently, or perhaps in consultation with their husbands and/or male relatives—to expand and/or reinforce existing kinship networks;; a form of female networking that complimented and supplemented male forms of networking.

41 ARV Gobernación 2235: M. 13: 9r–10v.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Chapter 6 Popular Balladry and the Terrible Wet Nurse:

“La nodriza del rey”

Emilie L. Bergmann

In 1928, the year in which he published his Romancero gitano [Gypsy Ballads], the poet Federico García Lorca spoke at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid on the topic of Spanish lullabies, an important subgenre of the folk tradition that resonates in his surrealist verses. “I wanted to know how the women of my country put their children to sleep, and after a while I found that Spain uses its

children … the bloodiest songs, those least suited to a child’s delicate sensibility.”1 In the oral tradition, García Lorca found a disturbing juxtaposition of nurturing

resistance to sleep and the everyday concerns that separate the nursing mother from the infant are remarkable for their unvarnished detail: the urgency of the impoverished mother for whom each child is a burden, and her frustration with the infant’s struggle against sleep, delaying her return to her work. He credited wet nurses, maids, and other domestic servants with the “important job of carrying the ballad, the song and the story into the houses of aristocrats and bourgeoises”;; thus, the violence recorded in the oral historical and literary tradition was inseparable from “the starchy breast of the nanny (that quivering little volcano of milk and blue veins).”2

theory, and although it is unlikely that García Lorca would have been aware of

1 “Quise saber de qué modo dormían a sus hijos las mujeres de mi país, y al cabo de un tiempo recibí la impresión de que España usa sus melodías de más acentuada tristeza y sus textos de expresión más melancólica para teñir el primer sueño de sus niños …. lo más sangrante, lo menos adecuado para su delicada sensibilidad.” Federico García Lorca, “Las nanas infantiles,” Obras completas (Madrid, 1954), 52–3. Federico García Lorca, “On Lullabies,” Deep Song and Other Prose, trans. Christopher Maurer (New York, 1980), 9–10. Although García Lorca never repeated his readings, he gave a similar talk at Vassar College in 1930. Five years later, an ominous version of one of these nanas infantiles

Bodas de sangre [Blood Wedding]. 2 “… la importantísima labor de llevar el romance, la canción y el cuento a las casas

de los aristócratas y los burgueses …. el almidonado pecho de la nodriza (ese pequeño volcánico estremecido de leche y venas azules).” García Lorca, “Las nanas infantiles,” 54. García Lorca, “On Lullabies,” 11.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

116

the object-relations theory that Melanie Klein began to propose in the 1920s, her concept of the infant’s dual experience of the breast can illuminate his writing on popular lyric sung to infants by mothers and caregivers. The melancholy tunes and sorrowful lyrics of Spanish lullabies, incongruities that surprised and fascinated the poet, can be read as a lyrical rendition of Klein’s concept of the infant’s dual experience of the breast, “instinctively felt to be not only the source of nourishment but of life itself … An element of frustration by the breast is bound, however, to enter into the infant’s earliest relation to it, because … the infant’s longing for an inexhaustible and always present breast—which would not only satisfy him but prevent destructive impulses and persecutory anxiety—cannot ever be fully

feeling that a good and bad breast exists.”3

breast have resonated for centuries in some of the most widely distributed Spanish ballads. Most pertinent to García Lorca’s recognition of the ambiguous breast in infantile experience are the lullabies that speak of the abandonment of the infant by the father or mother, or the mother’s anger toward the father.4 In one widely distributed lullaby, “La mujer engañada” [The jealous wife], known in Spain,

responds to her husband by refusing to unbar the door as he returns from a tryst. The comforting intention of the lullaby is disrupted by the mother’s envy of the other woman.5Although García Lorca spoke of Iberian cradle songs as uniquely disturbing,

the present chapter focuses on a ballad that he did not mention, a ballad whose many variants have survived on three continents and whose narrative is more explicitly frightening than those he cited. Known in French as “La nourrice du roi” [The Royal Wet-Nurse] or “Le nourrison brûlé” [The Burned Nurseling];; the ballad is known in Castilian and Judeo-Spanish as “La nodriza del rey” and in Catalan as “La dida del rei” [both can be rendered in English as “The Royal Wet-Nurse].”6 Versions of this ballad have been collected in France, Spain, Switzerland, and Canada, and in Sephardic communities in Morocco. Ironically, some Spanish informants regarded it as particularly effective in lulling infants to sleep.7 It begins

3 Melanie Klein, The Selected Melanie Klein, ed. Juliet Mitchell (New York, 1986), 211–12.

4 García Lorca, “Las nanas infantiles,” 61–5.5 The ballad has been recorded by numerous performers including Ensemble

Hesperion XX as “Nani, nani.” A study of the ballad’s distribution and variants appear in Armistead’s Catálogo. “Nani, nani,” Ensemble Hesperion XX, Weltliche Musik im christlichen und jüdischen Spanien (1450–1550) [sound recording] (Cologne, 1976).

6 Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. Milá y Fontanals’s title for the ballad is in Castilian, “La nodriza,” although the verses are in Catalan. Manuel Milá y Fontanals, Romancerillo catalán: Canciones tradicionales (Barcelona, 1882), 436.

7 Jesús Antonio Cid, “De La nourrice du roi a La nodriza del infante. Apertura Le

(Madrid, 1995), 115.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Popular Balladry and the Terrible Wet Nurse 117

response of horror and despair. As in the Grimm’s fairy tales, in which a cruel stepmother serves as buffer for emotional ambivalence toward the mother, the role of the hired nurturer in “The Royal Wet-Nurse” is to absolve the parents of blame for the death of their child.The ballad takes the narrative form of a miracle tale in versions from the French

regions of Brittany, Anjou, Orleans, Lorraine, Nivernais, Auvergne, Languedoc, and Provence, and from Quebec, in which the Virgin Mary, often with the assistance of Saint Nicholas, rescues the infant as well as the nurse, whether from execution by the authorities or her attempt at suicide by drowning. The journeys of popular ballads are impossible to trace with any certainty;; however, Doncieux posited a Catalan ballad from the pilgrimage site of Montserrat as the “primitive” version, in which the miracle is attributed to the Virgin alone. He cites the absence of any hagiographic narrative of a similar miracle in the life of Saint Nicholas as an indication that the region of Lorraine near Saint-Nicolas-du-Port had an important role in the French versions.8 The following is the version collected by Maurice Barbeau among the Acadians on Prince Edward Island, similar to the versions published by Doncieux and cited by Jesús Antonio Cid:9

La nourrice du roi The Royal NursemaidAh! c’était la nourrice, It was the royal nursemaidla nourrice du roi, Who took a little nap.Un jour s’est endormie, And as she slept, she heldl’enfant entre ses bras. The young prince on her lap.Dieu, aidez-moi! Lord, pity us!Douce Vierge Marie, O have mercy, sweet Mary!Saint Nicolas! Saint Nicolas!Mais quand ell’ s’y réveille, When she woke from her slumber,

Poussa un si grand cri In fright she cried aloud,que tout l’monde accoura. Till all men running came.Dieu, aidez-moi! … Lord, pity us! …Qu’ avez-vous donc, nourrice, “Pray, tell, what ails you, nurse-maid?à fair’ ce grand cri-là? Why do you cry and weep?”Oh! ce n’est rien, dit-elle, “‘Tis naught, ‘tis naught,” she said,j’en ai brulé un drap. “I only burned a sheet.”Dieu, aidez-moi! … Lord, pity us! …Elle enr’ouvre la porte, And through the gateway,à la rivièr’ s’en va. She to the river ran,Dans son chemin rencontre And met upon the pathle grand saint Nicolas. The great Saint Nicholas.

8 Cid, “De La nourrice du roi,” 104.9 Marius Barbeau, Folk-Songs of old Québec, National Museum of Canada Bulletin,

75 (Ottawa, 1964), 69–70;; Georges Doncieux, Le Romancero populaire de la France (Paris, 1904), 388–9;; Cid, “De La nourrice du roi,” 105.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

118

Dieu, aidez-moi! … Lord, pity us! …Où vas-tu donc, nourrice, “Whither go you, nurse-maid?avec ces hardes-là? With your clothes full of ash?”Je vais à la rivière, “I go to the river,je vais laver mes draps. With my clothes there to wash.”Dieu, aidez-moi! … Lord, pity us! …Tu as menti, nourrice, “You tell a lie, nurse-maid,te noyer tu t’en vas. You seek yourself to drown.Retourne à la maison, Go hence unto your home,l’enfant te tend les bras. The babe holds out his arm.”Dieu, aidez-moi! … Lord, pity us! …Dans les bras de la Vierge There in the arms of Mary

Voilà les grands miracles Such wonders come to passque fait saint Nicolas. Through great Saint Nicholas!

The ballad continued to thrive in mid-nineteenth-century France and early twentieth-century Castile, León, and Aragón (including Catalonia), while

Moroccan Sephardic community in the 1980s. From the evidence of numerous variants and wide distribution, Jesús Antonio Cid concludes that it clearly belongs to a centuries-old oral tradition.10recorded by at least three Canadian women performers.11 The liner notes for Alison Girvan’s compact disc praise its “sonorous antiquities” and “patina of ancient wisdom,” or perhaps more accurately its resonance with the deepest fears of a new generation of middle-class, rather than royal or even aristocratic, parents who entrust their infants to paid caregivers.Based on a detailed comparison of numerous versions, both printed and

unpublished, Cid argues that the miracle tale sugar-coats the terrifying narrative of the painful, violent death of a child.12 The wide distribution of the ballad and its number of variants in Castilian and Catalan, according to Cid, are extraordinary:

in others, by her delay in responding to their request to see their child. The cause of death can range from an innocuous bit of phlegm that choked the newborn, to poisoning or strangling by another servant, thus doubling the parents’ distance

10 Cid, “De La nourrice du roi,” 104.11 Teresa Doyle, “La nourrice du roi,” Cradle on the Waves (Toronto, 2003), music

CD;; Suzie LeBlanc, “La nourrice du roi,” La mer jolie: Chants d’Acadie (Toronto, 2004), music CD;; Allison Girvan, “La nourrice du roi,” Resonance ([Nelson, B.C.], 2007), music CD.

12 Cid, “De La nourrice du roi,” 116. While rejecting the “excessive positivistic

text, Cid concludes that the origins of the ballad are French. Cid also cites the updating of Doncieux in Conrad Laforte, (6 vols, Québec, 1977–1987), vol. 1 (1977), 10–11.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


from culpability for the child’s death. In some versions, the wet nurse is rescued by saintly intervention from an attempt at suicide by drowning;; in others she narrowly escapes death by hanging or burning, the latter a punishment equivalent to the results of her negligence. Cid groups the variants by language, noting several variants that are particularly pertinent to the moral and social questions of hiring wet nurses. Since there are no known published versions of the ballad from the early modern period, it is impossible to determine which details might have been added nearer to the dates when folklorists collected the earliest printed versions, in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.Although Cid, as well as Armistead, Silverman, and Katz, date the earliest

known version of the ballad of “The Royal Wet-Nurse” to the seventeenth century, a strikingly similar resuscitation of a child who has died can be found four centuries earlier, in the Cantigas de Santa María [Canticles of Holy Mary] (ca. 1270) from the court of Alfonso X “El Sabio.” These miracle tales include dozens of resuscitations and cures of infants and children, but Cantiga 122, with the refrain “Miragres muitos pelos reis faz / Santa Maria cada que lle praz.” [“Holy Mary performs many miracles for kings whenever she so wills”] tells of the death of Berenguela (1225–88/89), infant daughter of Fernando III (1199–1262) and Beatriz (or Elizabeth) of Swabia (1198–1235), who were also the parents of Alfonso X:

a fez pera às Olgas a levar the convent of Las Huelgas of Burgos, but

foi e morreu, de que mao solaz which grieved her nursemaid so greatly allMiragres muitos pelos reis faz … through the night that she thought sheToda a noite ssa ama levou, would kill herself from sorrow. Sheca de doo a matar-se cuidou;; informed the child’s mother at once and

13

e ela fez como a quen desprazMiragres muitos pelos reis faz …14

This Cantiga tells how the queen placed her daughter at the feet of a statue of the Virgin in the chapel in Toledo, sent everyone out of the chapel, and then

her daughter to her alive. As she was making a vow not to leave the doorway until this occurred, and to wear mourning if it did not, she heard her daughter cry. In gratitude to the Virgin, the queen made gifts to every chapel dedicated to her “as far as Arras,” and brought her daughter, as the parents had promised,

13 Songs of Holy Mary of Alfonso X, The Wise, A Translation of the Cantigas de Santa María, trans. Kathleen Kulp-Hill (Tempe, 2000), 150.

14 Alfonso X, King of Castile and León, Cantigas de Santa María, ed. Walter Mettmann (2 vols, Vigo, 1981), vol. 1, 447, lines 25–34.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

120

to Las Huelgas, “a worthy place, may it be to the devil’s dismay.”15of the saintly Fernando III, canonized in 1671, his wife, and his infant daughter are unusual in the Cantigas, which are more often narratives of sinners whose devotion to the Virgin summons her to rescue them from extraordinary dangers. Although this Cantiga

on the drama of the nurse than that of the king and queen and changing the sex of the infant from daughter to son. As Cid points out regarding the ballad, it is impossible to trace such narratives to a single origin. Anne C. McCormick reveals “webs” of secular “raw narrative material” in which the intervention of Mary was inserted in order to create miracle tales.16The Catalan versions of “La dida del rei” collected in the late nineteenth and

early twentieth centuries include a remarkable array of variants. Some elaborate upon the reasons for the hiring of a surrogate and the absence of the king and

the nurturing of one’s own children.17 One version collected in 1921 begins by reiterating the queen’s inability to nurse: “The queen Doña Maria cannot nurse;; she would if she could”;; and a version collected in 1985 in the region of Gerona offers a similar explanation.18 Yet another version narrates the lighting of a great

19

Perhaps the most striking Catalan variants are those in which the nurse, once the royal infant has been revived, resigns from her position because she regards herself as unworthy;; or her milk supply has dried up from the shock of the child’s death.20 The child’s insistence that she return to her task is dramatic evidence of his miraculous restoration to life. Manuel Milá y Fontanals published two particularly

15 “Logar de bon prez, / malgrad’ end’ aja o demo malvaz.” Alfonso X, Cantigas de Santa María, 448, lines 67–8;; Songs of Holy Mary of Alfonso X, 151.

16 Infanticide also appears in tale of the Empress of Rome in Alfonsine Cantiga 17 and in Gautier de Coinci’s Miracles de Notre Dame (ca. 1225), in which it is not the child but his caregiver who is killed and then miraculously revived. McCormick traces the secular tradition of these tales and the use of their scandalous narratives of adultery, incest, and fornication to illustrate medieval sermons. Anne Catherine McCormick, “Revealing Tales: Sex, Violence, and Gender in the Miracle Collections of Gautier de Coinci, Gonzalo de Berceo, and Alfonso X, el Sabio” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1996), 21, 23–5.

17 Cid, “De La nourrice du roi,” 110–111.18 “La reina no’l pot criar / la reina donya Maria;; / la reina no’l pot criar, si pogués ja’l

criaria.” Cid, “De La nourrice du roi,” 110.19 “L’infantó no pot dormir / ni al bressol ni a la cadira, // ni tampoc a en el llit d’or /

sino a la falda de la dida. // La dida ne fa un gran foc / ab llenya seca d’alzina, // y ab aquell ardor del foc / la dida s’es adormida.” Cid, “De La nourrice du roi,” 109–10.

20 Cid, “De La nourrice du roi,” 115.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


lively variants, in which the infant has worked up an appetite in the process of

Nurse, let me suckle, for I’ve just come from the other world [literally, another life],” and “Nurse! Oh, nurse, let me suckle, for I have quite an appetite! What can I give my little boy [literally, son, presumably a term of affection rather than literal kinship], since my milk has disappeared!” “Go to the henhouse and kill the fattest hen, and if one isn’t enough, kill them all.”21 In light of Klein’s theorizing of the infant’s ambivalent emotions toward the “devoured” and “devouring breast,” these lines are a grotesquely comical disavowal of the infant’s experience of anxiety toward the withdrawal of the breast.22 His abrupt weaning results not only in a monstrous appetite but also his simultaneous acquisition of highly sophisticated speech, evidenced in his reference to his hunger with the ironic diminutive “ganeta” [little craving].The Sephardic versions of “La nodriza del rey” found in Morocco are songs for

Tisha B-Av, commemorating the destruction of the Temple;; thus, it is appropriate that they end in tragedy rather than miraculous resuscitation. Joseph H. Silverman, Samuel Armistead, and Israel Katz found a single version of “La nodriza del infante” [The Prince’s Nurse] in Morocco and note that this ballad “is very rare in Spanish-speaking areas of the Peninsula” as opposed to Catalonia.23 Absent the possibility of intervention by Christian saints, Armistead observes that in the Sephardic ballad the nurse must drown herself in the sea;; however, Cid argues that the simple and ingenuous “deus ex machina” found in the “original” form of the

24

The tragic outcome cannot be attributed solely to a Jewish context, in light of the fourth and last group of variants discussed in Cid’s study, a group of ballads collected in the early twentieth century and in the 1980s in the northwestern

narrative of “Delgadina,” perhaps the most widely distributed of Hispanic ballads.25 In “Delgadina,” the king punishes his daughter with imprisonment in a tower for resisting his incestuous desires;; after she dies of thirst, “the bells of heaven tolled

21 “Troba l’infant al bressol / que jogava i que rivia: // —Dida, doneu-me mamar, que jo vinc d’un altra vida.” Milá y Fontanals, Romancerillo catalán, 40, variant C. “—Dida! //

m’en ha fugida! // —Aneu-s’en el galliner, / mateu la millor gallina;; // si d’una no n’hi ha prou, / mateu-ne quantas n’hi havia.” Milá y Fontanals, Romancerillo catalán, 41, variant K. In Alfonsine Cantiga 221, a boy’s return to life is similarly dramatized by his request for food.

22 Klein, The Selected Melanie Klein, 50.23 Samuel G. Armistead, Joseph H. Silverman, and Israel Katz, Folk Literature of

the Sephardic Jews: Judeo-Spanish Ballads from Oral Tradition;; Epic Ballads (Berkeley, 1986), vol. 2.1, 16, note 24.

24 Armistead, Folk Literature, 139;; Cid, “De La nourrice du roi,” 117.25 Cid, “De La nourrice du roi,” 123.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

122

for Delgadina;; those of hell for her father.”26 The twentieth-century versions of “La nodriza del rey” from León imply that the cause of the child’s immolation is not the negligence of a hired caregiver but the wrongdoing of the child’s incestuous father. The queen is no longer present, and the caregiver is no longer a servant;; the narrator refers to her ambiguously in one variant as “su hermana” [the infant’s sister], and the infant’s father calls her “vida del alma” [life of my soul] or “hija de mi alma” [daughter of my soul], unlikely ways for a king to address a servant.27 In

was surrounded by holy images;; that of the king spewed the smoke of demons.”28 Cid points out that the Leonese reinterpretation of “La nodriza del rey” begins with the situation that would have resulted had the king’s incestuous desire in “Delgadina” been consummated and produced a child. The death of the infant no longer represents a terrible loss, nor can order be restored through his return to life, as in the Catalonian and French versions;; rather, his very existence represents an irreparable disruption of the social order.29A far sunnier representation of the paid wet nurse can be found in sixteenth-

century Florence. In his article “The Middle-Class Child in Urban Italy,” James B. Ross cites two Canti carnascialeschi [carnival songs] that boast of the abundance and healthful quality of the breast milk and the swaddling skills of countrywomen from the rural areas near Florence. In her groundbreaking study Wet-Nursing, Valerie Fildes cites Ross’s translations of these festive verses to introduce her chapter on Renaissance Florence.30 While it is risky to attempt to draw boundaries between popular and learned lyric genres, it is important to note that, while these two ballads may have been performed by women, even by women who worked as wet nurses, the words were written by educated men.31 The songs’ boastfulness can be read as an emphatic disavowal of the fears voiced in the French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Ladino popular tradition of “The Royal Wet-Nurse.” Unlike the lullabies sung to infants in intimate surroundings, the Canzone delle balie were

by actors playing the parts of “gardeners, wet-nurses, fencers …” who addressed

26 su padre retornaban.” Paloma Díaz-Mas, Romancero (Barcelona, 1996 [1994]), 331.

27 Cid, “De La nourrice du roi,” 122.28 “La caja de Teresina / de imágenes rodeada, // y la del rey / de demonios fumeaba.”

Ibid., 123.29 Ibid., 124.30 Valerie Fildes, (Oxford, 1988);;

James Bruce Ross, “The Middle-Class Child in Urban Italy, Fourteenth to Early Sixteenth Century,” The History of Childhood, ed. Lloyd DeMause (New York, 1974), 183–228.

31 The term canzona (plural: canzone) refers to a verse form (distinct from the general term canzone [plural: canzoni, song or lyric poem]), which developed from the satirical and bawdy popular tradition of the caccia. Several canzone carnascialesci


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


“the ladies on their balconies looking down on the processions as they passed.”32 Along with other songs celebrating the artisanship of the male guilds, these Canzone delle balie dramatized the diverse forms of production that sustained the community. One of the nurses’ songs begins: “Here we come, balie from the Casentino, / Each one looking for a baby, / And here are our husbands / Who lead us on the way / / … Always when the baby cries / We feel our milk returning,” while another assures potential employers, “To avoid all suspicion / let the doctor see [our milk], / Because in it is found / The life and being of the creature.”33 Burke notes that “songs with [sexual] double meanings were not only permitted at this time;; they were virtually obligatory.”34 What kind of double meanings might be derived from songs about breastfeeding?In her study of medieval representations of the Madonna Lactans and the

Miles makes the important observation that women in the early modern period “did not own the breast.”35 Citing Klein’s theories of the neonate’s splitting of the breast into the gratifying source of pleasure and the hostile, frustrating breast, Miles refers to the masculinist tradition of categorizing women as “either dangerous seducers

of the “mechanisms for coping with the anxiety of the ambiguous breast.”36 In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the Madonna’s ownership of her nourishing breast gives her religious authority, while in the sixteenth century the Canti carnascialeschi

sexualized poetic genre belonging to a carnival scene and the vital function of lactation in the context of family and community. In light of the profound psychic ambiguity evoked by the breast, the explicit reference to the nurses’ husbands and the health of the infant consumers represents an attempt to foreground the “good,” nurturing breast and suppress the persecuting or “devouring” breast.37 Lorca’s perception of the inappropriateness of Spanish cradle songs, and the terrifying image of infant immolation at the hands of the negligent caregiver in the

32 Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 1st ed. 1978, 2nd 1994;; 3rd ed. 2009), 263.

33 Ross, “The Middle-Class Child,” 190–192;; Canzona delle balie no. XXIX: “Balie sián di Casentino, / ch’ognun cerca d’un bambino.// …. sempre quando il bambin piangne / ci sentián tornar il latte”;; Canzona delle balie no. XCIV: “Perch’alcun non sospetti, / dal medico potete far vederlo, / perché consiste in quello / la vita e l’esser della creatura.” Singleton, Canti carnascialeschi del rinascimento, 39, 125.

34 Burke, Popular Culture, 265.35 Margaret Miles, A Complex Delight: The Secularization of the Breast 1350–1750

(Berkeley, 2008), 3.36 Miles, A Complex Delight, 4.37 Ibid.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

124

ballad of the Royal Wet-Nurse, bring to the surface the frustrating, hostile breast in traditional lyric.Denise Filios’s analysis of the performance of femininity in a range of comic-

obscene and comic-erotic Iberian poetic texts composed by men but performed by both men and women, roughly between 1250 and 1550, supports my approach to the songs of the Tuscan balie. In Performing Sexuality, Filios examines the parodic double-voicing produced when women performed male-authored texts featuring loud-mouthed, vulgar femininity.38 While male performers impersonated women, the women, she argues, impersonated themselves. Most pertinent to an analysis of wet nurses’ songs is Filios’s discussion of the songs of panaderas [women bread bakers] and their coded language of eroticism in the thirteenth-century Libro de buen amor [Book of Good Love] and the anonymous Coplas de la panadera [The woman bread baker’s couplets, or, couplets about the woman bread baker]. Filios argues for a dual perspective on the panadera as “a consumable,” displaying her wares and her body through double-entendres familiar to listeners in a heteroglossic marketplace, an “arena of contested misrule” that was also regulated by law and monarchical authority.39 Similarly, the songs of wet nurses represent these women’s bodies in terms of consumption and nourishment. It is important to recognize the undeniable differences between the Tuscan nurturers with husbands in tow, and the tough-talking, sexually aggressive, economically subversive women of medieval Iberian lyric. The employment sought by the nurses was not only legal but also essential to the economic and social fabric. Both prostitution and wet-nursing, however, involve trading in the female body, especially since breast milk in the early modern period was not separable from the body that produced it. The sexual dichotomy persists in Fildes’ reference to wet-nursing as “the second oldest profession.”40The ballad of “La nourrice du roi” gives voice, literally, to the ambivalent view

of the nurse as both a vital member of the household and a servant, albeit better paid and better fed than any other female domestic worker.41 Documents from medieval France and Castile show the privileges granted to royal and aristocratic wet nurses.42 Heath Dillard found that “[t]he Cortes of Jerez in 1268 set the day wage of a woman labourer in Andalusia at six maravedís, half that of a man, although as a wet nurse she would earn ten.”43 Anastasio Rojo Vega’s research in the provincial archives of Valladolid shows a range of salaries in the mid-sixteenth

38 Denise Filios, Performing Women in the Middle Ages: Sex, Gender, and the Iberian Lyric (New York, 2005), 2–3.

39 Filios, Performing Women, 127.40 Fildes, Wet Nursing, 158. 41 Carmen Sarasúa, Criados, nodrizas y amos: El servicio doméstico en la formación

del mercado de trabajo madrileño, 1758–1868 (Madrid, 1994), 176. 42 Fildes, Wet Nursing, 36–8.43 Heath Dillard,

1100–1300 (Cambridge, 1984), 164.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


century, depending upon the wealth and social status of the employer. The lowest

maravedís to his daughter’s nurse, while the Count of Lemos paid 150,000 to his children’s wet nurse.44

century Florence, Christine Klapisch-Zuber investigated detailed records, kept by Florentine fathers and the husbands of the nurses, documenting the practices celebrated in the Canzone delle balie.45 While legitimizing their commercial endeavors by referring to the husbands who accompany them, the nurses’ ventriloquized voices celebrate their skill at swaddling babies, curing their ailments, and raising each to be a “proud knight” [franco paladino].46 In early modern conduct manuals, the invariable admonishments that mothers should nurse their own infants were followed by practical instructions for testing a prospective wet nurse’s milk. However, it was not only the abundant production of breast milk or the skill at wrapping the swaddling bands that concerned prospective employers. General health, evidenced in the good complexion that is described in numerous documents and upstanding moral character, were also important criteria. Canzona

need not worry;; we will watch the child day and night.”47 Despite their trumpeting

involved in hiring a surrogate.Feminist historians’ rediscovery of the extent of the practice of wet-nursing

in France, England, and Italy had an important impact on late twentieth-century historiography of motherhood. Elisabeth Badinter cited the predominance of the seventeenth-century practice of sending newborns to nurses in the countryside in order to challenge the notion of a biological basis for maternal attachment. Badinter’s translator, Francine duPlessix Gray, was so shocked by the documentation of “maternal indifference” toward these children’s well-being that she referred to it as “masked infanticide.”48 However, the documents studied by Klapisch-Zuber show that mothers did not make the decisions regarding the hiring of wet nurses for their newborns. Several historians, including Linda Pollock, David Herlihy, and Shulamith Shahar, have refuted Philippe Ariés’s and Lawrence Stone’s now-

44 Anastasio Rojo Vega, El siglo de oro: Inventario de una época (Valladolid, 1996), 157.

45 Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago, 1985).

46 Singleton, Canti carnascialeschi del rinascimento, 39;; Ross, “The Middle-Class Child,” 192;; and Fildes, Wet Nursing, 51.

47 “Dello star giorno e notte vigilante / non abbiate un sospetto …” Singleton, Canti carnascialeschi del rinascimento, 125.

48 Elisabeth Badinter, Mother Love: Myth and Reality, foreword by Francine du Plessix Gray, trans. Roger De Garis (New York, 1981), 55–6, xi.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

126

outdated arguments that the lack of a concept of childhood, together with the high rates of maternal and infant mortality, made the medieval and early modern European family an emotional wasteland, an often brutally hostile environment for children. Herlihy draws upon the popular narrative tradition of hagiography: “The lives [of the saints] give many examples of a passionate involvement with childhood and children. The devil himself uses the attraction of children as a trap to waylay saints … The medieval family was not a cold community founded on indifference;; the devil has keener insight than many modern historians.”49

environment of the early modern family is twofold. First, the popularity of the ballad provides evidence for affective bonds between parents and children strong enough to warrant a wet nurse’s terror upon having caused, even indirectly, the death of the child in her care. This folkloric narrative refutes the claim, now considered outdated, that medieval and early modern parents had little emotional investment in their offspring. It also uncovers yet another facet of the ambivalence towards the female body encoded in Western culture, as an idyllic scene of breastfeeding

infanticide. The survival of the ballad with so many variants in several Romance languages over the centuries suggests that early modern audiences empathized with the king and queen’s grief at the death of a child. More important is the ballad’s transgression of the taboo against voicing openly the cultural ambivalence—reverence and revulsion—toward women’s role as nurturers, whether biologically or economically linked to the infants who were completely dependent upon them. This ambivalence stems from the split between female sexuality and maternal nurturing;; thus, in addition to avoiding the suppression of ovulation that generally accompanies lactation, the displacement of the maternal function of breastfeeding onto another woman maintained the cultural value of the aristocratic mother, and created a cultural and social separation between sexuality and reproduction.There are curious anomalies in the ballad, one of which is the circumstance

of the royal infant’s death. If vigilance was a key criterion for the balie employed by the elite families of sixteenth-century Florence, it may be assumed that a royal infant would be tended with the utmost care, given that the political stability of the realm depended upon his survival to ensure a legitimate line of succession. The historian Barbara Hanawalt’s examination of English coroners’ rolls from the

common danger for peasant children than for the offspring of the elite. If a child

present or should have been.50 Hanawalt argues that because the elites were “less

49 David Herlihy, Medieval Households (Cambridge, MA, 1985), 125.50 Barbara A. Hanawalt, “Childrearing Among the Lower Classes of Late Medieval

England,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 8 (1977): 3.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


likely to meet with ordinary accidents or homicides and because they would usually be exempt from most judicial procedures, including the coroners’ inquests,” these documents provide rare glimpses of the everyday lives of peasants, rather than the political and ecclesiastical elites whose lives were documented in other forms. For example, her research suggests that children “were not given milk on demand

in houses whose open doors allowed farm animals to wander in. Thus, the most

51 While documentation similar to the English coroners’ rolls is not available, or has not been analyzed, for the regions where the ballad of

the necessity for both men and women to work outside the home, at least during some seasons of the year, caused similar accidents in other areas of Europe.The children of the wealthy, like the infante in “La nodriza del rey,” spent their

days in the arms of their nurses, or under their vigilance. The deaths of infants in towns or aristocratic courts were far more likely to be caused by illness or “overlaying,” suffocation under the weight of sleeping nurses or their husbands,

in bed, rolling onto the tiny bodies of infants and smothering them.52 However, the emotional impact of “The Royal Wet-Nurse” derives from the dramatic peril

accusations of maternal threats to the lives of their offspring depicted in texts such as the Roman de la Rose or Il Corbaccio, which depict women’s attempts to conceal their pregnancies (implying abortion);; and, in the sixteenth century, conduct manuals that admonished pregnant women against dancing, jumping, or wearing tight garments that could cause miscarriage. In contrast, Jaume Roig’s misogynist Espill o Llibre de les dones blames the carelessness or malice of mothers and wet nurses for the high rate of infant mortality.53 By the nineteenth century, the idea that a mother might endanger the well-being of her child was erased from folkloric tradition;; the stepmothers in the Märchen of the brothers Grimm exemplify this disavowal of uneasiness, the recognition that mothers’ feelings toward their children might not be invariably nurturing.54 The tale of the sleepy, but otherwise blameless, nourrice screens another, disturbing narrative.In the past decade, three Canadian singers—Theresa Doyle (2003), Suzie

LeBlanc (2004), and Alison Girvan (2007)—recorded versions of “La nourrice du

51 Hanawalt, “Childrearing Among the Lower Classes,” 11–13, tables 1–3;; 14.52 Fildes, Wet Nursing, 47–8.53 Emilie L. Bergmann, “Milking the Poor: Wetnursing and the Sexual Economy of

Early Modern Spain,” in Eukene Lacarra, ed., Sexuality, Love and Marriage in Medieval and Early Renaissance Iberia, Hispanic Issues, 26 (London, 2002), 139–76.

54 Maria Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales (Princeton, 2nd ed. 2003 [1987]), 143.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

128

roi.”55 All three versions feature haunting musical settings with Celtic woodwinds and harps. Four years after recording “La nourrice du roi,” LeBlanc, a soprano who specializes in the early music repertoire, played the protagonist in Rodrigue

Lost Song (2008). The camera follows a new mother who, like LeBlanc, is a professional singer. In an isolated cabin on a lake, she attempts to balance motherhood and career while struggling to breastfeed her newborn son. As her breast is replaced by a feeding bottle and her professional life unravels, neither the Virgin Mary nor St. Nicholas are available to rescue this young woman. The anxieties voiced in “La nourrice de roi” are updated in the disastrous plot of Lost Songdeath of an infant is disturbing in contemporary cinema made for an audience of adults, but it is jarring in a ballad sung to lull infants to sleep. That this theme has survived in so many cultural contexts suggests that it voices the unacknowledged,

55 Doyle, “La nourrice du roi,” Cradle on the Waves;; Suzie LeBlanc, “La nourrice du roi,” La mer jolie: Chants d’Acadie;; Allison Girvan, “La nourrice du roi,” Resonance.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Chapter 7 Picturing Institutional Wet-Nursing

in Medicean Siena

Diana Bullen Presciutti

In the mid-1570s, the rector of the Ospedale di Santa Maria della Scala in Siena, Claudio di Sinolfo Saracini, expanded the main hospital ward, the Pellegrinaio, by the length of one bay and commissioned additional pictorial decorations for the room.1 The Scala, one of the most famous and esteemed charitable institutions in early modern Europe, was a source of great civic pride for the Sienese and coordinated most of the city’s charitable activities. The main Pellegrinaio was an open and bustling zone of the hospital;; the walls of the ward were thus an ideal space to structure an institutional identity for the Scala for a large and diverse viewing audience. Indeed, much of the ward was frescoed in the early 1440s with scenes of institutional history and charitable works.2 As part of his renovations, Rector Saracini continued this tradition by ordering two additional frescoes for the newly added walls—the Assignment and Payment of Wet Nurses (Figure 7.1) and the Distribution of Grain (Figure 7.2), as well as decorations for the new southern window wall. The generalized, late Mannerist appearance of these frescoes, which have been largely ignored by scholars, contrasts vividly with the 1440s cycle.3 Along with the new frescoes came the visual evidence of a changed institutional

1 On the tenure of Saracini, see Luciano Banchi, I rettori dello Spedale di Santa Maria della Scala di Siena (Bologna, 1877), 207–16.

2 The literature on the quattrocento fresco cycle is vast. See, most recently, Elda Costa

Scala di Siena,” Iconographica, 3 (2004): 110–147;; Friedhelm Scharf, Der Freskenzyklus des Pellegrinaios in S. Maria della Scala zu Siena: Historienmalerei und Wirklichkeit in einem Hospital der Frührenaissance (Hildesheim, 2001);; Alessandro Orlandini, Gettatelli e pellegrini: Gli affreschi nella sala del Pellegrinaio dell’Ospedale di Santa Maria della Scala di Siena (Siena, 1997).

3 Italian Frescoes: The Early Renaissance, 1400–1470 (New York, 1996), 187;; Piero Torriti, Il Pellegrinaio nello Spedale di Santa Maria della Scala a Siena (Siena, 1987), 57;; Daniela Gallavotti Cavallero, Lo Spedale di Santa Maria della Scala in Siena: Vicenda di una committenza artistica (Pisa, 1985), 277, 281.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

130

Fig. 7.1 Pietro d’Achille Crogi and Raffaele Navesi (attr.), Assignment and Payment of Wet Nurses, ca. 1575–77, Sala Pellegrinaio, Ospedale di S. Maria della Scala, Siena. Photo Credit: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Picturing Institutional Wet-Nursing in Medicean Siena 131

Fig. 7.2 Pietro d’Achille Crogi and Raffaele Navesi (attr.), Distribution of Grain, ca. 1575–77, Sala Pellegrinaio, Ospedale di S. Maria della Scala, Siena. Photo Credit: Alinari/ Art Resource, NY.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

132

context: the frescoed stemmi on the south wall of the Medici grand duke, ruler of Siena (and the Scala) from 1556 onward.4This chapter examines how the two added frescoes, particularly the Assignment

and Payment of Wet Nurses, articulated an ideology of abundance in late sixteenth-century Siena, both by engaging with the imagery of the earlier cycle and by associating the care of abandoned children with the provision of sustenance to the local community. The representation of wet-nursing could be deployed effectively to communicate the abundant resources of the Renaissance hospital, as the wet nurse was a powerful symbol of plenty—her body, cornucopia-like, a source of essential nourishment for the infant foundlings of the institution. However, with abundance came a host of other, often less desirable, connotations—an inherent polyvalence that the added Pellegrinaio frescoes strive to contain and control. Through the deliberate omission of active breastfeeding, among other visual strategies, the Assignment and Payment of Wet Nurses attempts to neutralize the visual valence of lactation, which was fraught with communal associations unwanted in Medicean Siena.

The Scala in Medicean Siena

The Ospedale della Scala accepted, among others, pilgrims, the sick poor, and abandoned children.5 In addition, the hospital provided regular distributions of grain to the local community. These activities were among those represented in the fresco cycle commissioned for the Pellegrinaio by Rector Giovanni Buzzichelli in the early 1440s.6 The scenes on the east wall of the ward shape an illustrious and partially invented history for the hospital, including the construction of the Scala and the granting of papal indulgences to the institution. The frescoes on the west wall, all painted by Domenico di Bartolo, represent the scope of the hospital’s

4 Saracini served as rector of the hospital from 1572–93: Luciano Banchi, ed., Statuti senesi scritti in volgare ne’ secoli XIII e XIV e pubblicati secondo i testi del R. Archivio di stato in Siena (3 vols, Bologna, 1863–77), vol. 3 (1877), 346.

5 On the charitable work of the Ospedale della Scala, see, among others, Gabriella Piccinni and Laura Vigni, “Modelli di assistenza ospedaliera tra Medioevo ed Età Moderna:

in Giuliano Pinto, ed., La società del bisogno: Povertà e assistenza nella Toscana medievale (Florence, 1989), and Gallavotti Cavallero, Lo Spedale. For the care of abandoned children at the Scala, see Maura Martellucci, “I bambini di nessuno: L’infanzia abbandonata al Santa Maria della Scala (secoli XIII–XV),” Bullettino senese di storia patria, 108 (2001): 9–221.

6 For the documentation of the commission, see Archivio di Stato di Siena, Ospedale di Santa Maria della Scala, 519, 533r, 545r and 520, 99r. The records were published in Gaetano Milanesi, Documenti per la storia dell’arte senese (3 vols, Siena, 1854–56), vol. 1 (1854), 283–4;; vol. 2 (1854), 173;; Alfredo Liberati, “Nuovi documenti sul Pellegrinaio,” La Diana, 4 (1929): 239–43.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


architectural space linked explicitly to the Scala: the succor of the sick and dying, the distribution of alms to the community, the care and education of foundlings, and the ceremonial meal served to the poor.While the frescoes painted in the early 1440s cover the full range of the

hospital’s charitable activities, those added in the late 1570s—probably painted between 1575 and 1578 by the Florentines Giovanni di Raffaele Navesi and Pietro d’Achille Crogi—focus exclusively on foundling care and grain distribution.7 In the east wall fresco, the Distribution of Grain, the hospital is represented as the possessor of vast quantities of grain, which it in turn distributes to needy persons.8 Two large mounds dominate the composition, and the sack being carried away at

west wall, the Assignment and Payment of Wet Nurses, also constructs the Scala hospital as a repository of abundance, but in a way that places primary emphasis on the institution’s care for foundlings. In the center of the composition, members of the hospital staff make contractual arrangements with wet nurses [balie] and their male guardians [balii]. Much like the copious quantities of grain, wet nurses are present in great numbers in the west wall fresco, with some balie clustered in the foreground, others receiving instructions and payments in the middle ground,

the two forms of nourishment—grain and breast milk—is thus established by the juxtaposition of the frescoes, with the hospital positioned as the supplier of both.9

executed, Siena was still an independent republic. The fortunes of the city declined as the sixteenth century wore on, culminating with its fall to Imperial forces in 1555 and the subsequent transfer of authority to the Medici dukes in Florence.10 With control of Siena came jurisdiction over the Scala;; in 1562, Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici availed himself of the right to name the rector of the institution, choosing Girolamo di Giovanni Biringucci.11 By the time the ward was extended, the city had been under the rule of the Medici Grand Dukes for nearly twenty years. Like the Innocenti foundling hospital in Florence, also administrated during

7 For the attribution to Navesi and Crogi, see Gallavotti Cavallero, Lo Spedale, 277–81. Although the records relating to the Pellegrinaio frescoes have been lost, Navesi and Crogi are both documented as working on other projects for Saracini during the years 1575–80.

8 This fresco is typically described in the literature as “Payment of the Wet Nurses in Grain,” perhaps because of the appearance of women and children among those receiving the grain. There is, however, no indication in the painting that the women are to be

9 The parallel also had some basis in fact. Although the documentation is very spotty, institutional wet-nursing seems to have often been administrated through Scala granaries, and many countryside wet nurses were wives of sharecroppers (mezzadri) on hospital lands. See Martellucci, “I bambini di nessuno,” 106–8.

10 Siena fell on 17 April 1555.11 Banchi, ed., Statuti senesi, 342.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

134

the same period by a prior selected by Cosimo, the Scala had thus become part of the Dominio-wide ducal charitable bureaucracy.12The patron of the additions to the Pellegrinaio decorative program, Claudio

Saracini, a member of an elite Sienese family, was named rector by Cosimo in 1572.13 His loyalty to the Medici, as well as Siena’s new status as subject city, was visually articulated in the Pellegrinaio by the two sets of stemmi painted on the southern window wall at the same time as the narrative frescoes (Figure 7.3). On the left, the palle of the Medici loom large above the black-and-white balzana of the city of Siena. On the right, the Medici stemma again, this time split with the arms of Giovanna d’Austria, wife of Francesco I, surmounts the arms of Rector Saracini.14 These stemmi are painted on a much larger scale than any of

versions of the scala, the ladder symbol of the hospital. Importantly, the stemmi on the window wall make clear that the source of all the painted abundance in the Assignment and Payment of Wet Nurses and the Distribution of Grain is not the city of Siena but, rather, Grand Duke Francesco. Both the city and Rector Saracini, represented by the balzana and the Saracini arms respectively, must look to the Grand Duke, looming above through his surrogate stemmi, for material support. This message is reinforced by the presence of putti in both narrative frescoes that point the viewer’s attention toward the window wall.The frescoes added in the 1570s thus communicate the plentiful resources

of the Scala hospital under the control of Grand Duke Francesco and his proxy Rector Saracini. Siena had been brought to its knees by famine during the siege of 1554–55, when the armies of Florence and Charles V choked off supply routes into and out of the city. The sixteen-month blockade was a particularly brutal period for the Scala, which was overwhelmed by the demands on its resources.15 The Sienese government apparently expelled the wet nurses and foundlings of the hospital from the city during the siege, exposing them to the ravages of the invading armies.16 The frescoes suggest that such deprivations are a thing of the past in Medicean Siena, a point underscored by the high horizon line in the Distribution of Grain,

12 On the Innocenti, see Diana Bullen Presciutti, “Carità e potere: Representing the Medici Grand Dukes as ‘Fathers of the Innocenti,’” Renaissance Studies, 24, 2 (2010): 234–59.

13 Banchi, ed., Statuti senesi, 346.14 Giovanna’s death in 1578 can be taken as a for the commission

of the southern wall decorations.15 See John Koenig, “Saving Siena: A Renaissance State’s Religious Response to

Political and Military Crisis,” Bullettino senese di storia patria, 111 (2004): 184–5.16 These women and children, called bocche inutili, were thought to be an

unsustainable burden for the suffering, destitute city. See also Fausto Landi, Gli ultimi anni della Repubblica di Siena 1525–1555 (Siena, 1994), 185–9.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


which makes it seem as though the grain is about to be shoveled directly into the space of the Pellegrinaio.17In the context of the larger Pellegrinaio cycle, this fresco most closely relates

to the depiction of the allocation of bread and clothing to the local population in the Distribution of Alms

represented receiving the bread handed out by staff members of the Scala are a bare-breasted woman with two children and a crippled man carrying a satchel

connection between the Scala and the sustenance by featuring the rolls baked at

17 The iconography of the fresco may have been intended to allude to the renovations to the hospital granary at Serre di Rapolano commissioned by Rector Saracini in 1575.

Fig. 7.3 South Wall, Sala Pellegrinaio, Ospedale di S. Maria della Scala, Siena. Photo Credit: Alinari/ Art Resource, NY.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

136

Fig. 7.4 Domenico di Bartolo, Distribution of Alms, 1443;; detail of woman and lame man, Sala Pellegrinaio, Ospedale di S. Maria della Scala, Siena. Photo Credit: Alfredo Dagli Orti/ The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


the hospital marked with the ladder emblem of the institution. While images of the distribution of grain had a long history,18 the shift from rolls in the Distribution of Alms to grain in the 1570s fresco carried with it an important change in meaning. The sacks of grain came from the hospital granaries in the countryside, directing the viewer’s attention to structures located outside the city.19 This stands in contrast to the rolls, with their hospital emblems, which were baked in the Scala, thereby emphasizing the physical site of the hospital and its institutional identity. In the context of the viewing experience structured in the Pellegrinaio, the iconography of the Distribution of Grain thus worked to weaken the link carefully forged by the Distribution of Alms between the Scala and charitable alimentation.

institutional landmarks, the Distribution of Grain is set in a generic architectural space, completely unlike any known part of the Scala complex. The structure of

foreground and twin porticoes framing the middle distance, recalls Florentine maniera paintings executed in the ducal ambit.20 Even the construction material

particularly the Enlargement of the Hospital, emphasize brick and bricklaying, the added frescoes showcase monumental structures made of pietra serena. Brick was the traditional building material of Siena, while pietra serena was associated with Florentine architecture.21The subject matter of the narrative scenes added in the late 1570s encourages

viewers to read the frescoes in concert with the earlier scenes in the ward, while at the same time the contrasting styles and iconography articulate visually the shift undergone in both city and hospital with the Medici takeover. In contrast to

Assignment and Payment of Wet Nurses and the Distribution of Grainof the hospital, the history of the Scala, the relationship of the hospital to the local community, or the succor of patients other than foundlings. In conjunction with the oversized Medici stemmi, the additions made to the ward thus serve to neutralize the campanilismosome aspects of their subject matter into more homogenous representations of charity under the tutelage of the Medici Grand Dukes.

18 See, for example, the imagery included in the trecento Biadaiolo Codex of the Florentine grain dealer Domenico Lenzi. On the Codex in the context of images of charity, see Philine Helas, “Die Repräsentation von Armut und Armenfürsorge in italienischen Städten des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts—ein ‘republikanisches’ Thema?” in Philine Helas and Gerhard Wolf, eds, Armut und Armenfürsorge in der italienischen Stadtkultur zwischen 13. und 16. Jahrhundert: Bilder, Texte und soziale Praktiken (Frankfurt am Main, 2006), 192–6.

19 On the granaries, see Giovanni Cecchini, “Le grance dell’ospedale di S. Maria della Scala di Siena,” Economia e storia, 3 (1959): 405–22.

20 For example, Bronzino’s Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence of 1569.21 I thank Max Grossman for this suggestion.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

138

Representing Foundling Care

As it depicts the administration of foundling care, the Assignment and Payment of Wet Nurses engages most directly with the quattrocento fresco on the west wall depicting the Care and Marriage of Foundlings (Figure 7.5). This fresco shaped an idealized image of foundling care at the Scala around several key moments in the life of an abandoned child. In the foreground, an infant is entrusted to a hospital nurse, a tutor educates older children, and a pubescent female foundling is married by the hospital rector. In the background of the fresco we see the bustling

another brings hot rolls to eat;; a balia tenderly cradles a naked infant in her arms.

her lap and engaging him in affectionate play. To her right sits a third balia, who actively nurses one infant while a second child grabs at her free breast. The ward is thus represented as an idealized realm of doting attention and salubrious nursing, where the hospital’s abundant stores of bread, wood, clothes, and breastmilk provide superlative care to abandoned infants.Indeed, the attentive balia, typically depicted either breastfeeding or attending

to a child in a culla [portable crib or bassinet], was a long-established and readily comprehensible way of depicting the succor of foundlings.22 The care of abandoned children was closely associated with the nursing of infants in the earliest surviving records prescribing foundling care, among them the Statutes of the Scala hospital.23

abandoned children at the hospital and their assignment to wet nurses. The statute requires that “all the foundlings … should be received kindly and graciously, and they should be given to be nursed and to be cared for at wet nurse [a baile] at the expense of the hospital … until they are three years of age.”24The selection of wet-nursing as emblematic of foundling care was a logical

one, as its administration and funding was a central preoccupation of hospitals

22 See, for example, the illumination accompanying capitolo XLI of the trecento Liber Regulae of the Ospedale di Santo Spirito in Rome: Archivio di Stato di Roma (hereafter ASR), Ospedale di Santo Spirito (hereafter OSS), 3193, 127v. The culla, which reduced the risk of overlaying, was also a common feature in visual representations of foundling care. See: ASR, OSS, 3193, 163r. Both a nursing balia and an infant in a culla are depicted in a ca. 1450 panel originally located in the hospital of Santa Maria del Mercato in Gubbio;; the painting is now in the Museo Civico of Gubbio.

23 The Statutes were written in 1305 and revised in 1318. The 1318 Statutes remained in effect until 1599, when a thorough reorganization of the institution was ordered by Grand Duke Ferdinando I. For wet-nursing practices at the Scala, see Martellucci, “I bambini di nessuno,” 93–119.

24 Banchi, ed., Statuti senesi, 106: “tutti li gittatelli ... sieno ricevuti benigna e graziosamente, e sieno dati a lactare e nutricare a baile, a le spese del detto Ospitale ...


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


was a regular source of lament in requests from these institutions for communal and private aid throughout the period.25 By depicting the wet nurse as actively

25 For example, in the fourteenth century the friars and rector of the Scala requested exemption from ecclesiastical taxes because of the burdensome nature of wet-nursing: Martellucci, “I bambini di nessuno,” 10.

Fig. 7.5 Domenico di Bartolo, Care and Marriage of Foundlings, 1443, Sala Pellegrinaio, Ospedale di S. Maria della Scala, Siena. Photo Credit: Alfredo Dagli Orti/ The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

140

solvency of the hospital visually explicit.26 In addition, the representation of the lactating wet nurse aligned the care of foundlings with three established conventions for representing charity: the nursing Madonna, the allegorical

of the Biblical Acts of Mercy.27 In these iconographic formulations, breastfeeding is positioned as a charitable act, with the woman giving freely of her milk in order to nourish either her own child or others. In a manner similar to the cornucopia

nurse thereby serves as the vessel for the distribution of nourishment.28The style of the Care and Marriage of Foundlings, like the other frescoes

the swaddling bands hung out to dry, the objects on the schoolmaster’s desk, and the hospital emblem on the uniform of the rector. By borrowing from Sienese conventions for representing the life of the Virgin, the fresco also invited viewers to associate the prototypical Scala foundling with Mary, the city’s patron saint.29 In contrast, the generalized composition of the Assignment and Payment of Wet Nurses

being made at the table in the center of the fresco. A hospital representative, who works from an open account register, pen in hand, consults with a wet nurse who holds a bundle, likely a swaddled infant, under her arm. The piece of paper in her hand is the information that correlates with the entry in the register, enabling the hospital to track the child. The writing on the paperwork and the letters on the spines of the account books are picked out in black paint, details that stand

composition, a man, probably the husband or guardian of the wet nurse, known as a balio, receives payment from the other member of the Scala staff.30 Like the

26 See the frescoes depicting institutional wet-nursing painted ca. 1580 in the Salone of the Palazzo del Commendatore of the Ospedale of Santo Spirito in Rome and ca. 1610 in the former girls’ refectory of the Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence.

27 On the Madonna Lactans, see Megan Holmes, “Disrobing the Virgin: The Madonna lactans in Fifteenth-Century Florentine Art,” in Picturing Women in Renaissance and

, ed. Geraldine A. Johnson and Sara F. Matthews Grieco (Cambridge, 1997). For the iconography of charity as a nursing woman, see Robert Freyhan, “The Evolution of the Caritas Figure in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 11 (1948): 68–86. A wet nurse breastfeeding two infants appears as

of San Fiorenzo in the Piedmontese town of Bastia Mondovì.28 For example, Abundance holds a cornucopia in Giorgio Vasari’s Allegory of the

Earth fresco, painted between 1555 and 1559 in the Sala degli Elementi in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.

29 On the Marian imagery in the fresco, see Scharf, Der Freskenzyklus, 267–75.30

payment for services rendered, were conducted by proxy through male guardians. See Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “Blood Parents and Milk Parents: Wet-Nursing in Florence, 1300–1530,” in Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 1985), 143.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


writing in the registers, the coins on the table representing the payment for the wet-nursing to the balii are clearly delineated.This extraordinary pictorial emphasis on the administrative procedures of

foundling care would have served to underscore the sound organization and management of the Scala and, by extension, Rector Saracini and Grand Duke Francesco. The iconography would also have recalled the formal features and subject matter of many Sienese biccherna covers [known as tablets], a critical element of local visual culture. The biccherna tablets served both as covers for government account books and as sites for the pictorial articulation of civic identity.31 Although the imagery on surviving biccherna tablets varies considerably, the most common format, particularly before 1400, features one or two men conducting business transactions at a long table.32

biccherna covers, like the tablet dated 1394 and attributed to Paolo di Giovanni Fei (Figure 7.6). In the painting we see the public treasurer (Camerlengo) of Siena writing in a register while seated at a table very much like the one featured in the Assignment and Payment of Wet Nurses. A similar tablet now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, also attributed to Fei, shows the Camerlengo collecting payments from three taxpayers.33 As in the Pellegrinaio fresco, the books and writing implements depicted in both biccherna covers are

that of the established visual tradition of the biccherna cover would have served to authenticate the management of wet-nursing on local terms, by engaging with an established Sienese representational convention for picturing ideal administration.This strategy would have come with a political cost for the Medici. The

pictorial allusion to the biccherna tablet was ideologically expedient because it was a politically potent local convention. By conjuring up memories of the past, however, the reference to a visual tradition associated with republican Siena would have simultaneously shifted the focus away from the carefully constructed image of Tuscan charity under the Grand Dukes. Faced with a situation in which established visual rhetorics of Medici authority could not be effectively deployed, Rector Saracini and his artists strove to achieve a balance between local

culture that provided, in turn, the site of negotiation between these ostensibly irreconcilable discourses.

31 For the biccherna (and gabella) panels as a “category of autonomous painting,” see Luke Syson et al., Renaissance Siena: Art for a City (London, 2007), 85. See also Alessandro Tomei, (Rome, 2002), and Luigi Borgia, Le Biccherne: Tavole dipinte delle magistrature senesi (secoli XIII–XVIII) (Rome, 1984).

32 Undoubtedly aware of the ideological value of biccherna covers in Siena, the Medici Grand Dukes sought to assimilate them into their own imagery, as in the 1564 version depicting the Investment of Cosimo I de’ Medici as Grand Master of the Order of Santo Stefano in 1562.

33 The biccherna tablet in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum is dated 1402.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

142

Fig. 7.6 Paolo di Giovanni Fei, The Public Treasurer (Camerlengo) and the , 1394, Archivio di Stato, Siena. Photo Credit:

Alinari/ Art Resource, NY.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


The body of the hospital wet nurse emerges as a particularly fraught site of semantic negotiation in the Pellegrinaio frescoes. In the foreground of the Assignment and Payment of Wet Nurses, a wet nurse clad in a bright yellow dress with iridescent blue and violet trim cradles a tightly swaddled infant in her arms, while a

balia with toddler in the Care and Marriage of Foundlings, cueing the viewer to compare the representation of wet-nursing in the two west wall scenes. Interestingly, the explicit depiction of breastfeeding and the attendant allegorical associations are omitted in the later fresco, replaced by a strong pictorial emphasis on the brightly colored dress of the nurse and the swaddling bands wrapped precisely around the infant. Indeed, none of the wet nurses in the 1570s fresco are represented lactating. This exclusion seems particularly deliberate when compared with the imagery in the 1440s cycle, which emphasizes the breast as the source of sustenance.The omission of breastfeeding from the Assignment and Payment of Wet

Nurses can be read as a response to the multivalence of the bare-breasted women in the earlier cycle, suggesting an ambivalence about the semantic possibilities of lactation. In addition to commonplace depictions of the virtue Charity as a nursing woman, in the Sienese context these representations would have evoked the imagery of the defunct commune. The bare-breasted woman in the Distribution of Almsand Acca Larentia from the Fonte Gaia in the Piazza del Campo.34similarly modeled on allegorical representations of Charity, were tied both to the era and the imagery of Sienese civic republicanism. Siena’s foundation myth held that that the city was established by Senius, son of Remus and grandson of Rhea Silvia;; hence the she-wolf, a wet nurse of sorts, was an emblem of the republic.35 Thus the imagery of lactation in Siena would have had a strong local association with communal traditions, particularly the iconography of the nursing lupa as civic emblem. By avoiding the representation of active breastfeeding, the 1570s fresco attempts to neutralize the republican connotations of the lactating wet nurse structured by the 1440s frescoes and related imagery, directing the attention of the viewer instead to the administrative procedures of foundling care.Beyond the communal associations of lactation in the context of Medicean

Siena, wet nurses were inherently problematic as vehicles through which to promote

34 On the Fonte Gaia sculptures, see James H. Beck, Jacopo della Quercia (New York, 1991), 161–6.

35 For example, the nursing she-wolf appears at the feet of the allegorical Good Government fresco

(1338–40) in the Sala dei Nove of the Palazzo Pubblico. The lupa is also included, as an gabella cover of 1344. See Enzo Carli, Le tavolette

(Florence, 1950), 33–4.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

144

suspicion both in the hospital context and in broader popular culture.36 Among the accusations levied against them by hospital administrators were that countryside wet nurses failed to inform the hospital of the deaths of their charges in order to

polluting their milk;; that they found ways to be assigned as balia to infants they had abandoned, thus scheming to be paid to nurse their own children.37 Both inside and outside of the hospital, wet nurses were associated with sexual licentiousness and infanticide.38 Thus the representation of idealized wet-nursing required a delicate balancing act, one that necessitated the prominent display of bodies simultaneously nourishing and corrupt, bountiful and fraudulent, alluring and suspect.In depictions of institutional wet-nursing, various pictorial strategies worked

to assuage these and other concerns about wet nurses by displaying their bodies as monitored and authorized. In the earlier of the two Scala paintings, nursing is shown to take place within the domain of the hospital. In actual practice, in Siena

was typically nursed in-house only until he or she could be placed with a wet nurse in the countryside.39 However, rural wet-nursing, concealed from the eyes of hospital administrators, was particularly associated with fraud, mistreatment, and higher mortality rates. Notes left with children abandoned to foundling hospitals frequently requested that the child be kept in the institution rather than sent away to nurse.40 Whether or not one can posit, as Richard Trexler maintained, that sending a child to a wet nurse in the countryside was tantamount to infanticide, it seems clear that in-house nursing was widely considered to be the preferable option.41 Care and Marriage

36 See Richard C. Trexler, “Infanticide in Florence: New Sources and First Results,” History of Childhood Quarterly, 1 (1974): 98–116.

37 On concerns about wet nurse fraud at the Scala, see Martellucci, “I bambini di nessuno,” 117–18. For the Innocenti, see Philip Gavitt, Charity and Children in Renaissance Florence: The Ospedale degli Innocenti, 1410–1536 (Ann Arbor, 1990), 230–236. On this issue, see also Klapisch-Zuber, “Wet-Nursing in Florence,” 144–8.

38 In 1572, Vincenzo Borghini, prior of the Innocenti hospital in Florence, described wet nurses as “gente di ogni qualità” with the potential to corrupt female foundlings: Philip Gavitt, “Charity and State-Building in Cinquecento Florence: Vincenzio Borghini as Administrator of the Ospedale degli Innocenti,” The Journal of Modern History, 69 (1997): 230–270, 256.

39 For Siena, see Martellucci, “I bambini di nessuno,” 21–2;; 104–6. For the Innocenti, see: Archivio dell’Ospedale degli Innocenti, Serie XVI, 1–11 (1444–85);; 12–14 (1525–72);; 15–68 (1529–1642);; for all children who died, there is an indication of whether the death occurred nello spedale or a balie. Countryside wet-nursing was also standard practice outside the hospital context: Klapisch-Zuber, “Wet-Nursing in Florence,” 135–8;; Louis Haas, The Renaissance Man and his Children: Childbirth and Early Childhood in Florence, 1300–1600 (New York, 1998), 100–107.

40 Gavitt, Charity and Children, 196–8.41 This argument is made in Trexler, “Infanticide,” 98–116.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


of Foundlings of the sending of infants to wet-nurse in the countryside. Instead of imaging this practice, the painting displays the ward of the residential wet nurses, the preferred nursing environment.Unlike the Care and Marriage of Foundlings, the Assignment and Payment

of Wet Nurses does not emphasize in-house nursing. While the events are shown maniera

painting, the wet nurses, aside from the women in the foreground, are represented in the process of departing. In the background we see nurses with infants and culle retreating from the compositional space, presumably returning to their countryside residences with their charges in tow.42 The fresco thus makes visible not the ideal care of a small group of foundlings in the preferred in-house setting but, rather, the ability of the hospital to adequately fund, oversee, and systematize the nursing of a large number of infants, both in the city and in the contado. Like the representation of grain, rather than rolls, in the Distribution of Grain, the emphasis on countryside wet-nursing, rather than in-house, also served to reorient the frescoes from the city of Siena and its local concerns to the broader context of the contado and, by extension, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. The Medici Grand Dukes made frequent

the expense of individual cities such as Siena, Pisa, and even Florence.43 In related fashion, the added frescoes in the Pellegrinaio de-emphasize city in favor of country.Aside from the nurse in the center, most of the balie in the Assignment and

Payment of Wet Nurses are depicted grouped into pairs and clusters. Like the omission of breastfeeding, this also has the effect of mitigating the potential of the nursing body to evoke allegorical virtues and the Madonna Lactans, a strategy that emphasizes their nourishing potential as a collective while simultaneously undermining their individual agency. The viewer is thus compelled to focus on wet-nursing as a system funded by the charitable will of the institution rather than as the manifestation of the generous nature of a particular woman. This visual construction of wet nurses as vessels for nourishment rather than as individual hospital employees correlates with an inventory of the hospital of Santo Spirito in Rome conducted in 1582. The inventory of the furnishings in the rooms of the wet nurses lists the 13 residential balie, an exceptional inclusion of people in an inventory of mobili 44

42 Included in the “corredo degli esposti,” which remained the property of the Scala, was some combination of swaddling bands and blankets, clothing, and culle: Martellucci, “I bambini di nessuno,” 100–103. “Sei culle con suoi matarazzi lenzoli et coperte” also appear among the furnishings of the rooms of the wet nurses in the hospital of Santo Spirito in Rome recorded in an inventory of 1582: ASR, OSS, 29, 50v.

43 See, for example, Randolph Starn and Loren W. Partridge, Arts of Power: Three Halls of State in Italy, 1300–1600 (Berkeley, 1992), 168–96.

44 ASR, OSS, 29, 50v. Slaves were often listed in inventories of household goods and were also regularly sold or loaned to foundling hospitals as wet nurses: Iris Origo, “The Domestic Enemy: The Eastern Slaves in Tuscany in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” Speculum, 30, 3 (1955): 334. For the purchasing of slaves to work as wet nurses at the Ospedale degli Innocenti, see Gavitt, Charity and Children, 162–8.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

146

balie are constructed pictorially as instruments, not agents, of charitable abundance. Yet the instruments of meritorious charitable work also needed to be depicted in ideal terms;; the wet nurses had to be seen as performing their duties with care, not as scheming mercenaries. Representing the balie according to contemporary standards of beauty carried with it the implication that their milk was youthful and bountiful, rather than old and weak.45 The fresco attempts to strike a delicate balance between

charitable will and the wet nurse as calculating instrument motivated exclusively by monetary concerns. This struggle underscores the problematic multivalence

unstable.The structure of the composition also participates in this pictorial juggling act.

The high horizon line in the Assignment and Payment of Wet Nurses enables the viewer to partake both in monitoring the balie and in appreciating their idealized physiques. The compositional structure pushes the wet nurses into the space of the

robust bodies of the balie hemmed in by the framing of the composition, rendering their behavior effortlessly supervised and their alluring forms readily admired.By opting to add to rather than replace the 1440s frescoes in the Pellegrinaio,

Rector Saracini—and, by extension, his lord Francesco I—acknowledged that Sienese cultural traditions were more effectively adapted than uniformly

of the earlier cycle into a more generic Tuscan-wide vision of abundant charitable alimentation. The frescoes serve to mitigate the resentment and distrust engendered by memories of the siege of the city and the starvation that came with it by emphasizing seemingly inexhaustible quantities of breastmilk and grain provided under the auspices of the Grand Duke and administered judiciously by the Scala.The representation of institutional wet-nursing was an effective means through

which to present an image of a well-governed hospital backed by a magnanimous and virtuous patron. Images of the attentive and breastfeeding wet nurse brought with them a host of potentially useful associations: health, solvency, assiduous care, nourishment, charity. In the context of Medicean Siena, however, the visual valence of lactation carried with it less desirable ties to the imagery of the Sienese commune. Negotiating a delicate balance, the added frescoes in the Pellegrinaio seek to adapt, rather than replace;; attention is shifted from the milk and its source to the bureaucratic mechanisms behind wet-nursing and concerns about duplicitous wet nurses are allayed through the presentation of a variety of robust bodies for viewers to both monitor and admire.

45 On the importance of “young” and plentiful breastmilk, see Klapisch-Zuber, “Wet-Nursing in Florence,” 140.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Chapter 8 Mother London and the Madonna Lactans

in England’s Plague Epic1

Rebecca Totaro

She playes and dallies, for the babies good: And to her milke-white, brestes doth lay at length The prety foole, who learnes to take his foode. His onely meanes, to nourish life and bloud, He fed, she paind, he drawes, poore Mother yeelds, Whose loving brests both shutes and prickings feeles2

In 1603, Londoner William Muggins composed these striking lines about the joys and the explicitly physical pains of breastfeeding. Oddly, they appear in a poem about the bubonic plague in London entitled Londons mourning garment, or funerall teares: worne and shed for the death of her wealthy cittizens, and other her inhabitants. Known to us only through this poem, Muggins was surely no mother, and he may not have been considered a poet in his lifetime, but he was certainly a man living and working in London during one of its most noted periods of transition. The year 1603 brought in quick succession the death of Queen Elizabeth I, a brutal plague visitation, and the crowning of King James VI of Scotland as King James I of England. In this year, Muggins, the man about whom

she is the mother who grieves the loss of her children (London’s inhabitants)—the many that have either abandoned her in her greatest time of need or have died at the hands of a hungry tyrant, plague. Adding to the remarkable nature of this poem

the prosody used by Chaucer for Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1385) and Shakespeare for The Rape of Lucrece

1 Thanks very much to Sheila Barker, Patricia Rice, and Jutta Sperling for their insightful reviews of this chapter.

2 William Muggins, Londons mourning garment (1603), sig. B4r. I have retained original spellings for all texts except in modernization of u/v, i/y, vv/w, and i/j transpositions. For a transliteration of this poem, with additional analysis, and for transliterations and analysis of nine additional plague epics from the period including Wither, Holland, and others addressed in this chapter, see Rebecca Totaro, The Plague Epic in Early Modern England: Heroic Measures, 1603–1721 (Aldershot/Burlington, 2012).


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

148

of tragic and epic proportions.3 Muggins sets his mourning Mother London in this verse form and reinforces its epic associations: London compares her own task in the telling of her destruction to Homer’s singing of the siege of Troy, she

must be stopped, and she sings of her past glory and future promise, which for

appeals generally to all Londoners, her children, speaking as their alma mater,

she appeals to those citizens who are mothers themselves and who might most naturally empathize with her;; and, at the end of the poem, she speaks to London’s male leaders, whom she schools in civil conduct that she says is best sustained on the milk of human kindness. With a focus on Muggins’ poem, this chapter offers

literature. Among the mothers represented, and in contrast to the trope of the dead

BCE, London emerges as the model of Christian charity who calls to mind for readers both their recently deceased virgin queen and, surprisingly perhaps, the Madonna Lactans of Catholic devotion.4

***

During the plague visitations of the seventeenth century, English writers struggled to make sense of the special nature of these disasters and their pervasive effects.

killing thousands, but they had been relatively less frequent in their occurrence, with at least a decade separating most outbreaks;; in addition, those in recent memory (1563, 1578, and 1593) had prompted new, aggressive responses that promised a change for the better. It was in those years that medical literature in the

3 On the dating of Chaucer’s poem, see Larry Dean Benson, The Riverside Chaucer (Oxford and New York, 2008), 1020. On brief epics, see Elizabeth Story Donno, Elizabethan Minor Epics (New York, 1963);; S. Clark Hulse, “Elizabethan Minor Epic: Toward a

Studies in Philology, 73, 3 (1976): 302–19;; Paul W. Miller, “The Elizabethan Minor Epic,” Studies in Philology, 55, 1 (1958): 31–8;; Totaro, The Plague Epic in Early Modern England, 9, 9 n.15, 35.

4 The representation of the dead parent, baby, and/or family to create pathos dates

Athens, for example, Lucretius adds the “Lifeless bodies of parents lying upon their lifeless children, and contrariewise children yielding up their life upon the bodies of mother and father” (De Rerum Natura in Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, trans. W.H.D. Rouse, rev. M.F. Smith, The Loeb Classical Library [Cambridge, MA, 1975]), 598. See, for comparison, Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. C.F. Smith, Loeb Classical Library (4 vols, 1919, 1921;; Cambridge, MA, 1991), vol. 1, books 1–2;; especially book 2, 343ff.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Mother London and the Madonna Lactans in England’s Plague Epic 149

free medical advice and directions for how to purify one’s home and belongings when the visitation had ended.5nationwide use of plague bills to document the causes of death and the general trends in the plague’s movement. The newly (again) Protestant nation imagined itself overcoming challenges by appealing collectively to God for relief, as the biblical citizens of Nineveh had done;; by training up its physicians in the Galenic medicine that men like Thomas Linacre and Thomas More believed would put English physicians on par with the very best of those on the Continent;; by monitoring inhabitants carefully to catch early signs of the disease;; and by warning others to take extra caution when coming within proximity of areas and individuals thought to be infected. In spite of the plague outbreaks, under Elizabeth I in the sixteenth century, England would see its glory rise and its capital become a center for learning and for the distribution of culture throughout England, as Lawrence Manley details in his indispensable Literature and Culture in Early Modern London.6 In these years, hopes were high that this queen, this Protestant church, this rich capital city, and this medical knowledge were different enough from what had come before so that a golden age of prosperity—including improved health—might be on the horizon. Perhaps a tide in the affairs of men would turn, and going forward God would smile on England or would at least lead his Reformed saints securely through their earthly suffering and to their heavenly paradise.Beginning in 1603, however, plague visitations became much more frequent,

with the years from 1603–11 a particularly ominous start to the century: not one free from plague.7of seventeenth-century plague visitation was extraordinary. In Thomas Dekker’s terms, 1603 was a “Wonderful Year,” rivaling that of 1588, when England feared

5 For transliterations and discussion of Elizabeth I’s plague prayers (1563) and plague orders (1578), see Rebecca Totaro, ed., The Plague in Print: Essential Elizabethan Sources, 1558–1603, Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies (Pittsburgh, 2010);; and Totaro, “Introduction,” in Totaro and Ernest B. Gilman, Representing the Plague in Early Modern England, Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture (New York, 2010), 10–12. On England’s plague orders see Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (1985;; repr. Oxford:/New York, 1990), 207–16.

6 Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge/New York, 2000), 2. On the roles Thomas More and Thomas Linacre played in bringing Galenic medicine to England, see Rebecca Totaro, Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English Literature from More to Milton, Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies (Pittsburgh, 2005), chapter 3.

7 Plague struck again in 1636, making for an average of about one visitation every three years from 1603 to 1636. On these plague years, see Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England;; Rebecca Totaro, Suffering in Paradise, 2;; and Rebecca Totaro and Ernest B. Gilman, Representing the Plague, 9–10.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

150

Spanish invasion but was entirely spared from that threat in the same year.8 Dekker’s wonderful year was the year Queen Elizabeth I died, and a great plague followed, forestalling the arrival and coronation of the new king. When he did arrive, James I brought with him a stricter form of plague policy than his predecessor had employed;; for example, within a year, he toughened England’s laws regarding quarantine, making it legal for the watchers of quarantined homes to use corporal punishment to enforce regulations, and he reinforced efforts to account weekly for the numbers of plague victims nationwide. This aggressive posture resulted in little if any measurable improvement in managing plague visitations, and it certainly did not help to endear this king to his new people;; in fact, James’s efforts initially to avoid and then to control plague likely only widened the gap that the people perceived between their former and current sovereigns.9 Queen Elizabeth I had secured the devotion of her people in part through a campaign of widely embraced and reinforced self-fashioning in which she was virgin, humble milkmaid, head of the Church, and successful military leader against Spain—the ultimate alma mater.10

I’s reign, and speculation about its cause and meaning increased. If this Protestant nation was incurring more not less debt to God, and if he was punishing them more regularly rather than less, taking their beloved queen and bringing plague after plague, then something was terribly wrong. Perhaps England had been wrong to imagine it had any grasp of the problem: wrong in assessing the natural causes of a disease that the humanist-revived Galenic medicine was failing to treat;; unable to pinpoint the expectations of its obviously angry God;; entirely at a loss to prevent

8 For a transliteration of The Wonderfull Yeare with an introduction and notes, see chapter 6 of Totaro, ed., The Plague in Print.

9 On the 1603 plague in London, see Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England, 144–64. On King James I of England and his entry into England during a

impression of him as their new king, see James D. Mardock, “‘Thinking to Pass Unknown’: Measure for Measure, the Plague, and the Accession of James I,” in Totaro and Gilman, Representing the Plague, 113–29. On James’s 1603 legislation, see Totaro, “Introduction,” in ibid., 12–13.

10 On representations of Elizabeth I in her lifetime, especially as virgin and mother, see John Watkins, Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England: Literature, History, Sovereignty (New York/Cambridge, 2002), 38–47;; and all of Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (Houndmills/London, 1995), with a focus on 1–6, 128–9, 198–201. On what Gloria Olchowy calls “incarnational” motherhood in the period and Elizabeth I’s use of it in her self-fashioning, see her “Murder as Birth in Macbeth,” in Kathryn M. Moncrief and McPherson, eds, Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Aldershot/Burlington, 2007), 197–210, especially 198–203. On explicitly plague-time representation of Elizabeth I, see Richelle Munkhoff, “Contagious Figurations: Plague the Impenetrable Nation after the Death of Elizabeth,” in Totaro and Gilman, Representing the Plague, 98–112.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


for the sick. And then, even after the plague had subsided, leaving the country in relative peace for more than a decade, in 1625, King James I died, plague followed, and England awaited its new king—again. Few writers let slip the opportunity to assess the relationship between the 1603 and 1625 visitations, and many imagined that the pattern between sin and punishment was all the more clear, with plague as the just word of God regarding England’s deadly habits and dangerous direction.11 What could follow but the destruction about which Jonah had warned Nineveh and that had humbled great cities like Athens and Rome? London was in the best and worst of company.Writers of the sixteenth century had used literature to express religious faith,

to offer medical prescription, to supply government orders and medical regimens for the security and health of the population, and to provide readers with curative mirth. Writers in the seventeenth century did so as well. In these years of epic suffering, they also created a new genre that I am calling “the plague epic.”12 In contrast to the predominantly prose forms adopted for the representation of the plague in prior century, the seventeenth-century plague epic appears in heroic verse to function as the nation’s song of epochal change and of memorial. In these

forms: she is the dead mother unable to perform her natural role as life-giving nurse to her children, and she is the living mother who comes in the guise of

alma mater. In these poems, Mother London is cast as a new kind of hero, a model for how to suffer through and survive the plague. She emerges as the victim who, Job-like, stands for all Christians and who, muse-like, inspires the writer to sing of England’s glory and warn of the destruction that will follow if nothing changes.13 In the years that included such persistent plague visitations, England was in need of just such an alma mater who would stand by her people in their most trying of times and in this way substitute for those sources of comfort lost in the Reformation and with Queen Elizabeth I’s death.

***

The practice of nursing in plague-time is one that gave writers considerable imaginative material for the creation of horror and spectacle. A mother might spread disease to her infant, bringing death rather than life. She might die and

11 On the plague as God’s word in this century, see Ernest Gilman, Plague Writing in Early Modern England (Chicago, 2009).

12 On the plague epic, see Totaro, The Plague Epic in Early Modern England.13

seventeenth-century brief plague epics, see Totaro, The Plague Epic in Early Modern England, 31–40, 49, 109, 172, 229, 259, 272.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

152

be unable to feed her child, who would perish at her side. Her children, once

themselves and forgetting her. These scenarios were part of the narrative repertoire in plague literature, revealing the pathos of plague-time suffering and the degree

charity and even of civilization. This trope was pervasive in painting as well and The Plague at Ashdod, the

three children—one of them dead as well. As Sheila Barker explains in her award-winning account of Poussin’s painting in its plague-time context, “Foremost among this category of impassioning devices [Poussin employs] is the startling motif in the central foreground, consisting of a hungry infant being torn from the breast of his dead mother by a man who, at the same time, pinches his nose to avoid breathing the pestilential vapors produced by her corpse.”14 This image illustrates the chaos created when what is most natural, essential to all living creatures, becomes most deadly. The painting’s power comes in large part from

juxtaposed with the stillness front and center of the dead mother unable to nurse the children at her side.Poussin completed the Plague of Ashdod in 1630 during the same period when

plague was again threatening England and when seventeenth-century English poets were appropriating the images of nourishing and of death-dealing mothers to render their accounts of plague-time suffering and salvation suitable for their post-Reformation readers. In Britain’s Remembrancer (1628), for example, George Wither (1588–1667) captures in writing many of these fears:

Whilst in her armes the mother thought she kept Her Infant safe;; Death stole him when she slept. Sometime he took the mother’s life away, And left the little babe, to lye and play With her cold paps, and childish game to make About those eyes, that never more shall wake.15

In literary form, Wither creates two scenes in which sometimes the child,

in exaggerated yet exemplary motions as the baby attends to his mother’s breasts,

14 Sheila Barker, “Poussin, Plague, and Early Modern Medicine,” The Art Bulletin,

and in its plague-time context, see Elisabeth Hipp, “Poussin’s The Plague at Ashdod,” in Franco Mormando and Thomas Worcester, eds, Piety and Plague: From Byzantium to the

, Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies 78 (Kirksville, 2007), 182–6.15 George Wither, Britain’s remembrancer (1628), 129.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


playing with them perhaps to engage her in the loving exchange that he has come to expect, not realizing she “never more shall wake.”Like Poussin’s painting from roughly the same years, Wither’s scene also

posits contagion as a cause of plague—a theory increasingly represented in verse, as here in a plague epic by Abraham Holland called A description of the late great, fearefull and prodigious plague (1626):16

By one another (strong!) so many di’deAnd yet no murder here, no Homicide.A Mother great with Child by the Plagues mightInfects to Death her child not borne to light.So killing that which yet ne’re liv’d;; the wombeOf th’alive Mother, to th’dead Child was tombe,

17

English poet and son to the better known writer Philemon Holland (1552–1637), Abraham Holland (d. 1626) offers up literary treatment of early contagion theory and captures the plague-time fears exacerbated by the intimacy of the mother-child relationship. The mother’s body that once offered life proves to be a “tombe,” and the baby itself becomes a source of poison that will most certainly end the mother’s life. Holland explains the additional horror: there is “no murder here, no Homicide.” No fault is assigned to the mother, who “by the Plagues might”—not her own will or other power—“Infects to Death her child.” Holland would himself die from the plague in the very year his epic was published;; before he did, he left this record of the fear of contagion that turns the illness of one into the illness of all—whole families and streets perishing together in plague-time and being dumped together in the plague pit.18 This is a horror that according to Michael

16 On seventeenth-century contagion theory, see Barker, “Poussin, Plague,” 664;; and

Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge/New York, 1998), especially 19–47;; see also Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia, 2004).

17 Abraham Holland, A description of the great, fearefull and prodigious plague, in Hollandi post-humana (1626), sig. G1r. For additional treatment of Holland and a transcription of his plague epic, see Totaro, The Plague Epic in Early Modern England, 19–20, 32, 42–3, 155–70. On the fear that having the plague would terminate pregnancy, see Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book, Or the Whole Art of Midwifry Discovered, ed. Elaine Hobby, Women Writers in English 1350–1850 (New York/Oxford, 1999), 170.

18 For more examples of the dead mother in the brief plague epic, see also Thomas Sprat, The Plague of Athens The Plague of Marseilles: A poem. By a Person of Quality (1721), 24–5.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

154

Neill contributed to the popularity of the revenge tragedy in prior decades, the 19

In sharp contrast to these plague-time mothers who cannot care for their babies, and, worse, who spread infection rather than offering sustenance, is the image of the alma mater who in plague-time puts herself in peril in order to save her children from death. The successful plague-time alma mater appears often in

two or more children and who comes cloaked in red, the color associated with the suffering caritas Madonna Lactans exposing her breast to nurse the infant Christ while encircling him in her arms. These images offered comfort in plague-time, a fact underscored when they are compared to Poussin’s depiction of a dead mother, who also comes cloaked in red, with three children of nursing age nearby—one already dead, as she is.20The Madonna Lactans

comfort for those suffering from plague or from fear of its visiting yet again. As Sheila Barker, Louise Marshall, Christine Boeckle, and others have discussed at some length, and as Margaret R. Miles explains succinctly in A Complex Delight: The Secularization of the Breast 1350–1750,reassurances of provision and nourishment became attractive to people who lived in the midst of the personal and communal instability and suffering caused by food scarcity and plague.”21 Images of the Madonna Lactans also often reinforced the Catholic association between Mary and the Woman of Revelation, who appeared in heaven “clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars” (Rev 12:1);; and who faces “a great red dragon” that “stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born” (Rev 12:3–4).22 Associated in the west with the breathing of

19 Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford/New York, 1997).

20 On Poussin and the death of Charity, see Alexandra Catherine Woolley’s chapter in this volume.

21 On the comfort of the Virgin in plague-time, see Barker, “Poussin, Plague,” 666;; Margaret R. Miles, A Complex Delight: The Secularization of the Breast 1350–1750 (Berkeley/Los Angeles, 2008), 33–6;; Miles, “The Virgin’s One Bare Breast: Female Nudity and Religious Meaning in Tuscan Early Renaissance Culture,” in Susan Rubin Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. (Cambridge, MA, 1986), 197–8;; Christine M. Boeckle, Images of Plague and Pestilence: Iconography and Iconology Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies LII (Kirksville, 2000), 48, 52–3, 96–101;; James Clifton, “Art and Plague at Naples,” in Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Pamela M. Jones, Franco Mormando, and Thomas W. Worcester, eds, Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague, 1500–1800 (Worcester, MA, 2005;;), 97–115;; and Louise Marshall, “Manipulating the Sacred: Image and Plague in Renaissance Italy,” Renaissance Quarterly, 47, 3 (1994): 485–532, especially 527.

22 All biblical passages cited in the text are from the King James Bible.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


his serpent form, who according to Genesis 3:15, would die under the heel of the

and the Woman of Revelation and thereby proclaiming the power of the Virgin to protect those who turn to her from the pains of Hell. Mary becomes the dragon-

23 As an intercessor of the very highest order, Mary appealed

key to Christ’s survival. In a scene included within the thirteenth-century Hereford Mappamundi is one such ostentatio mammarum (the name for this image of the Mother of God who reveals her breast as a gesture of charity). Using both hands to expose both of her breasts, the Virgin in the Mappamundi appears to speak the

are my breasts from which you sought a Virgin’s milk. Show pity, as you said you would, on all who their devotion paid to me for you have made me saviouress.”24

deserved “devotion paid”;; she is the “saviouress” as he is the savior.

23 See, for example Amesbury Psalter: fol. 4: the suckling Virgin, 13th C All Souls College University of Oxford (here, the image drawn from the Web Gallery of Art [http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/zgothic/miniatur/1201–250/06e_1200.html], 19 July

Madonna and Child with Sts Sebastian and Roche” (ca. 1520–1522), Ringling Museum, State Art Museum of Florida (Sarasota), oil on wood panel, 173.4x154 cm (http://emuseum.

c2f8–44fc-ba0d-f34c44769169), 19 July 2012.24 Quoted in Catherine Oakes, Ora Pro Nobis: The Virgin as Intercessor in Medieval

Art and Devotion (London/Turnhout, 2008), 87. This ostentatio appears as part of the Day Mappamundi (ca. 1290) by

Richard de Bello (d. 1326). For a full description of the map and another translation of the inscription cited above, see Cartographic Images #226, The Hereford Mappamundi, available online at http://cartographic-images.net/Cartographic_Images/226_The_Hereford_Mappamundi.html, accessed 19 July 2012. See also Richard St. Victor quoted in Oakes, Ora Pro Nobis, 221. The ostentatio image was common enough, and apparently successful in its ability to engage viewers, that references to and representations of it abound throughout medieval Europe and England. For additional examples and discussion of the ostentatio and the relationship between Mary’s breast and Christ’s wound, see Caroline Walker Bynum, to Medieval Women (Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1987), 260–276, plates 23–30;; Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion6.8;; and Miles, “The Virgin’s One Bare Breast, 193–7. In this image in which Mary offers her breast to Christ who offers his wound, Christ is associated all the more with female qualities of mercy and with nursing. For an important starting place for an examination of what Caroline Walker Bynum calls “Jesus as Mother,” see Jesus as Mother: Studies of the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley/Los Angeles/New York, 1982), especially 110–169.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

156

In the years after the Reformation, one concern with the ostentatio images was that they made the Virgin a savior almost unto herself, taking the focus off

money offered up fraudulently to secure Mary’s intercession.25 Many of the efforts from various corners to diminish or eliminate the power of these particularly potent images of the Virgin Mary, however, likely served more to augment the discourse regarding the Virgin’s status than to disrupt devotion outright. Early Lutherans, for example, considered and reconsidered her role, and Catholics kept pace with them. As Beth Kreitzer explains in Reforming Mary: Changing Images of the Virgin Mary in Lutheran Sermons of the Sixteenth Century,

Several [early Lutheran] sermons mention Mary’s role in making salvation possible, reversing the sin of Eve, but are very careful to reserve any active role to Christ. Mary was merely the “instrument” of God’s work, not the one who accomplished the work. . . . The virtues so important for the medieval image of Mary—her faith, her humility, her chastity–were also stressed in Lutheran sermons. They made her praiseworthy and a great example, but none of these virtues adorned her with any sort of merit or power.26

25 On “the virgin’s centrality to mankind’s salvation, linking her with the Incarnation and the birth of Christ, and also with the salvation of souls at the end of time,” see Beth Williamson, The Madonna of Humility: Development, Dissemination & Reception, c. 1340–1400 Bristol Studies in Medieval Culture (Suffolk, UK, 2009), 49, 48, 173. On paintings juxtaposing the tomb and the Virgin crowned in heaven, as if she is overcoming death in a way that might be shared by those who pray for her intercession, see Rosemary Muir Wright, Sacred Distance: Representing the Virgin (New York, 2006), 100. See also the popular medieval story of Theophilus, whose soul the Virgin saved by descending into hell, discussed by Kate Koppelman in “Devotional Ambivalence: The Virgin Mary as “Empresse of Helle,” Essays in Medieval Studies, 18, 1 (2001): 67–82;; and Oakes, Ora Pro Nobis, 167, 182ff. On the veneration of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception in England, see Wright, Sacred Distance, 119–20.

26 Beth Kreitzer, Reforming Mary: Changing Images of the Virgin Mary in Lutheran Sermons of the Sixteenth Century, Oxford Studies in Historical Theology (Oxford/New York, 2004), 135. On Reformed treatments of Mary, see also Eamon Duffy, Stripping the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580, 2nd ed. (New Haven/London, 2005), 256–65;; on John Milton’s styling of Mary as a model for Christ’s ““masculine ‘thoughts’” and “‘strong Sufferance,’ through all the trials she endures” (a powerful reminder of the ongoing discussion about and devotion to the Virgin by Reformed Christians), see Theresa M. DiPasquale, and John Milton, Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies (Pittsburgh, 2008), 283–309. On the Virgin’s depiction in music, with references to her nursing of the infant Jesus and her connection to him, see Claire Fontijin, “The Virgin’s Voice: Representations of Mary in Seventeenth-Century Italian Song,” in Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh, eds, Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period (Aldershot/Burlington, 2000), 135–62.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


ran very deep, so deep that reformers like John Hooper and Hugh Latimer found themselves preaching on topics such as the details of her conception or the question of how many children the Virgin Mary eventually bore. As always, practices changed more quickly than did ideas and beliefs.”27 Protestants in England recast the Virgin in new, often surprising formulations, relying on literature to convey her unique position in relationship to Christ, to God, and to themselves as they suffered and sought relief.

***

her own baby or instead hire a wet nurse was growing in the very years that William Muggins and other writers of England’s plague epic were suffering through visitations of plague and seeking new ways to express exceptional needs. It had been the case for generations that families who could afford it would send their infants to a wet nurse so that the mother might more quickly produce another child.28 It was considered unhealthy to nurse a child if one was also going to be having intercourse, because sex would alter the blood, and thereby alter the breast milk.29 It was best to refrain from sex for the term of nursing;; therefore, if a woman

line than by the amount of money she could bring to the family through labor, the choice to hire a wet nurse seemed obvious, except if for some reason one could rest assured that a particular child was the last.30

27 Mary E. Fissell, Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England (New York/London, 2004), 32. On pre-Reform issues with the Madonna Lactans image, see Naomi Yavneh, “To Bare of Not too Bare: Sofonisba Anguissola’s Nursing Madonna and the Womanly Art of Breastfeeding,” in Miller and Yavneh, eds, Maternal Measures, 65–81.

28 On wet-nursing in Western history, see Valerie Fildes, Wet Nursing: A History from (Oxford, 1988);; Fildes, Breasts, Bottles, and Babies: A History of

Infant Feeding (Edinburgh, 1986);; and Colin Heywood, A History of Childhood: Children and Childhood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times, Themes in History (Oxford, 2004). On the anxiety regarding nursing women’s purity and that of the infant, see Rachel Trubowitz, “‘But Blood Whitened’: Nursing Mothers and Others in Early Modern Britain,” in Miller and Yavneh, eds, Maternal Measures, 82–101.

29 For a discussion of beliefs and practices related to Marian relics in the period, see Marilyn Yalom, A History of the Breast (New York, 1997), 44–8;; Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York, 1976), 192–205;; Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed (Ithaca, NY, 1993), 193–4;; and by Paster’s recommendation at note 69, page 194, see Fildes, Breast, Bottles, and Babies, 83–5.

30 On seventeenth-century discourse related to nursing in England, see Paster, The Body Embarrassed, chapters 4 and 5;; and David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford/New York,


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

158

This thinking had dominated nursing practices for generations on the Continent

large-scale alteration of them. Marian images such as the Madonna Lactans and other relics employed as devices of comfort during a woman’s lying in period—

and, when possible, destroyed. Among the most popular of the relics were the Virgin’s heavenly breast milk and the girdle the Virgin was said to have left behind when she ascended into heaven.31 Protestant mothers were exhorted in sermons to follow the Virgin in her womanly, natural ways of devoted motherhood, instead of superstitiously invoking her aid. This Reformed thinking extended to the prescription that mothers should breastfeed their own infants. When in 1622 the Countess of Lincoln offered in print The Countess of Lincoln’s Nursery, explaining that “the duty of nursing [is] due by mothers to their owne children,” and popular London minister William Gouge appealed to husbands, explaining that “Their fault therefore must be the greater, if in any way they be an occasion of their childes putting forth to nurse,” the discourse regarding the choice to nurse had grown to its height in England.32

of the physical experience of nursing in William Muggins’s London’s Mourning Garment makes more sense in this context. London emerges as a Protestant heroine, acting within the local community, within the normal conditions experienced by

1997), 87–94. For a more general treatment, see Miles, A Complex Delight, 36–9. In the primary literature, see Elizabeth Clinton, Countess of Lincoln, The Countess of Lincoln’s Nursery (1622);; and Henry Newcome, The compleat mother (1695). On the increase in number and popularity of gynecological manuals written in the vernacular by women, see Fissell, Vernacular Bodies;; on the corresponding increase of mothers’ advice books in the seventeenth century, see Susan C. Staub, ed., Mother’s Advice Books, The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works, Printed Writings, 1641–1700 (Aldershot/Burlington, 2002) series 2, part 1, vol. 3.

31 On Mary’s relics related to childbirth rituals, see Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (New Haven, 2009), 377;; and, with respect to English practices see Fissell, Vernacular Bodieswomen, and on the power ascribed to the milk as relic, see Megan Holmes, “Disrobing the Virgin: The Madonna Lactans in Fifteenth-Century Florentine Art,” in Geraldine A. Johnson and Sara F. Matthews-Grieco, eds, Italy (Cambridge, 1997), 190–195.

32 Elizabeth Clinton, Countess of Lincoln, The Countess of Lincoln’s Nursery (1622), B1r;; William Gouge, Of domesticall duties eight treatises (1622), 518. On the display of these concerns in drama from the period, see Janet Adelman, “‘Born of Woman’: Fantasies of Maternal Power in Macbeth,” in Marjorie Garber, ed., Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce: Estranging the Renaissance (Baltimore, 1987), 90–121;; Paster, The Body Embarrassed,

The Winter’s Tale,” in Moncrief and McPherson, eds, Performing Maternity, 183–95. For a comedic twist on the theme in a plague-time play, see Kelly Stage in Totaro and Gilman, Representing the Plague, 54–75.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


women of the time, and, by her exemplary behavior, as a hopeful member of the community of saints. She calls out to all other London mothers to empathize with her, appealing to them to recall together the pains they suffered willingly and lovingly to bear and then nourish their children:

Remember al, the sorrowes of thy breast, Which in the breeding, bearing and delivery, You did indure, with paine yet willing Againe bethinke you, at that instant hower, The little difference, was twixt life and death: When as the infant, with his naked power, Laboured for life, to have his rightfull birth, And with the sickly, Mother gaspt for breath, The one nere dead, as nigh to death the other, Sore to the babe, worse Travell for the Mother.…………………………………………………… The Child new borne, the Mother some dele well Are all the griefes, and sorrows at an end: No cares and troubles, yet I have to tell, Though Child be swath’de, and sickly Mother mende, The feeble Infant, many a fret doth send. Which grieves the Mother, till she weepe againe, To heare and see, the Infant in such paine. (sig. B3v–B4r)

As Patricia Phillippy explains, “Muggins’ poem constructs the maternal body as a synecdoche for the city’s suffering from the perceived continuity between the ‘paine yet willing’ of ‘breeding, bearing, and delivery’ and the unwilling sorrow of child-loss (B3v).”33 London becomes the Mater Dolorosa, our Lady of Sorrows mourning for her lost children as the Virgin mourned for Christ.34 In this poem, London all the more poignantly recalls, as literal mothers could, what it was like to be on the cusp of life and death during the delivery of a baby. She remembers the mother and child bond that is emotional and physical, each one laboring for survival and united by the struggle. This is a multi-sensory experience of literal, empathetic, and spiritual agony and relief. And then London calls others—“Remember al”—to return themselves in memory and so in emotion to what it

Infant in such paine.” These are hardly the joys of motherhood;; they are among its many sufferings. In their early modern Protestant context, these suffered pains are

33 Patricia Phillippy, Women, Death and Literature in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge/New York, 2002), 109. See also Thomas Brewer’s account of Mother London as the abandoned alma mater in The Weeping Lady: Or London Like Nineveh in Sack-Cloth (1625).

34 On the Mater Dolorosa in early modern Protestant drama, see Katharine Goodland, Female Mourning in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama, From the Raising of Lazarus to King Lear (Aldershot/Burlington, 2005).


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

160

also the certain signs of commendable devotion.35 In these ways, Muggins places Mother London and all of London’s mothers in the company of Charity;; of their former queen Elizabeth I, the self-fashioned virgin and mother;; of the Madonna at the time of the annunciation, Christ’s birth, and his nursing;; and of all alma maters

When they go well, labor and delivery bring forth a child, but even then, London recounts, “Though Child be swath’d, and sickly Mother mend, / The feeble Infant, many a fret doth send”;; this is a fretting partially remedied by the

illustrated in this poignant description, which I provide again, but here at greater length:

And with her feeble, hand and weakely strength, She playes and dallyes, for the babyes good: And to her milke-white, brestes doth lay at length The prety foole, who learnes to take his foode. His onely meanes, to nourish life and bloud, He fed, she paynd, he drawes, poore Mother yeelds, Whose loving brests both shutes and prickings feeles, And when the Babe doth gather strength a maine, Most strongly labouring at his mothers dugge. She patiently endureth all the paine, Suffering his lippes her nipple still to lugge, And with her armes most closely doth it hugge, As she should say, draw childe and spare not mee, My brests are thine, I feele no paine with thee. (sig. B4r)

transcends it. The pain becomes an act of caritas, the most self-less form of love, “as she should say, draw childe and spare not mee.” She is the “poore Mother” who chooses to endure the pain that provides her child’s “onely meanes, to nourish life and bloud,” but she is also one with the millions of women throughout time

join together with her in plague time, to care for each other, to remain in London

dismiss the men for a time, “because small pains, deserves the lesser pity.” Clearly,

faithful ones who offered themselves up time and again for their pelican children.The London Muggins reveals has human form and function. As she speaks

about herself, she is possessed of heart and face and hands and lungs, and the

35 On the early modern Protestant emphasis on the suffering in childbirth as a time of spiritual trial and heroism for women, see especially Louis Schwartz, Milton and Maternal Mortality (Cambridge/New York, 2009), especially 49–75.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


With heavy heart, and sighes of inward Cares, With wringing hands explayning sorrows wo, With blubbered cheekes, bedewde with trickling teares

London lament, and all thy losses showe: What al? nay some, all were too much to tell, The learned Homer could not penne it well. (sig. B1r)

London comes almost fully embodied, delivering lamentation, “with blubbered cheekes,” in some ways anticipating the performance of grief at child loss that, as Avra Kouffman explains, will come to animate descriptions of children in spiritual diaries.36 At the same time, then, Muggins crafts his London as a challenger to Homer, who, were he charged, “could not [have] pen[ned]” well those same losses London has sustained, and as one among great cities—Troy, Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome—that stood in the world’s admiration, only to fall. 37 She is poet and place, local and epic, individual and everywoman.Muggins also suggests that London is a virgin, having given birth to and

nurtured many children but never having had sexual relations. Early in the poem, London reports that in 1603, at the start of the year, she behaved,

. . . as a Bryde, against her Nuptiall day, Doth deck her selfe, with fayre and rich attyre, Accompanide with Damsells fresh and gay, To plight her faith, to him she did desire Even so did I with zeale as hot as fyer. Prepare my selfe against this day of joye, To give him welcome, with VIVE LE ROYE (sig. B1v).

This “Bryde” is betrothed to the king, “LE ROYE,” who is James VI of Scotland, coming to be James I of England. She is eager to wed, eager “to give him welcome” and to embrace the prosperity that this union will bring. She is also, however, a “Bryde” who will not see her wedding day or night come to pass as she would want.

almost from the start it is apparent that the reason she tells her story of “zeale” for her “day of joye” is to create a contrast with the remarkable change of fortune to which the majority of the poem is devoted. Slightly more than a dozen lines later, London breaks with her former tone:

36 Avra Kouffman, “Maternity and Child Loss in Stuart Women’s Diaries,” in Moncrief and McPherson, eds, Performing Maternity, 171–9.

37 Plague is built into many of the earliest of classical epics (in Homer’s Iliad, for example) and into Job, a biblical book many in the seventeenth century considered to be the

Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning, and Art of Paradise Regained (Providence, 1966);; and Totaro, The Plague Epic in Early Modern England, especially 9, 11, 16, 20, 30, 31–40, and 54.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

162

But oh, a sudden qualme doth crosse my heart Twixt cup and lip are dangers oft we see, Unwelcome death approcheth with his dart, Yelping, oh, LONDON, thou must yeeld to mee: I must have rootes and branches for my fee. The fruits full ripe and blossomes that might grow Are mine, not thine, the Fates decree’d it so. (sig. B1v)

Like the new bride in Thomas Dekker’s Wonderful Year, who loses her life and her maidenhead to death before she can share one night with her new husband, London is similarly accosted by a male who is strong enough to prevent her union with her betrothed. Although the language is not overtly that of rape but more subtly of being forced to “yeeld,” the yielding is arguably as tragic, because death, coming with his pestilential “dart,” claims her “rootes and branches” as well as her “fruits full ripe and blossomes that might grow.”38 Plague takes from her all children, grown (“full ripe”) and newborn (“that might grow”). In this metaphor, London has given of her own body for these children whom death will devour, every one.In an epic simile that follows, Muggins recasts London to show another aspect

of her function in the poem. In her words,

… as the greedy Wolfe, from harmeles Ewes, Robbs them of Lambes, sucking their tender Tett: And in his Rigour, no compassion shewes, But gormondizing, kils them for his meate. Euen so deaths fury, now is growne so great, The tender Lambe, will not his fury stay. Both Lambes and Ewes, he swalowes for his pray (sig. B3r).

kill all, regardless of their merits: the lambs, “sucking their tender Tett” are not only innocent but they are defenseless;; the ewes are “harmeles.” As the ewe, London is

Ecclesia or the Church, the fold into which the wolf has trespassed and about whom Paul warns in Acts 20:28–9: “Take

made you overseers, to feed the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood. / For I know this, that after my departing shall grievous wolves enter

39 Muggins offers a complex construction

38 For Dekker’s passage on the virgin bride taken by death (“Death rudely lay with her and spoiled her of a maidenhead in spite of her husband”) see Totaro, The Plague in Print, 238. For scholarly treatment of Elizabeth I’s death and its sexualized representation with respect to plague, see Munkhoff, in Totaro and Gilman, Representing the Plague, 97–112.

39 See also 1 Peter 19–20 and John 10:1. For these biblical passages, I am indebted to the article on wolves in the poetry and prose of John Milton;; Karen Edwards, “Wolf,” Milton Quarterly, 43, 4 (2009): 278–87.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


of Mother London who is ewe, shepherd, church, and mother of the lamb that is Christ. She is defender and nurturer, recalling the Woman of Revelation who saves her nursing infant from the dragon. Just so, Muggins suggests, will London serve, nurture, and protect her inhabitants, if they will return to her fold.At this point in the poem, however, with the visitation at hand and her

to tell their tales of loss, including a mother who represents more directly the

tended: “Twain in my lap, should suck their tender Mother” like lambs, “And with my foot, I would have rockt the other” (sig. C2r). In a move like Poussin’s in

in graphic illustration her inability to succeed in plague-time, when her lambs are taken to a slaughter— deaths hard to reconcile with the notion advanced later in the poem that the plague is “God’s Messenger” (sig. C3v).In a change of register and audience, Mother London turns her attention away

from efforts to attend to the maternal and spiritual wounds of plague time;; these will continue to throb and to demand communal efforts at empathy. In the end of the poem, she advances a practical, economic, and social salve, and she shares it with those who are metaphorically the city fathers:

Remember rulers, of each publicke charge, The severall branches, of your private oath: Remember them, that use a conscience large, And on themselves, the needyes stocke bestow’th, He robbes his God, and his poore neighbours both. He that graunts blessings, to the poore that lends, Gives treble cursings, to those it miss-spends. Remember likewise, God hath plac’t you heere, To be as nursing fathers to the poore, Let then your kindnes, now to them appeare, Give much and be, no niggards of your store: God in his wisedome, gave it you therefore.

So shall you in, the heavenly Cittie thrive. (sig. D1v).

Muggins’s great lady takes it upon herself to be the voice of wisdom, compassion, and faith in this time of crisis when it appears no other such voice is available or permitted. And she plays politics, schooling “rulers, of each publicke charge”

plague-time, but also to imitate her in empathetic, almost bodily form, “to be as nursing fathers to the poore.” London instructs these men in their responsibility in a new economy of Protestant England, where their charitable actions will help them bring about a community that will survive the plague and thrive after it

membership “in the heavenly Cittie” afterwards. Not one to generalize, London then provides an example of some of the steps these leaders might take, focusing


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

164

on the trades, which were facing pressure from immigrant craftsmen and whose work often slowed to a halt in times of plague.40

***

This practical alma mater wants to see the conditions established whereby charity—her own role in many respects—is no longer necessary. With trade better regulated, “each man may, with labour earne his foode,” she explains (sig. D1v). No one will need to depend so desperately on those “rulers” to create and enforce crisis-time measures for survival. Muggins’s London speaks not only as a virgin, as a queen, and as a mother, but also as an experienced tradesman and civic advisor to the leadership. As Patricia Phillippy suggests, London’s voice in the poem disturbs

Christian, corporal, and political behavior and belief.41 By urging the male rulers of London also to imitate her, sharing rather than withholding the milk of human kindness, especially in plague-time, Muggins’s London gives voice to an explicitly seventeenth-century, English plague-time hope rooted in generations of devotion to a recently deceased Queen Elizabeth I;; in centuries of veneration of the virgin mother Mary, once proclaimed queen of heaven but dethroned in the Reformation;; and in a nascent Protestant work ethic with its emphasis on becoming rather than invoking the suffering saint.42 In the early modern plague epic, London out-labors and outlasts all other English alma maters.

40 Scott Oldenburg has speculated in “London’s Mourning Garment: An Epidemiology of Class,” a paper for the 2006 Renaissance Society of America conference (25 March 2006), that, based on evidence in the poem and on archival research, Muggins was a weaver and sometime cellmate of Thomas Deloney—imprisoned for their parts in a 1595 petition to regulate relations between native and immigrant weavers (a possibility underscored by the title of his poem and the lines under consideration at this note). On English agitation over immigrant trade practices, see Harris, Sick Economies, especially 62–82;; on the Company, see Andrew Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities in Sixteenth-Century London (Oxford/New York:, 1986), 96–112.

41 See Patricia Phillippy, Women, Death and Literature, 138, and her “London’s Mourning Garment: Maternity, Mourning and Royal Succession,” in Miller and Yavneh, eds, Maternal Measures, 319–32, especially 328.

42 On the movement away from seeking out a suffering saint to becoming one, pronounced in Reformation rhetoric in plague-time, see Ronald K. Rittgers, “Protestants and Plague: The Case of the 1562/63 Pest in Nurnberg,” in Mormando and Worcester, Hope and Healing, 132–55, especially 152;; and on the widespread seventeenth-century appropriation of the concept of all Protestants as nursing mothers and fathers, see Rachel Trubowitz, “‘I was his nursling once’: Nation, Lactation, and the Hebraic in Samson Agonistes,” in Catherine Gimelli Martin, ed., Milton and Gender (Cambridge and New York, 2004), 173–4.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Chapter 9 Nicolas Poussin’s Allegories of Charity in The Plague at Ashdod and The Gathering of the Manna

Seventeenth-Century French Art

Alexandra Woolley

Before Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) went to Paris in 1640 at Richelieu’s request, the artist had made a name for himself in Rome, where he lived.1 Two of the paintings that contributed to his success were The Plague at Ashdod (Figure 9.1) and The Gathering of the Manna (Figure 9.2), commissioned by two prestigious amateurs. Both of these canvases present an allegory of Charity, used as a visual

The Philistines are punished with an epidemic by the God of Israel for their pagan adoration of the stolen Ark of the Covenant, which they had placed in the Temple of Dagon.2 Instead of showing the cause of the disease in the foreground, Poussin shows the consequences of God’s wrath by placing a dead, bare-chested allegory

that died after having suckled her poisonous milk.3 This iconographical invention 4

1 For Poussin’s reception in France, see Antoine Schnapper, “Inventaires après-décès et amateurs de Poussin au XVIIe siècle,” in Pierre Rosenberg and Louis-Antoine Prat, eds, Nicolas Poussin: 1594–1665 (Paris, 1994), 70–72. Regarding prints of Poussin’s work, see Maxime Préaud, “Nicolas Poussin dans les éditions d’Etienne Gantrel,” in Alain Mérot, ed., Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), octobre 1994 (2 vols, Paris, 1996), vol. 2, 671–93.

2 Elisabeth Hipp, Nicolas Poussin: Die Pest von Asdod (Hildesheim, 2005). Charity. Elisabeth Hipp,

“Poussin’s The Plague at Ashdod, a work of art in multiple contexts,” in Franco Mormando and Thomas Worcester, eds, (Kirksville, 2007), 177–223, especially 194;; and Sheila Barker, “Poussin, Plague, and Early Modern Medicine,” The Art Bulletin, 86, 4 (2004): 659–89.

3 Hipp, “Poussin’s Plague,” 194.4 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, trans. John Bostock and Riley Henry Thomas (6

vols, London, 1857), vol. 6, book XXXV, ch. 35, 263–4. For Poussin’s relationship with this Roman author, see Ingo Herklotz, “Poussin et Pline l’Ancien: À propos des monocromata,” in Marc Bayard, ed., Rome-Paris 1640: Transferts culturels et renaissance d’un centre

(Paris, 2010), 13–29.


Fig. 9.1

Nicolas Poussin, The Plague at Ashdod, 1631, oil on canvas (1.480 x 1.980 m),

Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo Credit: Musée du Louvre, Paris.


Fig. 9.2

Nicolas Poussin, The Gathering of the Manna, 1637–39, oil on canvas (1.490 x

2 m), Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo Credit: Musée du Louvre, Paris.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

168

In The Gathering of the Manna, Poussin represents the Israelites receiving the

Charity, also in the foreground of the painting, represents the time of famine that precedes God’s miracle. She is shown breastfeeding her own mother. This version

his Memorable Doing and Sayings (ca. 32 CE).5 These Roman sources were in 6

Poussin rarely used images of breastfeeding women in his religious canvases, and when he painted the well-known concept of Charity, he did not use the same

7 In this book of emblems, Charity is depicted as a woman dressed in red with three children, one of whom is being breastfed. The two other children at her side are symbols of Faith and Hope, thus completing the symbol of the three Theological virtues.8 Because of Ripa’s popularity, this

was to transform. By using pagan sources to render this allegory, the artist changed its semiotic conventions.9 In focusing on Poussin’s manipulated Charities, and on

in post-Tridentine France to stress its social and moral importance.10 Second, I

5 Valerius Maximus, Memorable Deeds and Sayings: One Thousand Tales from Ancient Rome

6 On the popularity of antique literature between 1601 and 1641, see Henri-Jean Martin, Livre, pouvoir et société à Paris au XVIIe (Geneva, 1969), 503–4, 607–8.

7 Rosenberg and Prat, Nicolas Poussin. There are exceptions: The Massacre of the Innocents (Chantilly, Musée Condé), cat. no. 24, 168;; and The triumph of David (Madrid, Prado Museum) cat. no. 32, 189, which shows a naked Allegory of Victory. From the 1640s onwards, Poussin subtly hides naked breasts for decorum. For French allegories, see Alain Tapié, (Caen, 1986).

8 Cesare Ripa, Iconologia (Rome, 1603), 63–4. “Donna vestita di rosso, che in cima

of her head, in her left arm, she holds a boy to whom she gives her milk, and two other children stand playing besides her, one of which is embraced with her right arm.] For the critical fortune of Cesare Ripa in France, see Virginie Bar,

(Dijon, 2003);; and Dominique Brême and Virginie Bar, les allégories et les symboles de C. Ripa et J. Baudouin (Dijon, 1999).

9 Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis, Humanisme & Théorie de la peinture, XVe– (Paris, 1998). Also see Jacqueline Lichtenstein and Christian Michel, eds,

Conférences de l’Académie royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (2 vols, Paris, 2006–2008), tome I, vol. 1 (2006), 1648–81.

10 On correlations between assistance to the poor and artistic commissions celebrating this topic in France, see Pierre Deyon, “A propos du paupérisme au milieu du XVIIe siècle: peinture et charité chrétienne,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 22, 1 (1967): 137–53.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Allegories of Charity in The Plague at Ashdod and The Gathering of the Manna 169

would like to compare these normative Charities to Poussin’s, in order to show the authority his two canvases had on French artistic works and theory in the aftermath of their success. However, Poussin’s images of a dead breastfeeding woman and an old lady suckling a young woman also seem to question the very message of Catholic charity at a time when charitable welfare was at its height in France.

Breastfeeding Allegories of Charity in France

of “charity” were commissioned by numerous patrons to decorate their homes. Inventories attest how widespread this iconography was, especially in Paris during the 1620s and 1630s, concurring with public assistance orchestrated by post-Tridentine pious congregations and confraternities.11 Those representations that survived time, such as those of Jacques Blanchard (1600–38), Philippe de Champaigne (1602–77), or Simon Vouet (1590–1649), commissioned by upper-class patrons, highlight the symbolic breast of Charity, placed at the center of their portrayals, and demonstrate knowledge of different visual sources.12 The

of the Virgo Lactans or nursing Madonna was also very popular.13 Furthermore, the subject was treated repeatedly during the sixteenth century by the Fontainebleau school, where Italian artists such as Andrea del Sarto (1486–1530) or Primaticcio (1504–70) painted lascivious lactating women with numerous healthy children in lavish surroundings.14 In addition to these visual sources, most seventeenth-century French painters possessed a copy of Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia brought back from Italy or the newly translated French edition in their personal libraries, which they directly imitated, thus aiding to establish a new set of “universal” topoi

11 Georges Wildenstein, “Le goût pour la peinture dans la bourgeoisie parisienne du début du règne de Louis XIII,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 6 (1950): 154–273. The author presents a study of paintings in Parisian post mortem inventories from 1602 to 1660. Charity is stressed as one of the favorite themes between 1617 and 1659 (see 160–161 and 192–3). For insight on charitable assistance in France during this time, see Jean-Pierre Gutton, Guide du chercheur en histoire de la protection sociale (2 vols, Paris, 1994), vol. 1, Fin du Moyen Age–1789.

12 For Champaigne’s allegory, see Tapié, L’allégorie, catalogue no. 34;; for Simon Vouet’s, see Jean-Luc Nancy, Dominique Jacquot, Maximilien Durand et Guillaume Kazerouni, eds, (Strasbourg, 2005), 192. As for Blanchard’s numerous versions of the allegory, see Jacques Thuillier, (Rennes, 1998).

13 Edgar Wind, “Charity: The Case History of a Pattern,” Journal of the Warburg Institute, 1, 4 (1938): 322–30.

14 Sylvie Béguin, “La Charité, un tableau de l’École de Fontainebleau récemment entré au Louvre,” L’Œil, 210–211 (1972): 13–18.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

170

and a standardized allegorical language.15 Christian Charity depicted as a woman

concept of love and the way to salvation. The attitudes and expressions conceived by French painters referred to different editions of Ripa’s book and to their artistic heritage, as did their different engravings, which recovered the Iconologia’s spiritual description of Charity.16

iconographical codes in religious paintings after the Council of Trent (1545–63). These Catholic symbols played an important part in France particularly in the aftermath of the Wars of Religion.17 Mass circulation of printed material in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries provided an essential component for the spread of new (and old) iconographies. Moral virtues such as Faith, Hope, and Charity, emphasized after the Council of Trent, were allegorized in the hope that their representations would educate Catholics in the fundamental values of their religion and seduce Protestants. Images were meant to assist the faithful in their devotion and meditation, thus becoming anagogical symbols holding “silent theology” and spiritually uplifting the viewer so that he could understand all the “hidden wisdom” of the holy Bible.18 Moreover, the act of breastfeeding at the centre of the portrayals of Charity had moral connotations, thus reinforcing the spiritual aspect of the allegory. The idea that breast milk transmitted virtues or vices was common during the early modern period and was recaptured by Lazarus Dassier, who explained in his sermons that “if children get from their mothers their features and lineaments of the face, and the marks they have on their bodies, they also often take the customs, inclinations, and the vices of their nurses.”19

15 Cesare Ripa, L’Iconologie, trans. Jean Baudouin (Paris, 1636). The book was republished in 1637 and in 1644. For its critical fortune, see Brême and Bar, Dictionnaire

.16 For the engraving of Charity, see Thuillier, ;; and Tapié,

L’allégorie.17 See Erna Mandowsky’s introduction to the Iconologia, which states that the Catholic

signify all the many aspects of Virtues and Vices, and every conceivable human sentiment and passion, without ever losing their moral implication and a code had to be invented by which their hidden meaning could be deciphered.” Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, introduced by Erna Mandowsky, repr. of the ed. Rome, 1603 (New York, 1984), no pagination.

18 Frédéric Cousinié, (Rennes, 2007). For an explanation on religious meditation through images, see Marc Fumaroli, “Muta eloquentia: La vision de la parole dans la peinture de Nicolas Poussin,” in Marc Fumaroli, L’Ecole du

(Paris, 1998), 189–231, especially 190–191. David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago, 1991), 161–91.

19 Lazare Dassier, L’Evangile de grâce, ou sermons pour tous les dimanches de l’année composés et préchés en plusieurs Cathedrales du Royaume, Par le R.P. Lazare Dassier, Religieux de l’Ordre des F.F. Prêcheurs du Couvent de l’Annonciation de Paris


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


The virtue of the breast was all the more prominent in Catholic theology after France’s endorsement of the decrees of Council of Trent in 1615, a century after the authority of the Virgin Mary had been questioned by Protestant reformers.20 Lactating Charity, which reproduced by mimetism the iconography of the Virgin and Child, materialized analogous spiritual aspects. The image of love embodied by a woman who breastfed children symbolized more than just benevolence.

contemporary forms of charitable assistance and poor relief, in which French women played an essential role. Again, the Council of Trent played a crucial part, by focusing heavily on charitable action, which was a debated issue with the Protestants and erudite readers of Erasmus.21 Catholics in the late sixteenth and

the idea of charity. The 23rd session of the Council was devoted to theories of poor relief and hospital care.22 In France, numerous hospitals and other charitable Catholic institutions were founded in the seventeenth century, in a movement led

way in organizing poor relief with private funding and the backing of the crown.

communities in the 1630s to nurse and catechize the poor, neglected girls, and

like the Filles de la Charité were associated with Vincent de Paul whom they credited and corresponded with throughout their pious charitable journey.23 The ubiquity of portrayals of Charity in private homes echoes the movement for

24

(2 vols, Lyon, 1682), vol. 1, 172. This idea was already present in Leon Battista Alberti’s treatise Della famiglia. The Albertis of Florence: Leon Battista Alberti’s Della famiglia, trans. Guido A. Guarino (Lewisburg, 1971), 56.

20 ceux qui se dressent des images se révoltent du Vray Dieu (1559) in Daniele Menozzi, ed., L’Église et les arts visuels (Paris, 1991), 172–79, especially 175.

21 Philippe Sassier, e–XXe (Paris, 1990).

22 Abbé Chanut, (Paris,

1686).23 For a history of the part women played in poor relief in early modern France,

see Barbara B. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris (Oxford, 2004);; and Susan E. Dinan, Women and Poor-Relief in Seventeenth-Century France: The Early History of the Daughters of Charity (Aldershot, 2006).

24 Tintoretto’s art, see Jutta G. Sperling, “Allegories of Charity and the Practice of Poor Relief at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco,” Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch, 70 (2009): 119–46.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

172

circumstances, the aesthetical appeal of her body and the generous breasts suggest a certain degree of eroticization, which must be taken into consideration. Pleasant to look at, the buxom maternal woman who gives her lactating breast to suckle

elite, as she could also be looked at from a secular perspective. The highlighted breast at the heart of the paintings depicting Charity became an object of lust.25 Published in 1690, Furetière’s dictionary provides a glimpse into the cultural

or breasts possess “great warmth” and that the breasts of young girls are “red like strawberries.”26 Despite the time-lapse between the commissions of Charity and Furetière’s description of breasts, one wonders if the number of these portrayals of the allegory really elevated the patron’s soul or if they simply allowed the owners of these paintings to look at a half-naked woman, while feigning morality and pretending to support charitable works.

Poussin’s Two Charities in Old Testament Scenes

The spiritual role of Charity was rehabilitated in Poussin’s two theoretical paintings, which were nurtured by Italian artistic theory. The allegory is placed within an allegorical biblical scene, thus amplifying its religious meaning, following Gabriele Paleotti’s Discorso intorno al le immagini sacre et profane (1582). This Tridentine treatise on religious images states that allegories must be placed in a composition in order to amplify their moral meaning and to facilitate their spiritual comprehension.27 For Poussin, the visual arts had to respond to the dual purpose of the edifying and the delectable;; in other words, they had to elevate the soul and be pleasing to the eye.28semiotics used in the Parisian canvases. Bellori quoted the artist saying that “the

25 Margaret R. Miles, A Complex Delight: The Secularization of the Breast, 1350–1750 (Berkeley, 2008), 14–15.

26 Antoine Furetière, Dictionnaire universel contenant generalement tous les mots (3 vols, La Haye, 1690), vol. 2, entry “Mammelle.”

27 Gabriele Paleotti, Discorso intorno al le immagini sacre et profane (1582), ed. Stefano della Torre, trans. Gian Franco Freguglia (Vatican City, 2002), books II, XVIII, and XLIV;; Olivier Bonfait, “De Paleotti à G.B. Agucchi: théorie et pratique de la peinture dans les milieux ecclésiastiques à Rome du Caravage à Poussin,” in Michel Hochmann, ed., Roma 1630. Il trionfo del pennello, exhibition catalogue, Rome, Villa Médicis, 1994–95 (Milan, 1994), 83–96.

28 See Anthony Blunt’s critical edition of Poussin’s correspondence and an analysis on his art and the “delectable.” In a letter to Fréart de Chambray dated 1 March 1665, Poussin

imitationtreatise: he says “its purpose is delectation.” Nicolas Poussin, Lettres et propos sur l’art, ed. Anthony Blunt with the assistance of Jacques Thuillier and Arikha Avigdor (Paris, 1994), 163–4 and 239.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


novelty in painting does not consist principally in a new subject, but in good and new disposition and expression, and thus the subject from being common and old becomes singular and new.”29In The Plague at Ashdod bought by Fabrizio Valguarnera, a noble Sicilian

close to the Barberini, Poussin represents a city in upheaval and sufferance.30 In the background, the people of Ashdod stare in panic at the damaged temple and statue, while others are dying from the disease. In the forefront, the motionlessness

on a Roman copy of Polycleitus’s sculpture of a dying Amazon and dressed in

arm thrown back, revealing the wan color of her bare chest.31 The shade of her 32 A dead

infant who drank the mother’s milk lies at her side. A man rushes to save Charity’s second child, who tries to succor the venom, and a woman stops a third child from approaching the corpse. At the right of the painting is a young boy who is being pulled away from the scene by a man who holds his nose to protect himself from the stench of the rotting body and from the contagion of the corpse’s breath.33 On the left, a man dressed in blue cannot bear the vision of the dead mother and looks

in Poussin’s painting, the concept it embodies is nonetheless present. The artist manages to introduce two works of mercy, which are acts of charity that each and every Christian must accomplish to gain salvation.34 The Plague at Ashdod stages the “visiting of the sick” and the “burial of the dead,” which was added as the seventh act of mercy during the second half of the twelfth century, on the stairs of a temple in the far right of the painting.35 However, these actions seem pointless. God’s punishment does not spare, but punishes impiety and kills the unfaithful Charity who alone embodies two acts of mercy: “feeding the hungry” and “giving drink to the thirsty.”

29 Giovanni Pietro Bellori, The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Alice Sedgwock Wohl, notes by Helmut Wohl, introduction by Tomaso Mantanari (Cambridge, 2005), 339. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis, 39.

30 Rosenberg and Prat, Nicolas Poussin, cat no. 43, 200–202.31 Barker, “Poussin, Plague,” 685–6, note 43.32 Hipp, “Poussin’s Plague,” 184.33 Barker, “Poussin, Plague,” 664. This mechanism is also seen in Marcantonio

Raimondi’s engraving after Raphael of Il Morbetto(Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale).

34 Hipp, “Poussin’s Plague,” 194;; Matthew XXV 35–40.35 St. Thomas Aquinas mentions the burial of the dead in Summa Theologica (II.32.ii).

Anna Tuck-Scala, “Caravaggio’s ‘Roman Charity’ in the Seven Acts of Mercy,” in Jeanne Chenault Porter, ed., Parthenope’s Splendor: Art of the Golden Age in Naples (University Park, 1993), 127–63, especially 129. Hipp, “Poussin’s Plague,” 194, 213.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

174

The birth of the Idea or concetto of this painted image displays Poussin’s erudite knowledge of Renaissance art and antique literature.36Charity, Poussin illustrates a passage from Pliny the Elder’s Natural History,

in Poussin’s painting: “There is a picture by him of a Captured City, in which is represented an infant crawling toward the breast of its wounded mother, who, though at the point of death, has all the appearance of being aware of it, and of being in dread lest the child should suck blood in place of milk from her exhausted breast.”37 In addition to this classic work, a similar scene was described in one poem of Giambattista Marino (1569–1625), who was a friend of the painter’s.38 Passages of contemporary Italian plague literature also depicted scenes of pathos that nourished the artist’s invention.39 Poussin’s new patrons were a small group of cognoscenti who, like Fabrizio Valguarnera or Cassiano del Pozzo, positively encouraged the study of antiquity and, in particular, of classical sculpture. Indeed, during the early 1630s, Poussin rarely treated religious topics, but painted subjects that were taken from ancient mythology and from Tasso, explaining the renderings of this Charity.40 This painting is also a testimony of Poussin’s new research on the

in his work, cultivated by his taste for classical literature and art. In this painting, the breast of lactation, the quintessential attribute of Charity, commonly a source of love, becomes a symbol of tragic death, and the milk, traditionally lifesaving, becomes a poison that murders the offspring. The scene visually combines the disgust for the disease with the delight of the erotically charged breasts.41 The isolated statue-like pallid and lifeless breast, which just killed an infant, incarnates God’s action, which saves in return of faith, but punishes impiety.Poussin used Charity a few years later in The Gathering of the Manna,

delivered in 1639 to Paul Fréart de Chantelou. For this friend and patron, who was secretary to the Surintendant des Bâtiments, Sublet de Noyers, Poussin deviates once again from the canonical concept of Charity by proposing a pagan

36 Scena Tragica (1545), see Oskar Bätschmann, , trans. Claire Brunet (Paris, 1994), 31.

37 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, vol. 6, book 35, ch. 35, 263–4. 38 Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the

Love of Painting (Princeton, 1996), 271. 39 For plague literature, see Hipp, “Poussin’s Plague,” 206–9;; and Barker, “Poussin,

Plague.”40 Anthony Blunt, Art and Architecture in France 1500–1700 (New Haven, 1999),

180–181.41 Cropper and Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin, 253–73;; Barker, “Poussin, Plague,” 668,

notes 72–4.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


Memorable Doings and Sayings (ca. 31 CE).42 The Roman author emphasizes that this breastfeeding scene was a “strange spectacle” in the eyes of the prison guard, and “against the laws of nature,” but “the daughter’s honor” works to erase these aspects. Defying

breast through the slit of her blue dress to an older woman, in the forefront of his painting. The latter suckles the breast and puts her right arm around the lactating woman, embracing her with relief. To the left is a naked child clinging onto

who is probably waiting to be breastfed in turn. A man dressed in red stands in admiration in front of this mother’s charitable action. His posture replicates that of the shocked man in the Plague at Ashdod, who turns away from the tragic scene of the dead mother. Both these characters raise their arm spontaneously, the one from the Plague in horror, and the one in the Manna in admiration. Poussin also contrasts the static Charity groups with the chaos and movement in the rest of the canvases. He symmetrically opposes Charity’s odd moral action to an eager mother and child who are greedily rushing to the manna. Poussin lays emphasis on these two maternal groups with the use of light, which catches the yellow of their dresses. In this painting, Charity’s breast represents the Israelites’ only salvation while they wait for God’s mercy, an echo to divine misericordia. The fervor of

thirst for God. Here, the maternal breast nurtures the body, but like the heavenly action of the manna, the milk does not only nourish the body, it also feeds the soul as explained in the writings of Bishop Louis Abelly, who reported that “The strongest and the tenderest love… is the love of a mother towards her child … by the affection and the urgent desire that she has to feed her milk & substance.” Abelly compares this maternal love to the love of God, which is given to man through the Holy Sacrament. “Under the veil of mystery, God nourishes us with his own substance, with love & charity which is incomprehensible to us.”43 In

starving Israelites while pending for God’s salvation.Poussin went to great lengths to make the various protagonists of this painting

demonstrate their emotions through their gestures and facial expressions. This was already the case in The Plague at Ashdod, but became of capital importance in The Gathering of the Manna. He makes this ambition clear in the well-known letter he wrote to his patron dated 28 April 1639, where he explains that one must read the expressions of human emotions of each character in the canvas:

42 Rossenberg and Prat, Nicolas Poussin, cat. no. 78, 262;; Maximus, Memorable Deeds, 180.

43 Louis Abelly, Sacrement de l’Eucharistie, par Messire Louis Abelly, (Paris, 1678), 139. This concept was already present in Saint Augustine’s writings and will also be used in maternity treatises during the seventeenth century: Guillaume Le Roy,

(Paris, 1675), 299–312.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

176

on the left side will tell you everything that is written here, and all the rest is much the same effect: Read the story and the picture in order to see whether each thing is appropriate to the subject.44

The painter underlines the same desire when he writes to Jacques Stella, stating Manna “will not displease those who will know how to

read them.”45 This echoes the artist’s thoughts on Leonardo da Vinci’s depiction of human emotions.46 Furthermore, the verb “to read” illustrates the importance paintings had gained, and concurred with existing debates on Horace’s Ut pictura poesis and Aristotle’s Poetics, in which paintings were elevated to the status of the liberal arts through a comparison with poetry.47 The reading of the picture also resides in the spiritual aspects of the story, as paintings beyond their different

accessible to the Catholic viewer through meditation.48Poussin diverges from the existing Iconologia codes, by making references

to antique literature in order to create the charitable allegorical groups of The Gathering of the Manna and The Plague at Ashdod, but the purpose merges with Ripa’s discourse on the importance of educational images.49 In his attempt to capture the viewer’s emotional response, Poussin draws on Roman pagan sources and their affetti to deliver a more complex discourse on Catholic charity, thus establishing a dialectical form of art.50 By embodying the imprint of the sacred and by never ceasing to celebrate classical antique culture, the unusual renewal of the iconography of Charity pushes the spectator to muse on the canvas and to study it with more thought, therefore intensifying its noble ideas, as advised by post-Tridentine Catholic literature.51

44 André Félibien, in Les conférences de l’Académie Royale de peinture et de sculpture pendant l’année 1667 (Paris, 1667). I used the second edition, printed in 1688, 328.

45 Blunt, Art and Architecture, 37–9.46 As Lee points out, this aspect of Poussin’s knowledge of expression in art

concurs with Leonardo’s theory on dramatic expressions, which was well known among Renaissance and early modern artists. Poussin illustrated Leonardo’s Trattato della pittura di Lionardo da Vinci during the 1630s. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis, 56, note 12;; Cropper and Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin, 111.

47 Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis, 66–7;; Louis Marin, On Representation (Stanford, 1994), 334–5.

48 Fumaroli, “Muta eloquentia,” 190–191.49 Ripa, Iconologia (Rome ed.), preface, not paged.50 Sébastian Schütze, “Aristide de Thèbes, Raphael et Poussin. La représentation

des affetti dans les grands tableaux d’histoire de Poussin des années 1620–1630,” in Mérot, ed., Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), vol. 2, 573–89.

51 Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis, 39–41.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


Poussin’s Charities as Examples of Artistic Theory

which French painters rendered historical paintings.52 This new call for artistic patterns concurs with Louis XIV and Colbert’s desire to promote “national” art with the creation of the Royal Academy of painting and sculpture in 1648.53 The Academy’s conferences explained to students the greatest art works of ancient and contemporary renowned Italian artists. Poussin, as a French artist living in Rome, who had been summoned to Paris by Louis XIII in 1640, became a nationalized emblem of good taste and a French equal to Raphael.54 Theorists of the second half of the seventeenth century declared that all noble subjects aimed at universal truths, which were possible only through knowledge of scriptural and visual antique sources.55 These two pillars of creation were indispensable for good

his allegories on French painters was remarkable, as is apparent from their artistic production and the Royal Academy’s conferences, which put Poussin’s art forward as an example of perfected artistic theory.The unusual dead Charity in The Plague at Ashdod

to have an impact on French art. As Elisabeth Hipp states in her commendable article on the painting: “many subsequent representations of historical or biblical plague epidemics are indebted to it, particularly in the way they depict the suffering masses and in their choice of visual motifs.”56 Indeed, Poussin can be credited with having invented a new visual rhetoric for the representation of plague victims. The acts of mercy in the background, the blocking of the nose from the stench of illness, the various attitudes of despair, and the grey tinted bodies conjuring up pathos, and of course the dead woman’s breasts and her children’s corpses, are turned into an emblematic plague pattern. Sybille Ebert-Schifferer suggests that Poussin standardized the language of the affetti in this painting, thus explaining its success in art criticism of the 1670s.57

1649), who in the Plague of Athens reproduced two Charities in the foreground of

52 Carl Goldstein, “L’Académie de Poussin,” in Rosenberg and Prat, Nicolas Poussin, 74–8, especially 77.

53 In the conference on The Gathering of the Manna, Poussin is described by André Félibien as “the Glory of his time.” Lichtenstein and Michel, Conférences de l’Académie royale, 156–75, especially 157.

54 Félibien, Les conferences, 434. 55 Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis, 39–41.56 Hipp, Nicolas Poussin, 177.57 Sybille Ebert-Schifferer, “L’expression des passions: Le rôle de Poussin dans

l’élaboration d’un art civiliateur,” in Olivier Bonfait and Christophe Luitpold Frommel, eds, Poussin et Rome (Paris, 1996), 329–52. Also Sébastien Schütze insists on the creation of “pathos icons.” See footnote 50;; see also Barker, “Poussin, Plague,” 666, note 57.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

178

column adorned with a bas relief. As an echo to this female group, on the right-hand side of the painting, is the second quotation of the dead Charity: Her corpse lies on the body of the deceased mother, who shows one bare breast. Next to her rests her dead infant who drank the poisonous milk. A man hides his tears behind his red toga as he leans over the dead body of a woman revealing her bare bosom.One other painter to use this motif of pathos was Sébastien Bourdon (1616–

71), who treated the subject in the mature years of his life in the late 1670s, when Poussin’s fortune was at its peak. As a member of the Royal Academy, Bourdon must have been very familiar with Poussin’s painting, because Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne gave a conference in its honor on 1 March 1670, when it was said that “the subject is so vibrantly expressed that even the strength of Eloquence is not capable of conjuring up such a vivid image [of it] in the mind.”58 Charles Le Brun, the director of the Academy, said that the painting inspired “sadness in the spectator’s soul.”59 Displayed as a model of perfection for its use of Classical

58 Lichtenstein and Michel, Conférences de l’Académie royale, 355–9, especially 358.59 André Fontaine, ed., Les conferences inédites de l’Académie Royale de Peinture et

(Paris, 1903), 117.

Fig. 9.3 François Perrier, The Plague of Athens, ca. 1635, oil on canvas (0.72 x 0.97 m), Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon, Dijon. Photo Credit: François Jay.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


sculpture, Poussin’s plague was also an example to live up to. Bourdon chose to reproduce the exact same story in his own version of The Plague at Ashdod towards the end of his life (Figure 9.4).60 The painting sought to compete with Poussin’s version, as Bourdon opted for a canvas of the same size to defy the master’s composition. He presents in the foreground a dead mother and two children with a male corpse, who must be the father of the family, hidden under a white sheet. The group is revealed by a man who tugs on it with one hand, while he blocks

the venomous milk, but the other infant, who is about to take the naked breast, stares at the viewer of the canvas as if surprised by our presence. Here, Bourdon enhances the dramatic effect of the original painting. Furthermore, by choosing

allegorical language of Charity that Poussin had very cleverly manipulated. The Burial of the Dead, staging corpses hidden under a white sheet, directly refers to the seven works of mercy, which Bourdon already represented in the 1660s in a series of seven paintings (Ringling Museum, Sarasota).61Bourdon also uses the motif of dead Charity in the Plague of Milan, which

commemorates the work of Charles Borromeo (1538–85). Charity is dying to the left of the canvas. Her chest is revealed;; a child is watching her and about to take hold of her breast. Next to them is the body of the father whom the archbishop of Milan tries to heal by prayer. A second child attempts to climb on his father, but

the stench of the sickness.62 Sébastien Bourdon uses Nicolas Poussin’s erudite vocabulary, making precise references to his work. Jacques Thuillier explains that the artist particularly focused on works by Poussin that were dated between 1625 and 1637, borrowing from his register as a young painter.63 By the time Bourdon was quoting Poussin’s plague iconography, he had grown very familiar with the artist’s motifs and theory, which he promoted at the Royal Academy as visual models of perfection.64

60 Jacques Thuillier, de l’œuvre complet (Paris, 2000), cat. no. 300, 418.

61 Series,” in Robert Enggass, Marilyn Stockstad, eds, Hortus imaginum: Essays in Western Art (Lawrence, 1974), 147–54. The style and color of the painting is similar to his Seven Acts of Mercy;; both are dated 1666–70. See also Thuillier, Sébastien Bourdon, 412–13, cat. nos 293–9.

62 This motif was also staged in a bas relief by Pierre Puget. Marie-Paul Vial, ed., Pierre Puget: Peintre, sculpteur, architecte, 1620–1694, exhibition catalogue, Marseille, Centre de la Vieille Charité, Musée des Beaux-arts, 28 October 1994–30 January 1995 (Marseille, 1994), no. 49, 144–5.

63 Thuillier, Sébastien Bourdon, 147.64 Bourdon presented a conference on Poussin’s The Blind of Jericho on 3 December

1667. On 9 February 1669, he praised Poussin for his use of light. On 5 June 1670, he lectured on human body proportions, saying that Poussin would have approved of his method. Lichtenstein and Michel, Conférences de l’Académie royale, 175–95, 293–304, 374–6.


Fig. 9.4

Sébastien Bourdon, The Plague at Ashdod, ca. 1670, oil on canvas, private collection.

Photo Credit: ©Christie’s Images Limited [2009].


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


Such promotion of Poussin’s visual language was typical of most of the conferences held at the Academy under the direction of Charles Le Brun. Le Brun

Richelieu’s palace between 1640 and 1641.65 According to Sauval’s guidebook of Paris, Poussin admired the work of the young Le Brun, who in 1642 left Paris for Rome to meet again with the erudite painter. His trip to Italy changed the way Le Brun conceived of art as he grew familiar with Poussin’s approach, which allied imitation, invention, decorum, and expression.66 He even saw himself as Poussin’s stylistic heir, and during his youth, Le Brun enjoyed passing off his own paintings as works by his mentor.67 In recent work on the artist, Bénédicte Gady demonstrates that Charles Le Brun’s admiration for Nicolas Poussin can be broken down into

1650. Throughout this period, the young painter tried to assimilate the work of his role model. For the duration of the second phase, the historian perceives the growth of Charles Le Brun’s own style, which is enriched by a “deep understanding” of Poussin’s work. The third stage takes place during Le Brun’s mature years, around 1670. Here the artist uses “quotes” from Poussin’s art in his own pictorial production.68works that in terms of expression and composition were inspired by The Gathering of the Manna and The Striking of the Rock, respectively.69portrayal of Charity, discovered by Alain Tapié and the second one Le Brun’s version of The Striking of the Rock (Figure 9.5) in 1648.70 Le Brun’s rendering of Charity shows a woman breastfeeding a child, with a young boy standing to her right, waiting for his turn. In addition, an old man expects to be fed by Charity. This choice is derived from an iconography analogous to the one Poussin used in his painting: that of Caritas Romanapiety told by Valerius Maximus, which accounts how Pero, a brave young woman, feeds her breast to her imprisoned father.71 This story was held in great esteem by numerous European artists during the seventeenth century. Caravaggio (1571–1610) immortalized the scene in The Seven Works of Mercy painted in Naples in 1607.72 His French followers such as Simon Vouet, Charles Mellin (1577–1649),

65 Bénédicte Gady, “D’un ministre à l’autre, rencontre entre Poussin et Le Brun,” in Bénédicte Gady and Jean-Claude Boyer, Richelieu, patron des arts (Paris, 2009), 337–67, especially 341–4.

66 Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis, 64–6.67 Claude Nivelon, Vie de Charles Le Brun et description détaillée de ses ouvrages

par Claude Nivelon, Lorenzo Pericolo, ed. (Geneva, 2004), 239–40.68 Gady, “D’un ministre à l’autre, 344–5.69 Ibid. 70 Tapié, L’allégorie, cat. no. 40.71 Maximus, Memorable Deeds, 180. The story directly follows the anecdote about a

woman breastfeeding her own mother.72 Tuck-Scala, “Caravaggio’s “Roman Charity,” 129. Jutta G. Sperling, “Péro et

” in Lucien Faggion and Laure Verdon, eds, Le don et le contre-don (Aix, 2010), 145–68.


Fig. 9.5

Charles Le Brun, The Striking of the Rock, 1648, oil on canvas (1.140 x 1530 m),

Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo Credit: Musée du Louvre, Paris.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


or Sebastien Bourdon played with the eroticism of the scene.73 Poussin’s group was reproduced independently in an engraving by Jean Pesne, printed ca. 1669 (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale).74 Charles Le Brun’s portrayal recaptures the structure, the body language, and the colors of Poussin’s Manna, but he also mimics the composition of The Striking of the Rock and incorporates his Charity into the right-hand side of his canvas where Poussin had placed a woman playing with two children. Each element of Le Brun’s painting is aimed at glorifying the lactating

him to study antiquity and to learn from the works of other artists.Le Brun’s study of Poussin’s technique also nourished his talks at the Academy.

The Gathering of the Manna. At the beginning of his talk, he outlines Raphael’s disegno and color, Titian’s harmony, and Veronese’s composition. He then states that the combined talent of these Italian painters is brought together in “our own French painter,” the “divine” Poussin.75 He goes on to analyze the general

passions, and its perspective. From the beginning of his speech, Le Brun underlines Charity as the “main group” of the painting, noting that the “air is more serene” on

a child who is greedily rushing to pick up the manna.76 Le Brun mentions that

points out the weakness of the old lady’s “dry” body.77 Focusing on Poussin’s

the correct emotions according to their situation. He points out the “grave man” staring at the breastfeeding scene of Charity, who heightens their action with his respect. He then discusses the emotion of the breastfeeding woman who is

not looking at her mother while she grants her this charitable help, but she leans towards her child … the desire that she has to save them both makes her do the action of a double mother … That is why, in the moment she takes her milk away from her child, she gives him tears, and through her words and warmth, she tries to appease him.78

Finally, discussing the painting’s perspective, the director focuses on the use of “divine light” that beams on the Charity group. Le Brun’s depiction of the “movements of the soul” reveal that he was aware of the letter that Poussin sent to Chantelou, in which he said that those who “read the painting” will recognize the emotions of “charity,” “hunger,” “joy,” “gladness,” “admiration,” and “respect.”

73 Tapié, L’allégorie, cat. nos 30–31. For Bourdon’s work, see Thuillier, Sébastien Bourdon, cat. nos 329, 440.

74 Tapié, L’allégorie, cat. no. 34.75 Lichtenstein and Michel, Conférences de l’Académie royale, 156–75, especially

159. 76 Ibid., 161–2.77 Ibid., 163.78 Ibid., 166–7.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

184

In 1666, the letter was printed by André Félibien, and on 7 April 1668, Le Brun presented one of two conferences on facial expressions.79used four of Poussin’s paintings to illustrate that The Mannaand The Plague at Ashdod demonstrated sadness.80 The director of the Academy studied the psychological attitudes Poussin had conveyed throughout his life;; a book on the subject by his hand was published posthumously.81Poussin’s rhetorical paintings were notorious for their erudition and remained

artistic production and conferences. While Poussin set out to manipulate the traditional iconographical code of Charity for a greater intellectual understanding of art, he created new codes of visual expression in the process. After all, Poussin had himself promoted imitation as one of the pillars of artistic learning.82

In Nicolas Poussin’s work, we can perceive the renewal and transformation of the allegorical language of Charity, rendered by the artist’s taste for antiquity and the

The Plague at Ashdod presents helpless, inoperative, and poisoned breasts. The traditional message of love and affection that the breast incarnates is transformed into a deadly poison. If the allegory causes the indignation and astonishment of the people around her, it is because she solely

abandoned civilization incapable of reproducing itself. Yet in The Gathering of the Mannathe Catholic message of love towards all, and symbolizes hope and faith. Beyond

example of virtue.83 The breast surpasses its primary function, and is shared with the suffering. This unconventional act of generosity precedes God’s salvation. Here, God saves the Israelites, the same God that punished the Hebrews in the Plague at Ashdod.Although living in Rome, Poussin remained deeply engaged with cultural and

the Catholic concern for salvation. Faced with the excessive use of this image, Poussin may have been fed up with the post-Tridentine conformism it represented

79 Félibien, Les conferences, 328.80 Lichtenstein and Michel, Conférences de l’Académie royale, 233–8. 81 Charles Le Brun, Conférence de M. Le Brun ... sur l’expression générale et

particulière (Paris, 1698). Jacques Thuillier, “L’image au XVIIe siècle: De l’allégorie à la rhétorique des passions,” in , 4 (1988): 88–98.

82 Bellori, The Lives of the Modern Painters, 321;; Blunt, Art and architecture, 232;; Richard Verdi, “Situation de Poussin dans la France et l’Angleterre des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles,” Rosenberg and Prat, Nicolas Poussin, 98–105, especially 98, note 28.

83 Lichtenstein and Michel, Conférences de l’Académie royale, 167.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


as early as 1631.84 Besides the two paintings studied above, we know of only two other representations of Charity in the whole of his artistic production: a drawing kept at Windsor Castle that reproduces Ripa’s Iconologia, which probably was a preliminary drawing for a Charity painted between 1630 and 1635, mentioned in a collector’s inventory.85 The second allegory is in the 1655 painting, Saints Peter and John Healing the Lame Man (New York, Metropolitan Museum) commissioned by Monsieur Mercier, treasurer at Lyon, which portrays a narrative from the New Testament Acts 3:1–10.86 The concept of charity is portrayed by a begging woman

illustrate the biblical story, yet here he does not bow to Ripa’s allegorical code or use pagan literary sources.The tragic Charity in the Plague at Ashdod

piety in the Manna suggest that Nicolas Poussin was not interested in mainstream

omnipresent in France, we know through his correspondence that Poussin had little time for works of mercy himself.87 Moreover, unlike other French artists, he did not leave anything to charity in his will.88 Despite his nonconformist attitude,

role inspiring later artists to muse on the symbolic power of breastfeeding and to play with the beauty of the female breast in a period of esthetical and moral conventions.

84 Alain Mérot, Poussin (Paris, 1990), 167. 85 Jean-Claude Boyer, “Un amateur méconnu de Poussin: Gérard de Daillon,”

in Mérot, ed., Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), vol. 2, 695–717, especially 703. The painting was ordered around 1635, when this iconography was very popular in France. For the drawing, see Rosenberg and Prat, Nicolas Poussin, cat. no. 88, 276.

86 Félibien, Les conferences, 359.87 In a letter to Chantelou, written in Paris on 20 March 1642, the artist said that he

wished to write to M. de Noyers, who had written to him about “La Charité,” but then said to his friend that he was too stupid and not intellectual enough to correspond with such a

88 Emmanuel Coquery, “La sensibilité religieuse des artistes de l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture au XVIIe siècle,” in Olivier Bonfait and Neil MacGregor, eds,

, exhibition catalogue, Rome, Académie de France, 19 October 2000–28 January 2001 (Rome, 2000), 47–57. For Poussin, see Charles Legay, “Testament de Nicolas Poussin,” in Société de l’histoire de Normandie. Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de Normandie (Rouen, 1875–80), 148–55;;

Storia dell’Arte, 79 (1993): 341–50.


Proof Copy


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Chapter 10 The Economics of Milk and Blood in Alberti’s Libri della famiglia: Maternal versus Wet-Nursing

Julia L. Hairston

Leon Battista Alberti’s Libri della famiglia has long been considered one of the foundational texts of modern family ideology. The dialogue is a compendium of precepts on domestic management in which the familia functions as a microcosmic civitas, or state,1 whose external and internal—what some might call public and private—relations are analyzed in order to ensure its enlargement and perpetuation.2 A commonplace of early modern studies, particularly regarding Italy, is that an outburst of interest in the family characterized the period, as evidenced by variations in numerous social and cultural manifestations. In the shift from feudal

century, the family moreover gained greater political importance;; it administered the city’s interests and, at the same time, defended its own status. Concern for the family by the family translated into a huge increase in the production of ricordanze and libri di famiglia, in which births, deaths, payments to wet nurses, or family

1 Guido Guarino writes that for Alberti the “family, then, is an institution which closely resembles the state in structure and ideals, and is in fact the basic unit of the state.” See his introduction to Leon Battista Alberti, The Albertis of Florence: L.B. Alberti’s Della famiglia, trans. Guido A. Guarino (Lewisburg, 1971), 18. Alberti was not, however, an innovator in this respect. Benjamin G. Kohl cites Francesco Barbaro “with his emphasis in the De re uxoria on the family as the basic unit of state and society, and on the duties of wives in this context” as the creator of a new literary genre in which the family functions as a microcosm for the state;; see his “Introduction to Francesco Barbaro’s On Wifely Duties,” in Benjamin G. Kohl and Ronald G. Witt, with Elizabeth G. Welles, eds, The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists on Government and Society (Philadelphia, 1978), 186.

2 offer advice, culled from the ancients as well as from the behavior of his own ancestors, on how to perpetuate the family and defend it against iniquitous fortune;; and, second, to ingratiate himself with his own family members. For the original Italian, see Leon Battista Alberti, I libri della famiglia, ed. Ruggiero Romano, Alberto Tenenti, and Francesco Furlan, 2nd ed. (Turin, 1994), especially 3;; 11–12;; 41. For the English translation, see Leon Battista Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence, trans. Renée New Watkins (Columbia, 1969), 25;; 31;; 50–51.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

188

movements were recorded by middle- and upper-class patriarchs.3 There was a concomitant growth of texts on household management—what Xenophon coined economics—whose main emphasis was to regulate the family and of which

volgare.4

procreate. Marriage was an expensive endeavor and was usually undertaken to perpetuate the family line by creating heirs to conserve the patrimony;; another

which was also necessary to sustain the economic well-being of the family.5 In the Albertian family cosmos, the wife/mother plays a central role, and, perhaps for this

be its proper place—the second book entitled De re uxoria—is instead dispersed

40-day period between 1433 and 1434 in Rome.6

3 For an overview of the genre, see Angelo Cicchetti and Raul Mordenti, “La scrittura dei libri di famiglia,” in Letteratura italiana (8 vols, Turin, 1982–91), vol. 3 (1984), 1117–59.

4 See, for example, Giovanni Dominici, Regola del governo di cura famigliare, ed. Donato Salvi (Florence, 1860).

5 On Alberti’s “construction of cultural ideologies of ‘woman’ through the category of the economic,” see Carla Freccero, “Economy, Woman, and Renaissance Discourse,” in Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari, eds, and the Italian Renaissance (Ithaca, NY, 1991), 196;; Constance Jordan has also insisted on the economic role that women play in humanist household management literature, see her Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca, NY, 1990), particularly 47–54. Those children who did not have the opportunity to marry often turned to the Church for their “livelihood.” Although this fate was reserved for both sexes, there was a much higher percentage of women to men. See David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427 (New Haven, 1985), particularly chapter 5, and Richard C. Trexler, “Celibacy in the Renaissance: The Nuns of Florence,” in Dependence in Context in Renaissance Florence (Binghampton, 1994

Julius Kirshner and Anthony Molho, “The Dowry Fund and the Marriage Market in Early Quattrocento Florence,” Journal of Modern History, 50 (1978): 403–38;; and Donald E. Queller and Thomas F. Madden, “Father of the Bride: Fathers, Daughters, and Dowries in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Venice,” Renaissance Quarterly, 46 (1993): 685–711.

6 his Vita anonyma. See in the original Latin, Riccardo Fubini and Anna Menci Gallorini,

Rinascimento, 12 (1972): 70;; for the English translation, see Renée Watkins, “L. B. Alberti in the Mirror: An Interpretation of the Vita with a New Translation,” Italian Quarterly, 30 (1989): 8. The fourth book, De amicitia, was written later, in 1440, in occasion of the certame coronario, a poetry contest in the vernacular promoted by Alberti in Florence.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

The Economics of Milk and Blood in Alberti’s Libri della famiglia 189

In this chapter, I consider a single prescription Lionardo makes concerning the nutrition of newborn children—that the mother nurse her own child.7 Although the question of who—mother or balia [wet nurse]—should feed the newborn child

enclosure Alberti constructs for the early modern wife.8 It moreover highlights tensions in his text, for the contraceptive effects of nursing, fully understood by Alberti and his contemporaries, directly contradict his alleged interest in the family’s expansion. A similar contradiction persists between humanist prescriptive literature on nursing and contemporary social practice.9 Milk represented more than mere nourishment for the newborn, and its qualities held implications for the future heir’s health, personality, level of civility, and language—all characteristics of distinction marking membership in a particular social class.Although Alberti’s advocacy of maternal breastfeeding over wet-nursing is

unequivocal, those critics who have considered the nursing question in Renaissance

7

maternal breastfeeding is based largely on the rhetorical structure that his discourse takes rather than that one character—in this case, the humanist—instead of another advocates it. The particular defense of maternal breastfeeding that Lionardo advocates may even serve to highlight Alberti’s critique of patriarchy that Najemy reads in the Libri della famiglia especially when he concludes that at times it is “at the expense of women.” See John M. Najemy, “Giannozzo and His Elders: Alberti’s Critique of Renaissance Patriarchy,” in William J. Connell, ed., Society and Individual in Renaissance Florence (Berkeley, 2002), 78.

8 See Julius Kirshner, “Materials for a Gilded Cage: Non-Dotal Assets in Florence, 1300–1500,” in David I. Kertzer and Richard P. Saller, eds, The Family in Italy from

(New Haven, 1991), 184–207, for information on the legal rights of wealthy Florentine wives regarding material assets in which he describes their existence as a “gilded cage.” Louis Hass has noted that humanist critique of nursing may be related to the fact that the practice of wet-nursing left the mother freer, although he claims that “Alberti did not oppose the practice”;; see his The Renaissance Man and His Children: Childbirth and Early Childhood in Florence, 1300–1600 (New York, 1998), 91.

9 The most extensive investigation on the use of wet nurses in early modern Florence is Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “Blood Parents and Milk Parents: Wet Nursing in Florence, 1300–1530,” in Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 1985), 132–64;; and Louis Haas, Renaissance Man, 89–132. See also James Bruce Ross, “The Middle-Class Child in Urban Italy, Fourteenth to Early Sixteenth Century,” in Lloyd DeMause, ed., The History of Childhood (Northvale, 1995 [originally published in 1974]), 183–228;; two essays by Richard C. Trexler, “Infanticide in Florence: New Sources and First Results,” and “The Foundlings of Florence, 1395–1455,” in Dependence in Context in Renaissance Florence (Binghampton, 1994 [originally published in 1973]), 203–58;; chapters 3, 4, and 5 in Valerie A. Fildes, (New York, 1988);; and chapter 4 on nursing in Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London, 1990), 53–76.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

190

Florence instead recall his pages as one of the most memorable examples of early modern advice on choosing the proper wet nurse.10 Alberti, however, along with Francesco Barbaro, signaled an unambiguous preference for maternal nursing characteristic of the humanists, a preference that ran directly counter to contemporary custom and to the frequently ambivalent views of their ancient and medieval predecessors. Alberti’s promotion of maternal nursing derived, I will argue, from political and social issues related to enclosing the maternal body and from personal questions concerning the relation of reproduction to wet-nursing.

Milk and Blood

thought that milk was “blood concocted”;;11 the material and symbolic value traditionally attributed to blood is self-evident. Although it was almost universally acknowledged that menstrual blood nourished the fetus in the womb, there were differing opinions as to which blood—menstrual or otherwise—gave its origin to the formation of milk.12 Heat was mostly responsible for transforming the blood into milk in women or sperm in men.13 The transformation in females took place in tubes that connected the breasts to the lower regions (either uterus or liver) from which the blood was emitted.14 The quality of the milk was thus naturally tied

10 See Ross, “Middle-Class Child,” 185–6;; Klapisch-Zuber, “Blood Parents,” 140;; Shahar, Childhood, 62;; and Haas, Renaissance Man, 91. Fildes uses Aldovardo’s comment “You know, too, how rare is a good nurse and how much in demand” as an epigraph to her chapter on the Renaissance wet nurse.

11 Aristotle, “The Generation of Animals,” in Jonathan Barnes, ed., The Complete Works of Aristotle (2 vols, Princeton, 1984), vol. 1, 1202. That maternal milk derived from the blood was universally accepted and had been so since Aristotle. The second-century Greek physician Galen reiterates that “the source of milk is from blood undergoing a slight change in the breasts.” See Galen, A Translation of Galen’s Hygiene (De sanitate tuenda),

The Attic Nights, trans. John C. Rolfe (3 vols, London, 1927–28), vol. 2, 357.

12 For a discussion of the problematics related to the double nature of menstrual blood as a source of nourishment and corruption, see William F. MacLehose, “Nurturing Danger: High Medieval Medicine and the Problem(s) of the Child,” in John Carmi Parsons and Bonnie Wheeler, eds., Medieval Mothering (Hamden, 1997), 3–24.

13 Gianna Pomata has emphasized the importance, at least in Galen, of the passage

her “La ‘meravigliosa armonia’: Il rapporto fra seni ed utero dall’anatomia vascolare all’endocrinologia,” in Giovanna Fiume, ed., Madri: Storia di un ruolo sociale (Venice, 1995), 50.

14 One of the characteristics Soranus required of the proper wet nurse was that she be “‘of good color’: for in such women, bigger vessels carry the material up to the breasts so that there is more milk.” See Soranus, Soranus’ Gynecology, trans. Owsei Temkin (Baltimore, 1991 [1956]), 91.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


to the quality of blood and to the proper physical characteristics that allowed an

Milk’s supposed origin in blood helps explain some of the concerns associated with choosing the proper wet nurse. Nursing a child meant not only giving one’s milk, but also the potential passing on of characteristics that were thought to have found their origin in blood. The second-century Latin encyclopedist Aulus

as to claim that milk has the same importance in forming the newborn as the seed from which he or she was conceived: “Therefore it is believed not without reason that, just as the power and nature of the seed are able to form likenesses of body and mind, so the qualities and properties of the milk have the same effect.”15Some of the “likenesses of body and mind” include personality traits, habits,

and even the command of language. The humanist Francesco Barbaro, in his widely circulated De re uxoria (1415–16), makes very clear that it is the milk itself that transmits certain attributes:

They [mothers] ought to give their infants to the care of those who are freeborn,

the young infant will not imbibe corrupt habits and words and will not receive,

a dangerous degenerative disease in mind and body.16

Although milk physiologically transmits certain qualities to the nursling, the question of language introduced by Barbaro is also founded on social relations.

volgare immediately comes to mind: “I will proceed

rules at all by imitating our nurses.”17 Soranus too speaks of language acquisition

15 Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, vol. 2, 357.16 I have used the English translation of the prologue and book two of Barbaro’s treatise,

see Francesco Barbaro, “On Wifely Duties,” in Benjamin G. Kohl and Ronald G. Witt, eds., The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists on Government and Society (Philadelphia, 1978), 223. For the Latin, Francesco Barbaro, “De re uxoria,” Attilio Gnesotto, ed., Atti e memorie della R. Accademia di scienze, lettere ed arti di Padova, n.s. 32 (1915–16), 95.

17 For the English translation, see Dante Alighieri, Book of Exile, trans. Marianne Shapiro (Lincoln, 1990), 47. For original Latin, see Dante Alighieri, , ed. Pio Rajna (Florence, 1896), 4. Although one might argue that nutrix may simply mean a nurse, as in one who takes care of children, or one who nurses, that is, the mother, historical contextualization points to the more common meaning of wet nurse. Children usually begin speaking at one to one-and-a-half years, that is, usually while still suckling in the care of the wet nurse;; see Klapisch-Zuber, “Blood Parents,” 154–9. Gian Giorgio Trissino’s translation of Dante’s passage furthermore suggests the meaning of nutrix as wet nurse, for he employs the term balia, which in no way can refer to the mother. See Dante Alighieri, “De la volgare eloquenzia,” in Epistola del Trissino de le lettere nuovamente aggiunte ne la lingua italiana (Vicenza, 1529), 20.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

192

based on frequentation when he recommends that the wet nurse “be a Greek so that the infant nursed by her may become accustomed to the best speech.”18The need to guarantee language competence through origin may also be the

result of the custom of employing slaves as wet nurses. Again, Alberti’s source Aulus Gellius warns against “corrupting the nobility of body and mind of a newly born human being” by nourishing it with another’s milk. “Especially if she whom you employ to furnish the milk is either a slave or of servile origin and, as usually happens, of a foreign or barbarous nation.”19 Yet as Barbaro’s recommendation to use only freeborn wet nurses helps prove, slaves were still being used as wet

20 Alberti himself recalls the use of foreign slaves in the preface to the third book:

idioms comprehensibly simply because, in their unfamiliarity with our variations of case and tense, they do not know how to make words agree as required?21

The implications of what milk transmits to the future heir help explain the attention in medical and moral literature to the question of who—mother or nutrix—should nurse the newborn child. Yet despite Peter Garnsey’s contention that the “medical writers of antiquity were agreed that mother’s milk was best for babies, other things being equal,” on a closer look, the tradition offered much more ambivalent responses.22 The rhetorical structure of some ancient texts shows that,

contemporary social practice;; others merely oscillate between mother and wet nurse. In antiquity, wet nurses were employed not only for upper-class children, but also for the children of slaves and often for the children of the very same

18 Soranus, Soranus’ Gynecology, 94. Pseudo-Plutarch’s De liberis educandis also calls for the use of Greek wet nurses only. “[F]oster-mothers and nursemaids are not to

character they must be Greek.” See Pseudo-Plutarch, “De liberis educandis,” in Moralia (16 vols, Cambridge, MA/London, 1927–69), vol. 1 (1927), 13.

19 Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, vol. 2, 356.20 See Iris Origo, “The Domestic Enemy: The Eastern Slaves in Tuscany in the

Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” Speculum, 30 (1955): 335. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber calculates that “one out of ten domestic nurses listed in the ricordanze is a slave,” and thus foreign;; see her “Women Servants in Florence during the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” in Barbara Hanawalt, ed., Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe (Bloomington, 1986), 69.

21 Alberti, Family, 152. For the Italian, see Alberti, Libri, 189.22 See Peter Garnsey, “Child Rearing in Ancient Italy,” in David I. Kertzer and Richard

P. Saller, eds., (New Haven, 1991), 59.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


nutrices who were catering to the rich.23sixteenth centuries in Italy, the practice extended also to include the middle class. Although all the medieval sources I encountered mirror the rhetorical structures of the ancients, which ultimately result in ambivalent positions, the humanists,

their predecessors.An initial objection to the argument that one aspect of the rhetoric of the texts

on nursing—that they devote many more pages to wet nurses than they do to

mother to nurse her own child. There is simply much more to say, the argument would follow, on the qualities necessary to a good wet nurse. Such an interpretation however ignores history, for the large majority of ancient, medieval, and early modern elite women in Italy did not nurse their own children, and they were the indirect (and occasionally the direct) recipients of these texts. Indeed, if the authors on nursing were sincerely interested in having mothers breastfeed, they would have

to do so. For from antiquity through early modernity in Italy, elite mothers (and fathers) consistently turned to wet nurses, and thus more persuasive arguments were necessary if the authors wished to change this social practice.

Ancient Sources

De liberis educandisthe Renaissance also because it was assumed to have been written by Plutarch and was included in his Moralia, begins the section on feeding by offering both practical and theoretical reasons in favor of maternal breastfeeding. The author contends that “[m]others ought, I should say, themselves to feed their infants and nurse them themselves. For they will feed them with a livelier affection and greater care, as loving them inwardly.”24 He adds that “[n]ature too makes clear the fact that mothers should themselves nurse and feed what they have brought into the world, since it is for this purpose that she has provided for every animal which gives birth to young a source of food in its milk.”25 After offering these two reasons, however, the text then states that “if they [mothers] are unable to do this, either because of bodily weakness (for such a thing can happen) or because they are in haste to bear more children, yet foster-mothers and nursemaids are not to be selected at random, but as good ones as possible must be chosen.”26 Several more pages follow on how to choose the best wet nurse.

23 Quoted in Garnsey, “Child Rearing,” 60–61.24 Pseudo-Plutarch, De liberis educandis, 13–15.25 Ibid., 15.26 Ibid.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

194

We will later return to the reasons given for a mother’s not being able to nurse. The rhetorical structure of the text, a sort of “A is better, but if you can’t do A, then do B and B should be like this…,” is what I call a reverse occultatio. Richard

occultatio as:

Emphasizing something by pointedly seeming to pass over it, as in introducing a guest speaker one says, “I will not dwell here on the twenty books and the thirty articles Professor X has written, nor his forty years as Dean, nor his many illustrious pupils, but only say that last year in Africa he killed ten men with his spear.”27

in a sentence or two that maternal breastfeeding is best;; they then add that if, for some reason or another, a mother cannot nurse her own child, the proper wet nurse must be found;; and then they proceed to spend pages and pages on how to choose her. The rhetorical structure may best be described as a sort of reverse occultatio in that after seemingly invoking A, the text is instead really an extended development of B.Soranus of Ephesus, a Greek physician who worked primarily in Rome during

the second century, provides evidence of the same rhetorical phenomenon seen in De liberis educandis. In apparent agreement with Garnsey, Soranus states that:

To be sure, other things being equal, it is better to feed the child with maternal milk;; for this is more suited to it, and the mothers become more sympathetic towards the offspring, and it is more natural to be fed from the mother after parturition just as before parturition. But if anything prevents it one must choose the best wet nurse, lest the mother grow prematurely old, having spent herself through suckling.28

Again, we will return later to why a mother might not breastfeed;; the reader should note, however, that following these observations, Soranus begins three sections concerning the wet nurse, her milk and how to test it, and her general regimen, which extend to a total of 14 pages.Galen’s De sanitate tuenda differs slightly in its rhetorical structure from Soranus but in the end imparts the same ambiguous advice. His text oscillates, sometimes even within the same sentence, between addressing the mother and the nurse. Although he states that “those children who are nourished by their mother’s milk enjoy the most appropriate and natural food,” he suggests that if children “chance to be distressed or to cry, the best appeasement of their unhappiness is the nurse’s nipple put in their mouth.” Galen moreover explains that such “remedies for the distress of infants have been found by nurses taught by experience.”29 Or in the

27 Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, 1991), 104.28 Soranus, Soranus’ Gynecology, 90.29 Galen, Translation of Galen’s Hygiene, 24. Italics mine.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


that she “should observe no little care as to her food, drink, sleep, sexual life, and exercise, in order that her milk may be of the best quality.”30 These texts remain ambiguous because, although they clearly state, usually early on, that maternal milk is best for the child, they then dedicate extensive time and space to wet-

pro forma. One suspects that the widespread use of wet nurses, along with the reproductive effects it induced, as we shall see later, helps account for the discrepancy between declared textual intent and ultimate effect.One decidedly unambiguous ancient source on nursing, however, is Aulus

Gellius’s Noctes Atticae, the very same and only text cited by Alberti. Gellius purportedly recounts a discourse in favor of maternal breastfeeding pronounced by the Greek orator, teacher, and philosopher Favorinus, at the home of a “family of high nobility” to a woman whose daughter had just given birth to a son. Favorinus argues that any mother who “bear[s] a child and at once send[s] it away from her” is unnatural (contra naturam).31 He speculates that many women do not want to spoil their beauty with the duress of pregnancy and lactation and even goes so far as to equate wet-nursing with abortion:

Many of those unnatural women try to dry up and check that sacred fount of the body, the nourisher of mankind, regardless of the danger of diverting and

In so doing they show the same madness as those who strive by evil devices to cause abortion of the fetus itself which they have conceived, in order that their beauty may not be spoiled by the weight of the burden they bear and by the labour of parturition. But since it is an act worthy of public detestation and general abhorrence to destroy a human being in its inception, while it is being fashioned and given life and is still in the hands of nature, how far does it differ from this to deprive a child, already perfect, already brought into the world, already a son, of the nourishment of its own familiar and kindred blood?32

Favorinus furthermore explains that those who say it makes no difference by whose milk the infant is nourished are wrong because, as we have already seen, milk derives from blood and is as important as “in whose body and from whose blood a human being is formed.” Thus giving the “alien and degenerate nourishment of another’s milk” corrupts the “nobility of body and mind of a newly born human being,” especially when that other is a foreign slave.33Finally, on a psychological level, Favorinus notes that the practice of wet-

nursing causes maternal affection to diminish, for a “child which has been given over to another to nurse is almost as completely forgotten as if it had been lost

30 Ibid., 29.31 Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, vol. 2, 354–5.32 Attic Nights, vol. 2, 354–5.33 Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, vol. 2, 356–7.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

196

by death.” As a result, also the child’s love for her/his parents is “not natural but merely courteous and conventional.”34

Medieval Sources

The bibliography on nursing in the medieval period maintains its characteristic

domestic management. Moreover, and again in concordance with the ancient sources, all of the texts—excluding one which takes the use of a wet nurse for granted—converge in their apparently token advocacy of maternal breastfeeding over wet-nursing. They furthermore either take the form of a reverse occultatio or oscillate between mother and wet nurse and, thus, ultimately result in a now characteristic ambiguity. The physician Aldobrandino of Siena, in his 1256 medical compendium entitled Le régime du corps, originally written in the langue d’oïl but also translated into Italian by 1310, is yet another case in point of reverse occultatio. In the chapter “How one should care for a newborn,” Aldobrandino

Now to tell you in what manner you should nurse them. Be aware that the milk one should give them, and that is best for them, is that of the mother since the child is nourished with the same in the womb and once the child is outside of the womb, the milk comes naturally to the breasts.35

A short paragraph (seven lines) follows on how and how often to breastfeed, after which Aldobrandino states: “But, since mothers can’t always nourish their children, it is thus useful for them to have wet nurses, so we will teach you which types of nurses they must have.”36 The rest of the chapter (another two and a half pages) is dedicated to the necessary qualities of a good wet nurse.Francesco da Barberino, in his Reggimento e costumi di donna, written

sometime between the end of the thirteenth century and 1314/15, instead oscillates between a series of references to children being “no longer with a wet nurse” [fuor di balia], and one thus assumes that they were previously with one, and the

of the prosimetrum, where a young woman is describing her own body, she refers to her age with the hysteron-proteron when “I was no longer with a wet nurse or mother”;;37 in the sixth section, Francesco recommends to mothers:

34 Ibid., 360–361.35 Aldobrandino of Siena, Le régime du corps de maître Aldebrandin de Sienne, ed.

Louis Landouzy and Roger Pépin (Paris, 1911), 76. The chapter is entitled “Comment on doit garder l’enfant quant il est nés.” Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine.

36 Aldobrandino da Siena, Le régime du corps, 76.37 Francesco da Barberino, Reggimento e costumi di donna, ed. Giuseppe E. Sansone

(Turin, 1957), 70.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


As for children, if they are no longer with a wet nurse,

mature and good at heartso that they can also do good (for others);;and if these children are with a wet nurse,look ahead to the thirteenth parton how a wet nurse should nourish infantsand see to it that they’re nourished as you read there.38

As promised, the thirteenth section is devoted to “como balia di casa e como di fuori.”39 Only the very wealthiest sectors of Florentine society could afford to have a wet nurse living in their home.40 The overwhelming majority opted instead to send their children into the countryside surrounding Florence, frequently to the Casentino area which was renowned for its balie.41 Francesco da Barberino counsels the wet nurse that:

If it should happen that you, wet nurse,should fall ill, don’t despair;;take him to his motherwho, if she wantsand it’s appropriate, will be ableto nurse him with excellent milk.It’s true that at the beginningthe milk of another woman is better than hers.And besides, barring any illnesses, it’s goodthat sometimes the mother nurse himbecause it removes many noxious thingsfrom him like a precious medicine.So at every changein the infant, take him back to her milk.42

Here Francesco da Barberino refers to the widely held belief, disseminated by Soranus and completely contrary to current medical thinking, that “for twenty days the maternal milk is in most cases unwholesome.”43 Maternal milk is

her/him to health. Yet the presence of an entire section (one out of 20) dedicated to the wet nurse—not to mention the other cursory references to her in the text—would lead the reader to believe that the author took for granted that infants were

38 Ibid., 134. Italics mine.39 Ibid., Reggimento, 9.40 See Ross, “Middle-Class Child,” 187;; Klapisch-Zuber, “Blood Parents,” 135–6.41 See the “Canzona delle balie,” in Charles S. Singleton, ed., Canti carnascialeschi

del Rinascimento (Bari, 1936), 39–40.42 Francesco da Barberino, Reggimento, 189–90.43 Soranus, Soranus’ Gynecology, 89.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

198

to be breastfed by someone other than their mother. Imbedded deep within the sixteenth section of the Reggimento, however, after lengthy instructions on how to conceive either male or female children, Francesco tells mothers that indeed they themselves ought to nurse their children:

And you who can nurse him with your own milksuitably, don’t send him to someone else,if you wish to please God and the child;;don’t do like the peacockwho breaks the egg of the peahenin order to take his pleasure with her;;do like the peahenwho takes many tortuous turns and then places the eggso that the peacock with his long tailcan’t go and break it in the nest.44

The use of apologues is not uncommon in the Reggimento;; Francesco da Barberino often turns to the animal world to effect what he calls “covert speech” [parlar coverto]45 in order to express concepts which if rendered explicit would be considered inappropriate.46 The subtext of the peacock story is the centuries-old injunction against intercourse during lactation. Ancient physicians warned that sexual intercourse diminishes or ruins the milk by either provoking menstruation or causing pregnancy.47 The Church followed suit in banning marital intercourse

44 Francesco da Barberino, Reggimento, 230.45 Ibid., 224.46 Barbaro writes that “Nature has so hidden and secluded those parts of the body that

what cannot be viewed without embarrassment can hardly be discussed by us without loss of dignity.” Barbaro, On Wifely Duties, 221;; Barbaro, De re uxoria, 93.

47 Soranus writes that “coitus cools the affection toward <the> nursling by the diversion of sexual pleasure and moreover spoils and diminishes the milk or suppresses it entirely by stimulating menstrual catharsis through the uterus or by bringing about conception.” Soranus, Soranus’ Gynecology, 92–3. Galen too states: “I order all women who are nursing babies to abstain completely from sex relations. For menstruation is provoked by intercourse, and the milk no longer remains sweet. Moreover some women become pregnant, than which nothing could be worse for the suckling infant. For in this case the best of the blood goes to the foetus. For the latter, which has in it the intrinsic principle of life, is governed thereby, and constantly draws its proper nourishment, is as if immovably rooted to the uterus night and day. Meantime the blood of the pregnant naturally becomes less and of inferior quality, so that not only less, but inferior, milk collects in the breasts;; so that if a nursing mother should become pregnant, I should strongly advise that another nurse should be procured, thinking and considering that her milk would be better in taste, appearance, and odor.” Galen, A Translation of Galen’s Hygiene, 29–30.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


woman’s physiological cycle such as menstruation, pregnancy, and lactation.48 Francesco advises the mother not to do as the peacock who “breaks the egg of the peahen” in order to copulate with her, but instead to follow the example of the peahen who “places the egg” out of the peacock’s reach. In other words, by placing her body at a distance from her husband, the mother is able to keep her milk from being spoiled by sexual intercourse.49 Thus consonant with several ancient sources, Francesco da Barberino’s Reggimento oscillates between mother and wet nurse in indicating who is to nurse the newborn child.Paolo da Certaldo, in contrast, in a text which received its title—the Libro di

buoni costumiwas written sometime after 1350, takes for granted that the male reader to whom the advice is addressed will send his children to a wet nurse.If it happens that you have children, one or more, pay close attention to give

them to be nourished to a good wet nurse. Make sure that she’s wise, well-behaved, and honest and that she’s neither a drinker nor drunk because very often children receive and resemble the nature of the milk they suck. And be careful that the wet nurses of your children are neither arrogant nor possess other bad vices. Also, be very careful, if you don’t have your child and his nurse in the house with you, to

48 See James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago, 1987), 198–9. Paolo da Certaldo offers several reasons why: “Be very careful not to be with your woman when it’s that time of the month because the children you would generate then run the risk of being sick [leprous] or suffering from ring-worm. So consider what a risk this is and always be careful. And you can really hurt yourself too.” Paolo da Certaldo, “Libro di buoni costumi,” in Vittore Branca, ed., Mercanti scrittori: Ricordi nella Firenze tra Medioevo e Rinascimento (Milan, 1986), 55. The Paduan physician Michele Savonarola instead discusses the risks of superfetation (“superimpregnatione”) caused by having intercourse during pregnancy. See Michele Savonarola, Il trattato ginecologico-pediatrico in volgare: Ad mulieres ferrarienses de regimine pregnantium et noviter natorum

, ed. Luigi Belloni (Milan, 1952), 29–30.49 Directly preceding the passage cited is explicit advice to the wife to send her

husband away after having given birth: “But of all things, remember that after the birth,

if she had a female, if she can do so with decency.” Francesco da Barberino, Reggimento, 230. The motive of seeking pleasure as a reason for sending a child to wet nurse returns in a sermon of San Bernardino, although here the admonition is aimed directly at mothers: “And who among you has children? Have you ever given them to a wet nurse? What was your reason? Why? In order to procure yourself more pleasure, you did it … etc. etc. As soon as you gave them to a wet nurse, you immediately put your own pleasure before God, and you fell into sin. And you know what you did? You did worse than an ass does because when as ass has a colt, she raises it and nourishes it. You don’t do that. The reason why you don’t take care of him, you know what it is, if it’s a licit reason. If it’s licit, it’s not a mortal sin. It’s not licit like you think it is, no;; if you gave your child to a wet nurse because you’re weakened, or because you don’t have a lot of milk, or for other legitimate reasons, you don’t sin;; but if you do it in order to have more pleasure, I say that then you’re sinning.” See San Bernardino da Siena, Le prediche volgari di San Bernardino da Siena dette nella piazza del Campo l’anno 1427, ed. Luciano Banchi (3 vols, Siena, 1880–1888), vol. 2, 157–61.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

200

give him to a nurse who has an abundance of milk so that the said nurse, because she lacks milk, doesn’t give him the milk of a goat or a ewe or a donkey or of some other beast because the boy or girl who is nourished with an animal’s milk doesn’t have perfect powers of reasoning as one who is nourished with the milk of a female. Indeed he always seems stupid and mindless and without full reasoning. And always visit your children whom you send away from home to a nurse often, so that you can see how they’re doing and if they’re in discomfort, immediately move them to another wet nurse and don’t bother about the price.50Paolo’s is the only text among the sources referred to in this study to make no

mention of maternal nursing. This may be due to his cultural background, for he was primarily a merchant (his Libro dei buoni costumi is the only thing he wrote, as far as we know.) His text thus likely responds more directly to contemporary social practice than to the moral, pedagogical tradition of household management literature that preceded him.

Italian Humanism

Francesco Barbaro’s De re uxoria represents an important step in the return to

of Barbaro’s discourse—unlike either the reverse occultatio or oscillation of his predecessors—appears to advocate maternal breastfeeding on more than a merely formal level. Although there are differences in tone, structure, and motive between Barbaro’s Latin treatise and Alberti’s Italian dialogue, the two humanists mark a distinct departure as regards maternal nursing from the views of Aldobrandino da Siena, Francesco da Barberino, and Paolo da Certaldo.Francesco Barbaro wrote De re uxoria as a wedding gift for Lorenzo di

Giovanni de’ Medici and Ginevra Cavalcanti.51 Barbaro had met Lorenzo, along with many other important humanists such as Poggio Bracciolini and Leonardo Bruni, in the summer of 1415 in Florence when he accompanied Guarino da Verona on a trip there. Upon his return to Venice in the fall, he began composition

52

The section discussing nursing is in the ninth chapter (“De liberorum

expected, ample familiarity with the ancient sources already discussed—especially Pseudo-Plutarch and Aulus Gellius. Barbaro begins the chapter stating that the education of children is the “most serious of a wife’s duties.”53 He then details how Nature assigned her with the necessary requirements to carry out her task: women are naturally prepared in both body (the presence of breasts on the front

50 Paolo da Certaldo, “Libro di buoni costumi,” 87–8.51 See Kohl, “Introduction,” 184.52 For information on Barbaro and his treatise, see Kohl, “Introduction,” 179–88.53 Barbaro, On Wifely Duties, 220;; Barbaro, De re uxoria, 92.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


of the body in order to fondle children while they feed them) and mind (women naturally possess great love for their children) in order to carry out the “duty of bearing and rearing children.”54 Barbaro recalls the wife of Marcus Cato the Censor who nursed her own child and claims, for reasons that are unclear, that “this custom continues among Roman women down to the present age.”55 He then “exhort[s] the most noble women to follow this example of feeding her infant her own milk, for it is very important that an infant should be nourished by the same mother in whose womb and by whose blood he was conceived” for the “power of the mother’s food most effectively lends itself to shaping the properties of body and mind to the character of the seed.”56 Barbaro rounds off his initial appeal by reiterating “[t]herefore, noble women should always try to feed their own offspring so that they will not degenerate from being fed on poorer, foreign milk.”57The nature of Barbaro’s addressees—noble women—clearly highlights the

continued recognition (at least since Soranus) that breastfeeding meant more than simply how an infant might get nourished. Maternal nursing was a means to help defend one’s family—and ultimately—one’s class from pernicious lowly or

58 Recall the earlier quotation from Barbaro in which he refers to the child possibly “imbibing” negative qualities from the milk.59 The desire on the part of the nobility to defend itself may be yet another reason why Paolo da Certaldo—a man of the middle classes—did not feel the need even to mention maternal nursing, perhaps because he knew it countered the social practice of contemporary middle and upper class families.60

54 Barbaro On Wifely Duties, 222;; Barbaro De re uxoria, 94.55 Barbaro, On Wifely Duties, 222;; Barbaro, De re uxoria, 94.56 Barbaro, On Wifely Duties, 223;; Italics mine. For the Latin, see Barbaro, De re

uxoria, 94–5.57 Barbaro, On Wifely Duties, 223;; Italics mine. Barbaro, De re uxoria, 95.58 Stephanie Jed’s argument that the birth of humanism is permeated by the desire for

philological and paleographical purity, what she calls “chaste thinking,” seems relevant to Barbaro’s fear of foreign corruption via the wet nurse’s milk;; see Stephanie H. Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington, 1989). Margaret King has also noted Barbaro’s concern with genealogical purity in De re uxoria;; see Margaret L. King, “Caldiera and the Barbaros on Marriage and the Family,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 6 (1976): 31–5.

59 “They [mothers] ought to give their infants to the care of those who are freeborn,

infant will not imbibe corrupt habits and words and will not receive, with his milk, baseness,

mind and body.” Barbaro, On Wifely Duties, 223;; Barbaro, De re uxoria, 95.60 Here I am, of course, excluding those women of the lower classes who—in order to

work as wet nurses—sent their own children out to be nursed by women who were probably paid less than they were. I do so because of the economic nature of the “choice.” On the phenomenon of displacement, see Trexler, “Infanticide,” 207–12 and “Foundlings,” 226. See also Klapisch-Zuber, “Blood Parents,” 137–8.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

202

Barbaro, however, unlike Aulus Gellius’s Favorinus the philosopher, recognized that there may be “compelling reasons” why a mother might not be able to nurse so he limited himself to explaining the importance of choosing a good nutrix:

For just as the limbs of an infant can be properly and precisely formed and strengthened, so can his manners be exactly and properly shaped from birth. Therefore, mothers ought to be especially careful in their choice of nurses for infants;; at this tender age a child’s unformed character is very susceptible to being molded, and, as we impress a seal in soft wax, so the disposition and faults of a nurse can be sealed upon an infant.61

The turning point in Barbaro’s discourse on nursing occurs at a halfway point, after having espoused his reasons for favoring maternal nursing and before describing the dangers in employing the wrong sort of wet nurse.62 Thus, differently than the texts of the reverse occultatio, Barbaro gives as much attention to the mother as to the nutrix, if not more.In terms of rhetorical structure, Barbaro’s discourse does not follow either

of the forms described earlier—reverse occultatio or oscillation. He uses instead a form of argumentation which might be formulated as “A is better, but if you can’t do A, then do B, but A really is better …” The distinguishing structural element, present in both Barbaro’s and Alberti’s texts, is a return at the end of the discourse to maternal nursing and its ultimate desirability. Barbaro’s dinumeratio

Therefore, women ought to consider it best, very honorable, and commendable

and diligence;; or they may commit this part of their duty to well-trained nurses who will esteem and care for the infants, not with a pretended enthusiasm nor out of mercenary consideration.63

Barbaro’s text functions as a bridge between the preceding texts and Alberti’s: it ultimately advocates maternal nursing and does so with a rhetorical structure similar to Alberti’s;; however, its tone is decidedly less strident than Alberti’s, and the choice of using a wet nurse is not stigmatized to the same degree.It is indeed highly likely that Alberti knew Barbaro’s treatise. Manuscripts of

De re uxoria had been circulating widely since 1416, when Barbaro presented it to Lorenzo di Giovanni de’ Medici and Ginevra Cavalcanti. Moreover, Barbaro and Alberti had both been students in Gasparino Barzizza’s school in Padua. Although their periods of study never overlapped, Cecil Grayson claims they

61 Barbaro, On Wifely Duties, 223–4;; Barbaro, De re uxoria, 95.62 “But if, as often happens, mothers cannot for compelling reasons suckle their own

children, they ought to place them with [good] nurses …” Barbaro, On Wifely Duties, 223;; Barbaro, De re uxoria, 95.

63 Barbaro, On Wifely Duties, 224;; Barbaro, De re uxoria, 96.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


met at Barzizza’s school, yet does not furnish any further details.64 If Grayson is correct, then their encounter probably occurred in 1416, when Barbaro returned to Padua to deliver two speeches.65

where the Alberti clan is gathered around the deathbed of Lorenzo Alberti, the author’s father.66 Lorenzo has summoned his brother Ricciardo to come so that he can recommend the welfare of his sons Battista and Carlo. Upon hearing of his

The doctors arrive and advise that Lorenzo rest, so the others retire and continue

sorrows of fatherhood between two adult Alberti cousins, Adovardo and Lionardo, in the presence of the younger Battista and Carlo.67 In general, the dialogue is a series of conversations, which often read like monological disquisitions, between various Alberti family members. The main speakers of the second book, De re uxoria, are Lionardo and Battista. The third book, which for centuries was attributed

of household management, consists of a long discussion—or debate—between Lionardo and the elder merchant Giannozzo, with Adovardo arriving towards the end of the book. The last book, De amicitia, written six years later, begins with Buto, an old family servant, and proceeds with all the other characters, excluding Lorenzo.Alberti’s choice of language and genre, as David Marsh has shown, are

Libri della famiglia. The use of Italian, rather than Latin, attests a desire to appeal to a wider public than that which was constituted by the educated Latin readers of his day.68 Marsh labels Alberti’s Italian dialogues neo-Ciceronian, for “[a]s Cicero had composed Latin dialogues to explain Greek thought to his fellow Romans, so Alberti wrote his volgare dialogues as compendia of classical doctrines not accessible to contemporaries ignorant of Latin.”69 Moreover, the semantic application Alberti

64 See Cecil Grayson’s entry on Alberti in vol. 1 of the italiani (Rome, 1960), 702–9.

65 Francesco Barbaro, Centotrenta lettere inedite di Francesco Barbaro, ed. Remigio Sabbadini (Salerno, 1884), 136.

66 For information on the Alberti family exile from Florence, see Susannah Foster Baxendale, “Exile in Practice: The Alberti Family In and Out of Florence 1401–1428,” Renaissance Quarterly, 44 (1991): 720–756.

67 Judging from his behavior, the text makes it appear as if Battista were the elder of the two. In reality, Carlo was two years older than Battista. Genealogically, Battista and Leon Battista are one and the same;; the name “Leone” was a humanist addition.

68 For Alberti’s comments on the use of the volgare, see the proem to the third book;; recall also his promotion of the certame in Florence.

69 David Marsh, “Leon Battista Alberti and the Volgare Dialogue,” in The Quattrocento Dialogue: Classical Tradition and Humanist Innovation (Cambridge, 1980), 79.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

204

makes of the dialogue genre draws inspiration from Cicero in that it purports to offer moral instruction to the young, in this case, to Carlo and Battista.70Marsh has also noted the importance of tensions between the speakers in

“Adovardo’s experienced pessimism and Lionardo’s lettered optimism.”71 Marsh rightly contends that the “limitations of inexperienced learning are gradually demonstrated, as Lionardo’s erudite notions about the individual yield to the discourses of more experienced men—both the lettered Adovardo and the unlettered Giannozzo—concerning the larger problems of life and society.”72

nursing where Lionardo’s humanist position triumphs.Of the

Duties of the Old Toward the Young and of the Young Toward their Elders, and of the Education of Children, in which Aldovardo, himself a father, discusses issues related to fatherhood with Lionardo, a young, unmarried Alberti. Aldovardo prefaces his remarks on the many cares fathers have in raising children with the comment:

Alberti family, not only as now with your fame and renown but also with sons [children] like yourself. I am very much afraid, therefore, to persuade you of something which might make you doubt and hold back.73

problem he mentions, which arises before the child has seen the light of day, is

deal of attention and for which Alberti is often remembered, it deserves to be quoted in its entirety:

ahold of one who will be ready in time. He must check that she is not sick or of immoral character. He must expend much thought and labor to be absolutely sure that she is free, clear, and clean of those vices and defects which infect and corrupt the milk and the blood. Still more, he must be sure she is not the sort who will bring scandal or shame to the house. It would take a long time to tell you how careful we fathers have to be about these things, and how much trouble or how much time it takes before one has found an honest, good, and competent nurse. Nor would you believe, perhaps, how much anxiety, trouble, and remorse of spirits results if she is not found in time or if she doesn’t stay long enough. Yet this sort of person always seems to be unavailable just when you need her most. You know, at the same time, how great is the danger with a sick or immoral girl,

70 Marsh, “Leon Battista Alberti,” 84–5.71 Ibid., 80.72 Ibid., 87.73 Alberti, Family, 51;; Alberti, Libri, 41.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


for leprosy and epilepsy and other serious diseases are passed on by the breast, it is said. You know, too, how rare is a good nurse and how much in demand.74

Adovardo continues by recording all the various hazards to which a young child [ , meaning age 0–2] is subject. Lionardo responds tongue-in-cheek by saying through a litotes that he may soon marry [non trovarmi senza moglie] and thus would be able to respond to Adovardo’s discourse with as much experience as logic. After joking that he will marry mainly to stop people from pestering him about it, Lionardo then responds to Adovardo’s recommendations on the proper nurse:

other nurse for them than their own mother. I am reminded of Favorinus, that philosopher mentioned by Aulus Gellius, and of the other ancient writers who praise the milk of the mother above any other’s. Perhaps these doctors nowadays will assert that giving the breast weakens the mother and makes her sterile for a

all. It is probably not by coincidence, but for excellent reasons, that pregnancy is accompanied by the springing up and increase of an abundance of milk, as though nature herself were preparing us for the need and telling us how much we may expect the mother to do for the children. I would take this license if the mother were weakened by some accident: then I would provide, as you say, a good, knowledgeable, and moral nurse. I would not do this to give the lady more leisure, or to relieve her of that duty she owes to her children, but only to give less unhappy nourishment to the child.75

I shall leave an analysis of Lionardo’s reasoning for later. He continues his disquisition by emphasizing the moral dangers involved in the choice of a wet nurse for an “immoral nurse can injure the character of the child.”76 He concludes by recalling the necessary requirements for the proper balia which:

If, as you say, nurses seldom meet these requirements, then you must admit also that the mother herself, as she is more modest and of better character than other nurses, offers more suitable and much more practical nourishment to her own children. I shall not go on to describe which of them takes care of the child with more love, more constancy, diligence, and zeal, the one who does it for pay or the mother herself. I shall not show you at length that the mother’s love toward her child is fostered and strengthened while he grows and is nourished in her bosom. Even if, as rarely happens except in the absence of a mother, it really is

74 Family, 51;; Alberti, Libri, 41–2. The assumption that the balia was to come into the home [tale che in casa seco porti né scandolo né vergogna] is a distinct class marker, for only the wealthiest Florentines had wet nurses come into their homes;; see Ross, “Middle-Class Child,” 187 and Klapisch-Zuber, “Blood Parents,” 135–6.

75 Alberti, Family, 53;; Alberti, Libri, 44.76 Alberti, Family, 53;; Alberti, Libri, 44–5.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

206

does not seem such a heavy task to me.77

difference is that here theory wins out over practice. Adovardo, the voice of experience, takes wet-nursing for granted and, as such, represents social practice;; Lionardo, in contrast, promotes the theoretical position of humanists in advocating maternal nursing. Lionardo’s arguments and the position they occupy in the argument make it clear that his viewpoint is the one that is ultimately promoted. It stands as an infrequent example in the Libri della famiglia of the theoretical, lettered position triumphing over the experiential, proven one.Although Barbaro’s De re uxoria and Alberti’s Libri della famiglia adopt the

same rhetorical structure as regards nursing—in which the discourse concludes by a return to advocating maternal breastfeeding—and ultimately share an

best, yet he also considers the possibility that a mother might not nurse her own child.Therefore, women ought to consider it best, very honorable, and commendable

and diligence;; or they may commit this part of their duty to well-trained nurses who will esteem and care for the infants, not with pretended enthusiasm nor out of mercenary consideration.78Lionardo, however, plays down the eventuality of needing a wet nurse and

comments that it is only “rarely” necessary: “Even if, as rarely happens except

to concern oneself with these things, it does not seem such a heavy task to me.” Whereas Barbaro conjectures that “it often happens” that a mother is unable to nurse her own child, Alberti contends that only when the mother is absent, the most probable cause for which would be death in childbirth, would there be

balia might be necessary is “if the mother were weakened by some accident.” Alberti’s motivation [“per sinistro”] implies some out-of-the-ordinary, perhaps unnatural, event. Indeed although the foundation of Lionardo’s reasoning is solidly on the side of nature, which causes the production of milk “as though nature herself were preparing us for the need and telling us how much is due to children from their mothers,” he implies that only catastrophic reasons will justify the utilization of

77 Alberti, Family, 54;; Alberti, Libri, 45–6.78 Barbaro, On Wifely Duties, 224. For the Latin, see Barbaro, De re uxoria, 96.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


a wet nurse.79 Those same reasons are called “justis” instead by Barbaro, that is “just” or “right,” which Kohl translates as “compelling.”Both authors emphasize the importance of the child’s well-being in promoting

maternal breastfeeding. Yet the emphases in Alberti’s text regarding not only mothers but also women in general evince a tone of severity that ultimately renders his discourse different from that of Barbaro. Barbaro, for example, states straightforwardly:

Mothers merit the severest censure if they neglect the care of their children and live carelessly. I would have them avoid no hardship in order to ensure that they make their children the best companions, comforters, and helpers in their old age. Therefore, if mothers would be free from reproach they should not neglect their offspring, but they should provide for both the bodies and souls of their children, and they should nourish and suckle them at their breasts.80

accident” he would hire a wet nurse “I would not do this to give the lady more leisure, or to relieve her of that duty she owes to her children, but only to give less unhappy nourishment to the child.”81 There is a subtle difference in the motivation behind these two passages. Barbaro condemns maternal neglect of children, yet,

by reminding them of the role their child will one day play in caring for them in turn. Lionardo instead seems as intent on defending himself from hypothetical accusations of philogyny as on promoting the interests of the child. I am not suggesting that the child’s welfare does not concern him, but rather that he also seems anxious about clarifying his position as regards women at the same time.Moreover, one must consider Lionardo’s comment regarding mothers in light

of his joke at the beginning of the conversation with Adovardo, who had chastised him for having remained single and without children:

The maidens who suit your taste would not please me. Those who perhaps would not offend me, never seem to suit the rest of you. So my spirit remains athirst, not so much to avoid having my place and name in the family extinguished and blank after my own passing, as just to escape the pestering of all those friends

being without a wife.82

79 Alberti, Family, 53. I have slightly altered Watkins’s translation here. In the original:

aspetti.” Alberti, Libri, 44. The use of the pronoun “ci” here may be read alternately as “to us, humanity” or “to us, patres familias.”

80 Barbaro On Wifely Duties, 222;; see Barbaro, De re uxoria, 94.81 Emphasis added. See Alberti, Family, 53;; Alberti, Libri, 44.82 Alberti, Family, 52–3. Emphasis added. Alberti, Libri, 43–4.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

208

Although I shall not document it fully here, a vein of misogyny runs throughout the Libri della famiglia and other Albertian works. This attitude not only contributes to differentiating Alberti’s discourse from Barbaro’s but also to highlighting the tension in his forthright, unwavering advocacy of maternal nursing. Alberti’s greater investment in maternal breastfeeding leads the reader to question what other issues might help drive it.Battista Alberti was born in February 1404 in Genoa to Bianca Fieschi, a

widow of the important Grimaldi family, by Lorenzo Alberti, who had been in that city ever since his exile from Florence in 1401. Two years earlier she had given birth to a boy, Carlo.83 When Battista was two years old, Bianca Fieschi died of the plague and Lorenzo removed from Genoa, probably to Padua or Venice, taking his two natural sons with him. In 1408 Lorenzo married Margherita Benini of Florence, yet their union of 13 years remained without issue. Although without heirs, Lorenzo chose not to legitimize his two only sons and, upon his death in May 1421, merely bequeathed them a sum of 4,000 ducats each. Margherita Benini, as was custom, received her dowry and a small legacy of 400 ducats, and the rest of Lorenzo Alberti’s estate was awarded to his brother Ricciardo, who was deemed executor, and a nephew Benedetto. Unfortunately for Battista and Carlo, however, Ricciardo soon died, leaving his son Antonio, along with Benedetto, in charge of paying their cousins’ bequests. Benedetto and Antonio were willfully slow in executing Lorenzo’s testament in order not to pay Battista and Carlo. They

alleviate or eliminate Lorenzo Alberti’s legacy to their illegitimate cousins.84Alberti in the Vita anonyma mentions the life of “great poverty” he led in the

years succeeding his father’s death and refers repeatedly to the poor treatment he received at his relatives’ hands, even accusing them of trying to have him murdered.85 As Renee Watkins has noted, in the opening line of the Vita anonyma,

father.86was raised in his father’s household and allowed to use the Alberti name) but also necessarily illegitimate, and therefore subject to the sort of treatment by his relatives he describe in his autobiography. Although he was exonerated by a papal

83 See Carlo Ceschi, “La madre di Leon Battista Alberti,” Bollettino d’Arte, 33 (1948): 191–2.

84 Padova,” Archivio storico italiano, 40 (1907): 233–84, for Antonio and Benedetto’s petition to the Signoria. For Alberti’s life, see Giacomo Mancini, Vita di Leon Battista Alberti, 2nd ed. (Florence, 1911 [repr. 1967]), and, more recently, Luca Boschetto, Leon Battista Alberti

(Florence, 2000).85

Watkins, “L.B. Alberti,” 9.86 Watkins, “L.B. Alberti,” 28.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


In a persuasive reading of the Libri della famiglia as a “directive on the treatment of illegitimate children,” Thomas Kuehn emphasizes Alberti’s own illegitimacy as a “lurking presence” for Lionardo’s promotion of adoption as a lawful solution to a marriage without progeny, as was Lorenzo Alberti’s.87 Kuehn also highlights the paradox that the “natural imperative to secure blood descent of one’s line (‘legitimate’ descent) ends ironically in the admission of the possible necessity to secure heirs without blood, by means of law.”88 I would like to suggest, in the wake of Kuehn, that Alberti’s promotion of maternal breastfeeding

89 Just as it provides a backdrop against which to read his advocacy of adoption—as rare as it was in quattrocento Florence—Alberti’s illegitimacy may be a factor that helps account for his staunch support of maternal nursing, as I shall explain.Breastfeeding has a contraceptive effect on the woman who is nursing. This

physiological occurrence is valid even today, although to a lesser degree than during the Renaissance, when poorer nutrition aided in retarding ovulation and

since antiquity. Aristotle, in the Generation of Animals, explains quite clearly that “[w]hile women are suckling children menstruation does not occur according to nature, nor do they conceive;; if they do conceive, the milk dries up. This is because the nature of the milk and of the menses is the same, and nature cannot be so productive as to supply both at once.”90The ancients also recognized the debilitating effects of breastfeeding on

women. Soranus is perhaps the most eloquent commentator:

It is more natural to be fed from the mother after parturition just as before parturition. But if anything prevents it one must choose the best wet nurse, lest the mother grow prematurely old, having spent herself through the daily suckling. For just as <the earth> is exhausted by producing crops after sowing and therefore becomes barren of more, the same happens with the woman who nurses the infant;; she either grows prematurely old having fed one child, or the expenditure for the nourishment of the offspring necessarily makes her own body quite emaciated. Consequently, the mother will fare better with a view to her own recovery and to further childbearing, if she is relieved of having her breasts distended too. For as vegetables are sown by gardeners into one soil to sprout and are transplanted into different soil for quick development, lest one soil suffer by both, in the same way the newborn, too, is apt to become more

87 Thomas Kuehn, “Reading Between the Patrilines: Leon Battista Alberti’s Della Famiglia in Light of His Illegitimacy,” in Law, Family, and Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 1991), 171.

88 Kuehn, “Reading,” 168.89

author’s own vacillations.” Marsh, “Leon Battista Alberti,” 83.90 Aristotle, “Generation,” vol. 1, 1202. See also Aristotle, “History of Animals,” in

The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (2 vols, Princeton, 1984), vol. 1, 921.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

210

vigorous if borne by one woman but fed by another, in case the mother, by some 91

Pseudo-Plutarch draws the obvious conclusion regarding the contraceptive effect of breastfeeding by explaining that a woman might send a child to wet-nurse because she is “in haste to bear more children.” The practice of wet-nursing did indeed encourage more numerous births.92 Michele Savonarola—a Paduan physician who after 1440 practiced at the Este court and, incidentally, was the grandfather of Girolamo and a contemporary of Alberti—wrote to Ferrarese women that “cussì non lactendo, tu te engravidi più presto assai … moltiplichi i parti, et ogni parto ti dà una gram bastonanta a la vita tuoa.”93 Thus Savonarola, although favoring maternal nursing for all the reasons we have seen so far, encourages women to breastfeed not to promote pregnancies, but to avoid too many of them.Alberti’s discourse on maternal breastfeeding thus presents numerous

contradictions or tensions, as Marsh would call them. When Lionardo admits that “[P]erhaps these doctors nowadays will assert that giving the breast weakens the mother and makes her sterile for a time,” he is clearly acknowledging the contraceptive effect of breastfeeding.94 The concessive nature of Lionardo’s comments, the lamentations on the demise of great families in the prologue, and

clear that Alberti could only view this effect as disadvantageous.95 Yet Lionardo sweeps aside the warnings of doctors on the possible contraceptive repercussions

to believe that nature has made adequate provision for all.”96 Ironically, Alberti

91 Soranus, Soranus’ Gynecology, 90.92 See Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans, 245–6;; Margaret King, Women of the

Renaissance (Chicago, 1991), 2–3;; and Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1993), 70.

93 Savonarola, Il trattato ginecologico-pediatrico, 147. For an overview of Savonarola and his work, see Luke Demaitre, “The Idea of Childhood and Child Care in Medical Writings of the Middle Ages,” Journal of Psychohistory, 4, 4 (1977): 461–90;; and, more recently, Rudolph M. Bell, How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians (Chicago, 1999), 128–30;; 139–40;; et passim.

94 Alberti, Family, 53;; Alberti, Libri, 44. In the original: “Forse questi medici appongano che dare el latte le indebolisce e falle talora sterile.” Again, a pronoun can be revealing: there is no grammatical antecedent for the “le” in the text (“them,” which Watkins renders as “the mother”), only a logical, all-encompassing “women” or “mothers.” In the

with nursing seem only to apply to the noble women who have given birth, not to the wet nurse, whose identity is associated with her profession rather than with their familial or social role, i.e., that she too is a mother.

95 See Alberti, Family, 25 et passim, 50–51;; see Alberti, Libri, 3 et passim, 41. 96 Alberti, Family, 53;; Alberti, Libri, 44.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


thus promotes a method of curtailing births at the same time he claims to profess the desire to enlarge families.One hypothesis—which I advance with a certain degree of prudence but want

to mention nonetheless—is that Alberti may have subliminally desired not to promote births but to limit them. The primary motivating factor in this theory would be his experience of illegitimacy, as described in the Vita anonyma. Promoting maternal breastfeeding meant curtailing births, as we have seen;; circumscribing women’s movements to the domestic realm would however help contribute to

illegitimate births. A similar family structure and practice would thus result in fewer illegitimate births and allow Alberti to save “those born out of wedlock” from the sort of suffering he experienced in his own family. In this light, his express concern for the child also acquires greater resonance. As a “mistreated,” illegitimate child, Alberti thus would vindicate the rights of children and control the errancy of potential mothers.A second layer of tension persists, therefore, between what Alberti prescribes

for proper domestic management, and ultimately for civil society—woman enclosed within the home, inaccessible to public space and thus to possible sexual contamination—and what he himself represents as a bastard child—the reality of reproduction outside the sanctioned family economy. Breastfeeding functions as a means with which to enclose women within the home. Giannozzo comments that “it would hardly win us [fathers of the family] respect if our wife busied herself among men in the marketplace, out in the public eye. It also seems somewhat demeaning to me to remain shut up in the house among women when I have manly things to do among men, fellow citizens and worthy and distinguished foreigners.”97 The opinion is not merely that of the old, unlearned merchant Giannozzo, for Lionardo rejoins, voicing his agreement with the opinions of the ancients:The character of men is stronger than that of women and can bear the attacks

of enemies better, can stand strain longer, is more constant under stress. Therefore men have the freedom to travel with honor in foreign lands, acquiring and gathering the goods of fortune. Women, on the other hand, are almost timid by nature, soft, slow, and therefore more useful when they sit still and watch over our things. It is as though nature thus provided for our well-being, arranging for men to bring things home and for women to guard them. The woman, as she remains locked up at home, should watch over things by staying at her post, by diligent care and watchfulness.98Alberti’s Libri della famiglia demonstrates personal, social, and political

reasons why a woman’s place is in the home. Her enclosure there contributes to the proper conservation of family goods while her uncontaminated, chaste body helps assure the legitimate, patrilineal transfer of those goods. Family honor is invested in the maternal body. Furthermore, as Alberti makes clear in his fourth

97 Emphasis added. Alberti, Family, 207;; Alberti Libri, 266.98 Alberti, Family, 207–8;; Alberti, Libri, 267.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

212

century Florence, and thus its proper functioning is ultimately a political issue with possible economic repercussions.Numerous factors may account for Alberti’s promotion of maternal nursing,

as I have shown, yet female enclosure is clearly one of its results. Maternal breastfeeding functions as a rein with which to bridle a woman’s movement (and her potential sexual errancy) by keeping her closed within the familial shell. As Barbaro demonstrated, it moreover represents a way of protecting that shell from

Finally, as a recognized method of birth control, maternal nursing would limit the number of legitimate heirs any one woman may produce, an end result that may have appealed to an illegitimate son like Alberti.99

99 For a discussion of the sexism inherent in the differentiation between the spheres of production and reproduction, see Alison M. Jaggar and William L. McBride, “‘Reproduction’ as Male Ideology,” in Azizah Y. al-Hibri and Margaret A. Simons, eds., Hypatia Reborn: Essays in Feminist Philosophy (Bloomington, 1990), 249–69.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Chapter 11 The Social and Religious Context of

Iconographic Oddity: Breastfeeding in Ghirlandaio’s

Birth of the Baptist

Patricia Simons

Breastfeeding scenes are scarce in Domenico Ghirlandaio’s oeuvre, yet his Birth of St. John the Baptist (Figure 11.1) in the high altar chapel of S. Maria Novella (ca. 1488) depicts the rare, perhaps unique, episode of the boy being suckled by one of his nurses. More commonly, the saint’s role as baptizer is visually suggested by his forthcoming immersion in water as a bathed newborn. My chapter seeks to explain this striking iconographic oddity, arguing that the emphasis on domestic nurturance relates to particular aspects of the patron’s family, but that it also has civic and religious resonances.In the years 1486–90, the large chapel in Florence’s principal Dominican church

was frescoed with scenes from the lives of the Virgin Mary and of Saint John the Baptist, the former being the church’s dedicatee, the latter not only the city’s patron saint but also the name saint of the chapel’s patron Giovanni Tornabuoni (1428–97).1 Each cycle emphasizes aspects of marriage, birth, and childhood. Replete with portraits of contemporary Florentines, the frescoes on the lower levels celebrate many women as well as men of the extended family, representing

thus carefully reinforced, but the unusual stress on feminine subjects and female portraits emphatically integrates women into both the dynastic commemoration and the religious program.

1 On the chapel, see Patricia Simons, “Portraiture and Patronage in Quattrocento Florence with Special Reference to the Tornaquinci and their Chapel in S. Maria Novella” (2 vols, Ph.D. diss., University of Melbourne, 1985) (available online as searchable pdfs at http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/78007);; Jean Cadogan, Domenico Ghirlandaio: Artist and Artisan (New Haven, 2000), 67–90, 236–43;; Ronald Kecks, Domenico Ghirlandaio und die Malerei der Florentiner Renaissance (Munich, 2000), 276–320.


Fig. 11.1

Domenico Ghirlandaio, The Birth of the Baptist, ca. 1487–88, fresco, high altar

chapel, S. Maria Novella, Florence. Photo Credit: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e

le Attività culturali / Art Resource, NY.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

The Social and Religious Context of Iconographic Oddity 215

Ghirlandaio’s birth story of each saint follows much of the standard iconography (Figures 11.1–11.2).2 The mother is lying in and receiving visitors, while midwives attend to the newborn. In the pictorial tradition, the actions of those servants were not sharply distinguished between different births. In the thirteenth-century mosaics of the Florentine Baptistery there are no midwives with the young Baptist, for the focus is on a crowd of men and women presenting the swaddled infant to Zacharias, who has begun to exercise his patriarchal right to name the child. During the 1320s Giotto followed that scheme in the Peruzzi chapel of the Franciscan church of S. Croce, but increasingly the vignette of baby care was added. Hence, two midwives occupy the lowest of three tiers in Andrea Pisano’s bronze relief for the doors of the Baptistery in Florence (ca. 1330–36), beneath the mother Elizabeth reclining in her bed overseeing their activities, while above her two attendants or visitors bring gifts or foods in containers. Her child is about to be bathed, as one carer tests the water and the other leans for the child over the basin, her hands covered in a cloth.3 At other times, the towel is being

the National Gallery, London.Echoing the gesture employed by Andrea Pisano, one servant might extend one

or both of her arms in order to receive John in preparation for the bath (for instance, in Filippo Lippi’s cycle of the Baptist in Prato), and that is the partial implication in Ghirlandaio’s fresco (Figure 11.1). Yet the gesture of two-armed outreach was

embroidered section of the altar frontal for this very chapel in S. Maria Novella, designed in 1466 by Paolo Schiavo and executed by the nuns of Saint Bridget of Ripoli.4 The Baptist’s birth is best recognized for its common inclusion of the Naming, when the speechless, seated father writes the ordained name and thereby

moment warranted a separate scene. Mary too may be washed, as she will be in Ghirlandaio’s description of her nativity because the water is being poured (Figure 11.2), but the bath appropriately appears more often with the Baptist, the water often contained in a footed bowl that resembles a baptismal cistern (Figure 11.3).Hence, the crowd in some birth scenes brings to mind not only the visitors

at a lying-in but also the participants at the baptismal ritual, the moment when a

2 On the Birth of the Baptist, see Louis Reau, Iconographie de l’art chrétien (3 vols, Paris, 1955–59), vol. 2, part 1, 442, 445–6.

3 Earlier, testing the water and pouring it were performed by two midwives below Mary in Giovanni Pisano’s Nativity1301). Simple dipping into the bath characterizes his later relief of the Birth of the Baptist on the pulpit in the Cathedral of Pisa (1302–11).

4 Maria Cristina Improta and Anna Padoa Rizzo, “Paolo Schiavo: fornitore di disegni per ricami,” Rivista d’Artedisplay in the Museo of S. Maria Novella.


Fig. 11.2

Domenico Ghirlandaio, The Birth of the Virgin, ca. 1486–88, fresco, high altar




Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


and the church.5 Tellingly, the representation of the Baptist’s birth that is most remembered by Ghirlandaio in terms of processional spectators and palatial space is Pollaiuolo’s relief for the silver frontal for the altar in the city’s Baptistery where everyone had to be baptized (Figure 11.3).6 The citizens and well-wishers who presented gifts and attended the baptism included godparents and midwives but

carried the infant to the Baptistery. Combining the civic and domestic occasions of baptism and lying in, Ghirlandaio turned the pictorial and ceremonial convention

5 Louis Haas, The Renaissance Man and his Children: Childbirth and Early Childhood in Renaissance Florence 1300–1600 (New York, 1998), 64.

6 See Alison Wright, The Pollaiuolo Brothers: The Arts of Florence and Rome (New Haven, 2005), 286–92. A terracotta relief by Benedetto da Maiano (now in the Victoria and Albert Museum) may either be related to this dossal or, more likely, given its dimensions and inclusion of the Virgin, a later Marian project of ca. 1485–90: Doris Carl, Benedetto da Maiano (2 vols, Turnhout, 2006), vol. 1, 45 n. 32, 88 n. 131;; vol. 2, pl. 161.

Fig. 11.3 Antonio Pollaiuolo, The Birth of the Baptist, ca. 1477–80, silver and enameled relief, altar frontal for the Baptistery, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence. Photo Credit: Gianni Dagli Orti / The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

218

of the Tornabuoni’s social world.

shallow bowl propped against the wall are evident signs of washing in the Birth of the Baptistwhen the godparents had to touch and hold the child they were sponsoring.7 Midwives and wet nurses were sometimes these co-mothers, and it has not been

and green, which were common to the heraldry of both the Tornabuoni and the Tornaquinci consorteria from which they sprang. The young John, future performer of the ritual by which everyone became a Christian citizen, is being welcomed into

and they both shared their name with the saint Giovanni Battista.8In 1550 the painter and biographer Giorgio Vasari found the servant’s gesture

of extension charming, observing that the woman “with joyfulness is asking for the child in order to show to the visiting neighbors the novel feat performed by the elderly lady of the household.”9 The rejoicing by “neighbors and kinsfolk” featured in the Bible (Luke 1:58), and the testimony of neighbors happily witnessing the miracle is important also in the well-known Golden Legend, written

10 The latter text also dwelled on the “supernatural conception” of a child born to a woman both old in years and previously sterile.11 According to the long poem about the Baptist written by Giovanni Tornabuoni’s sister Lucrezia (1425–82), an angel prophesied that the miraculous child “will make many people glad at his birth, for he is chosen by God and will be great in his sight.”12 That delight was clearly shared by his mother, and after the naming he is returned to Elizabeth who, Lucrezia imagines, “had been awaiting him with joy, and when she held him again, she gave him her breast.” In this she is following the popular fourteenth-century text of Fra Domenico Cavalca,

7 Haas, Children, 66–8;; on baptismal kinship or co-parenthood, 69–80;; on midwives and nurses, 78.

8 Simons, “Portraiture and Patronage,” vol. 1, 311–12;; vol. 2, 139 n. 81, 241 n. 142;; Patricia Simons, “Giovanna and Ginevra: Portraits for the Tornabuoni Family by Ghirlandaio and Botticelli,” I Tatti Studies, 14–15 (2011–12): 103–35.

9 Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite de’ piú eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani … Nell’edizione per i tipi di Lorenzo Torrentino, Firenze 1550, ed. Luciano Bellosi and Aldo Rossi (2 vols, Turin, 1991), vol. 1, 466.

10 Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. William Granger Ryan (2 vols, Princeton, 1993), vol. 1, 332 (from Luke 1:66).

11 Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 1, 329–31 passim.12 Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’ Medici, Sacred Narratives, ed. and trans. Jane Tylus

(Chicago, 2001), 227 (14.3–4);; hereafter quoted from page 234 (42.7–8).


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


who has the Virgin Mary bathe then present the child to his parents, concluding with Elizabeth’s joyous nursing.13Ghirlandaio chose the more standard, earlier moment of household care,

though he shows Elizabeth interrupted in her reading (a book now resting under her left hand), and the servant’s gesture is an emphatic presentiment of maternal longing. In part demonstrative, as Vasari believed, the woman’s eager reach also implies that she is another wet nurse keen to nurture and sponsor the special child. Far from merely a mundane action, as is usually assumed, the gesture celebrates miraculous generation and reminds viewers of the sacramental spectacle of religious integration, communal bonding, civic incorporation, familial fecundity, and identity formation.Young Giovanni is absorbed in his task of suckling, and this overt view of

breastfeeding in a religious narrative is rare, as distinct from devotional images of Christ at his mother’s breast. For theological reasons, Mary cannot be shown imbibing material substance from anyone other than her own immaculate mother, but even the Baptist is not represented at the breast. The closest parallel is Pollaiuolo’s design of the Birth of the Baptist (ca. 1465–73) for an embroidered panel of vestments to be worn at the Baptistery, in which one of the servants has an exposed breast, although the child she holds is no longer being nursed (Figure 11.4).14the nursing garment, that breast is an attribute of the woman’s occupation more than a vital element of the story’s action as it is in Ghirlandaio’s depiction. Like Andrea Pisano’s other assistant, a woman on the right of the embroidery supports a cloth, in this case holding it out over a brazier so that it can be warmed or dried. Elizabeth reclines on the bed, strangely naked and exhibiting both breasts in the conventional mode of an aged hag, which thereby emphasize the miracle of her childbearing at such an extreme age. Yet her mammary glands are swollen with milk rather than wizened, a visual contradiction that not only accentuates the miracle but also brings to mind Lucrezia Tornabuoni’s notion of maternal care encapsulated in giving the breast.

13 Fra Domenico Cavalca, Vite de’ Santi Padri, ed. Bartolommeo Sorio and A. Racheli (Milan, n.d. [1870]), 405.

14 See Jutta Sperling’s chapter in this volume (on Mary and Elizabeth);; Wright, The Pollaiuolo Brotherssinopia for the Birth of Jacob and Esau in Pisa’s Camposanto, executed 1473–77, shows to the right of a standing visitor three midwives seated around a basin;; one twin reaches for a breast while the other twin is already being suckled by his midwife at the far left. The actual fresco instead shows fully clothed attendants and upright children. For the latter, see Diane Cole Ahl, Benozzo Gozzoli (New Haven, 1996), 171, 175, 243–4, pls 218–19. Around 1510, the tale of a 75-year-old woman miraculously nursing her grandson was frescoed at a shrine dedicated to the lactating Virgin in San Giovanni Valdarno: Megan Holmes, “Disrobing the Virgin: The Madonna Lactans in Fifteenth-Century Florentine Art,” in Geraldine Johnson and Sara Matthews Grieco, eds,


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

220

Other elements of Ghirlandaio’s narrative also embody “disguised symbolism,” for in his pictorial narratives, frequently regarded as no more than faithful replications of elite life, I would suggest that various seemingly everyday details instead convey meaning. The servant rushing in and pouring water in one continuous motion enacts a highly dramatized version of an action seen in more sedate, incidental terms in other birth scenes (Figures 11.2–11.3). Her animation

usually shown watering down wine but here balancing the temperature of the bathing water and thereby addressing the need to moderate pleasure within the

Fig. 11.4 Antonio Pollaiuolo, The Birth of the Baptist, ca. 1469–80, or nué embroidery, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence. Photo Credit: Nicolo Orsi Battaglini / Art Resource, NY.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


marital household. Witnessing this example at the head of the visitors, Giovanni

future role as bride and mother.15shows that its virtue is not puritanical in conception, and the celebratory welcome of a newborn is reinforced by the smile of the woman holding the baby as well as the playful putti decorating the chamber. Drawn from the antiphon for the feast day of the Virgin’s Nativity, an inscription beneath these romping infants proclaims that the entire world is jubilant.16The Birth of the Baptist

with everyone else’s stately demeanor (Figure 11.1). In windswept and glacially

a century ago captivated the art historian Aby Warburg for its lively, all’antica presence, although his reference to the disquiet felt by the Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola in a sermon of 1496 about Florentine daughters dressed like idolic nymphe

17

In fact, images of a maiden carrying produce on a salver or in a basket resting on her head recall Donatello’s now lost statue of Dovizia or Abundance which graced the Florentine market area as a declaration of civic wealth, well-being, and charity.18in at least one print, and from the 1490s it was adapted by the della Robbia shop

the Birth of MaryGhirlandaio’s example is highlighted by its scale, exuberance, and coloristic key,

Visitation below.Framing the parturient mother and her visitors on the other side of the Birth

of the Baptist, the movement of that gesturing servant on the far left moves the eye back towards the focus of the composition and the cynosure of most depicted gazes, the leading visitor situated in the central foreground. This, I

15 Tornabuoni e Ginevra de’ Benci nel coro di S. Maria Novella in Firenze,” Archivio Storico Italiano, ser. 5, 6 (1890): 426–56, especially 451–2, is accepted by all scholars. Cavalca explicitly excluded the midwives from touching the child, instead having Mary, a 15-year-old, inexperienced mother-to-be bathing the future Baptist in order for her to learn the fundamentals of childcare.

16 Simons, “Portraiture and Patronage,” vol. 1, 301–2.17 E.H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London, 1970), 105–27;;

Aby Warburg, , trans. David Britt (Los Angeles, 1999), 380, 398–99 nn. 113–14;; cf., for example, Andreas Quermann, Domenico di Tommaso di Currado Bigordi Ghirlandaio 1449–1494 (Cologne, 1998), 72.

18 Adrian Randolph, Engaging Symbols: Gender, Politics, and Public Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence (New Haven, 2002), 19–75, especially 43–6 (with previous literature).


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

222

have demonstrated, is a portrait of Giovanna degli Albizzi, the young wife of the patron’s son Lorenzo and recent mother of the boy called Giovannino, who was born on 11 October 1487.19 Lodovica stands in the representation of Mary’s birth as an augury of her future fertility;; Giovanna is present in the story of a son’s arrival as an act of thanksgiving and prayer for future safety and fertility, as though the scene is a votive in fresco (Figure 11.2). Taking the unusual step of transforming lying-in visitors into portraits might be considered merely another sign of Ghirlandaio’s interest in mundane genre, but in comparison to the active surfaces and domestic bustle of previous examples, Ghirlandaio’s painting is a

pious witness and votive prayer (Figures 11.3–11.4).The fresco’s most immediately noticeable feature is the large, richly red cover

upon Elizabeth’s bed, set against the complementary green wall hanging behind. Even from a distance, for viewers standing down the nave and looking over what was once a tramezzo or choir screen, the narrative of John’s birth was clearly visible, and the warm red attracted the eye. The consequent projection of the color red, let alone its sheer mass, is a forceful statement of the Baptist’s presence in visual and symbolic terms, since red is the color he wears in the chapel and is the color of Florence, John’s special city.20 The blood of the Mass and the water of

the black and white grapes on the salver as well as the carafes of red wine and clear water being offered to Elizabeth by another servant.21Given these various symbolic resonances, it is likely that the breastfeeding

of a woman nursing infants alludes to the foremost theological virtue of Charity. amor proximi,

distinguished from amor dei, love of God) was shown by artists like Giotto in the Arena Chapel of Padua by means of a bowl of fruits or, in examples such as Andrea Pisano’s Caritas on the Baptistery doors, a cornucopia, and this bountiful

Dovizia in the market square or derivations like Ghirlandaio’s “nymph” (Figure 11.1).22 During the fourteenth century, the

the case of Andrea Orcagna’s Caritas on the tabernacle of the public granary and

19 Simons, “Giovanna and Ginevra.”20 Similarly, the blue cover of Anne’s bed, set against the complementary color of

the orange/brown wall, refers to the Virgin Mary. The Baptist wears red in several of the chapel’s narratives.

21 Christ “came by water and blood”;; 1 John 5:6. On grapes, see Mirella Levi d’Ancona, The Garden of the Renaissance: Botanical Symbolism in Italian Painting (Florence, 1977),

Patronage,” vol. 1, 316. 22 Robert Frehyan, “The Evolution of the Caritas Figure in the Thirteenth and

Fourteenth Centuries,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 11 (1948): 68–86.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


civic monument of Or San Michele in Florence (1355–59).23 Florentine viewers were habituated to the doctrinal and civic meaning of representations of nursing,

and other necessities of public well-being and order.Directly beneath the Birth, in the lowest register, the story of the Annunciation

to Zachariaschapel, and male portraiture with Old Testament characters (Figure 11.5). Modeled

an architectural allegory commemorating political, manly and religious Triumph. The hybrid mix was accompanied by an inscription marking the year when the paintings were unveiled: “In the year 1490, when our most beautiful city, graced by treasures, victories, arts, and buildings, enjoyed wealth, health, and peace.”24 Just as the patriarch and priest Zacharias was delivered with the marvelous news of his fatherhood while censing the altar, so the gathered Florentine luminaries portrayed here perpetually offer in the apse chapel their prayers and thanks for the

The nurse (nutrice or baliaguide and educator. Many people thought that in a physical sense infants imbibed with the milk something of the qualities of their nurse, and hence Michelangelo’s belief that his time suckling at the breast of a woman who was the daughter and also the wife of stonemasons had altered his “inclinazione” so that the chisel thereafter especially delighted him.25 In his second edition of 1568, Vasari repeated this observation by Michelangelo, who worked in the Tornabuoni chapel

of the nurse’s character were widespread;; and thus, for instance, Vasari reported

because his father took the unusual step of insisting that he be suckled within the household by his own mother.26 Hence, as Vasari explained in his expanded second edition, Raphael acquired the proper habits of his paternal household, rather than learning “less gentle and brutish ways and habits in the houses of peasants and common men.”27In both the selection of the wet nurse and her cultural representation, an

emphasis was placed on her virtue, and Ghirlandaio’s view of the Tornabuoni

23 Closer to the time of Ghirlandaio’s fresco is Benedetto da Maiano’s Charity nursing a single child, installed on the pulpit in S. Croce (1481–85): Carl, Benedetto da Maiano, vol. 1, 310–312;; vol. 2, pls. 143, 154.

24 Gombrich, Warburg, 117. 25 Ascanio Condivi, Vita di Michelagnolo Buonarroti (1553), ed. Giovanni Nencioni

(Florence, 1998), 8–9. For the belief shared by San Bernardino, Alberti, and others see Haas, Children, 90, 91, 105.

26 Vasari, Vite, 611. 27 Le Opere di Giorgio Vasari, ed. Gaetano Milanesi (9 vols, Florence, 1906), vol. 4,

316.


Fig. 11.5

Domenico Ghirlandaio, Annunciation to Zacharias, 1490, fresco, high altar




Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


balia shows her as ideal, young, clean, and respectable. She too is serving in casa rather than the countryside, a more expensive alternative that kept the child near its natal family, practiced in Raphael’s Urbinate home and also amongst some members of the Florentine elite.28 The inventory of Tornabuoni properties drawn up on 4 January 1498, for instance, designated one room in their chief villa as the “sala delle balie.”29 The nurses’ proximity enabled closer supervision of such servants and stricter control of the children’s early formation, and it also made initial breastfeeding by the mother more possible. Although not the rule, at times a child was maternally suckled for a week or even a month or so, perhaps until it was baptized or considered strong enough to make the journey away from home.30 This emotional and social habit is indicated by Cavalca’s and Lucrezia Tornabuoni’s focus on Elizabeth’s glad, and lactating, response to John’s birth (missing from the biblical account). Furthermore, the ideal nature of the portrayed arrangement shows the babe nurtured by its loyal citizens. He is in the bosom of “Florentia mater,” mother Florence, a place “powerful in wisdom and wealth,” as the humanist Angelo Poliziano had put it a few years earlier in a Latin poem of 1486 when praising poetry because it had been his own wet nurse (Nutricia).31

altarpieces underlined the double meaning of nourishment, as food for the mind and soul as well as the body. The chapel’s double-sided altarpiece completed by the workshop (ca. 1491–94) shows on its outward face the Virgin nursing her Child, a motif not otherwise evident in the artist’s oeuvre (Figure 11.6).32 Whereas the earlier iconographic type of the Madonna of Humility nursing her infant while resting on the ground is a model followed by John’s baliathe theme of the high altarpiece in a church and a chapel dedicated to the Virgin. Surrounded by a radiant aureole, the visionary mother looks down on the saints

conveyed by the clarity and saturation of the colors, the legibility enhanced by the balanced composition of saints in simple swathes of drapery set against a panorama of distant landscape and open sky.

28 Haas, Children, 100–103, 113. 29 Florence, Archivio di Stato, Pupilli avanti il Principato, 181, fol. 142v. For similar

rooms in the Medici palace and the Sassetti villa, see Amanda Lillie, “The Patronage of Villa Chapels and Oratories Near Florence: A Typology of Private Religion,” in Eckart Marchand and Alison Wright, eds, With and Without the Medici: Studies in Tuscan Art and Patronage 1434–1530

30 Haas, Children, 113–4.31 Angelo Poliziano, Prose volgare inedite e poesie Latine e Greche edite e inedite,

ed. Isidoro del Lungo (Florence, 1867), 423 (“Ingeniis opibusque potens, Florentia mater”). Poliziano is portrayed in the lower left of the scene below, the Annunciation to Zacharias (Figure 11.5), and he may have penned the inscription there, which similarly praises Florence.

32 Cadogan, Ghirlandaio, 264–8, no. 38;; Kecks, Ghirlandaio, 321–5.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

226

Earlier in the century, a more intimate version of the Virgo lactans mostly frequented smaller devotional images, but from 1484, with Botticelli’s altarpiece for the Bardi chapel in S. Spirito, in Florence it became the subject of large altarpieces displaying the enthroned Virgin and Child venerated by saints.33 These

33 Holmes, “Madonna Lactans,” 167–95, especially 179–82;; Antonia Fondaras, “‘Our Mother the Holy Wisdom of God’: Nursing in Botticelli’s Bardi Altarpiece,” Storia dell’arte, 111, 3 (2005): 7–34. Other examples include Filippino Lippi’s Virgin and Child

Fig. 11.6 Domenico Ghirlandaio and workshop, The Virgin and Child in Glory with Sts. Dominic, Michael, John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, ca. 1491–94, tempera and oil on panel (221 x 198.2 cm), Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Photo Credit: Art Resource, NY.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


public statements remobilized the metaphor that associated divine wisdom with physical and spiritual sustenance. They highlighted Mary’s allegorical role as mother Church or Ecclesiaor Sapienta, through whom is offered the milk of what Saint Bernard of Clairvaux called “the milk of doctrine” or Saint Augustine termed “the pure milk of the little ones” when referring to the incarnated Christ.34 The Child tends to look out at the viewer in these altarpieces and, in her intercessory, maternal role the Virgin is the intermediary conduit between the human and heavenly realms for the bearing and dissemination of wisdom. By means of such images the church was visually insisting on its central, ongoing place in the worlds of learning and biblical exegesis, practices of special concern to the Dominican theologians and teachers at S. Maria Novella. On their high altarpiece, as Megan Holmes has pointed out, the metaphor of guidance lies behind the text presented by the Order’s founder, Saint Dominic: “Beato Dominic taught them discipline and knowledge.”35 Notably, the text is didactic and impersonal rather than speaking in the saint’s own voice, as though envisaging a literate audience of novices and laity as well as professed friars.On a devotional altarpiece and in a narrative fresco, the chapel’s two images of

nursing demonstrate the range of meanings associated with the act, each maternal and historical but one more symbolic and theological, the other more naturalistic and social. This spectrum of visual and didactic modes is also at play within the birth scenes. In some ways, what could be called the disguised allegories of Temperance, Abundance, and Charity display the indecorous enthusiasm of peasants and servants, erupting in Warburgian terms into religious and bourgeois scenes (considered, in typical nineteenth-century fashion, innately repressive) by delivering the alien fervor of classicism.36

nature, especially their civic familiarity and pious meaning. The familial focus of the chapel’s decoration made of it a “showpiece” according to Warburg, and the portraits—in the prosaic, overcrowded Annunciation to Zacharias in particular—outweighed Christian decorum so much that Ghirlandaio’s character was judged to have “an essentially philistine element” (Figure 11.5).37 While Warburg sensitively understood that the frescoes were “a pictorial thank-offering for family blessings

with Sts Jerome and Dominic for the Rucellai chapel in S. Pancrazio, ca. 1485 (in the National Gallery, London) and Cosimo Rosselli’s Virgin and Child with Sts James and Peter for the Salviati chapel in S. Maria Maddalena di Cestello, 1492 (in the Florentine Accademia).

34 Fondaras, “Our mother,” 12, 15.35 Holmes, “Madonna Lactans,” 179–80. 36 Gombrich, Warbug

37 Gombrich, Warbug, 115, 121.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

228

this motive was thought to profanely overshadow rather than complement proper devotion.38In such a view, the iconographic oddity of breastfeeding in the Birth of the

Baptist is no more than a mundane, indecorous, and almost irreligious element. Yet it is carefully thought out, like other features in the frescoes simultaneously naturalistic and allegorical, adding authenticity and meaning to a narrative that is considered historically true and also forever relevant. Ghirlandaio was an adept professional, at work in the choir space of an important, learned Dominican church where the Baptist’s nativity was a major feast day, so this vignette is not incidental or erroneous.39

The paintings can be interpreted as the patron’s merely personal statement, whose

all control over the iconography of the chapel.”40 The evidence adduced for such a claim, however, is weak. For instance, that the Meeting at the Golden Gate between Joachim and Anna is referred to at the doorway at the top of the stairs in the Birth of the Virgin Mary is not a sign that the Dominicans had sold out and foregone their long standing opposition to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception which

had been long settled in favor of the doctrine, which, furthermore, was adopted by Pope Sixtus IV as a universal feast in 1477.41 This is not to deny a personal component to the iconographic inclusion. The full name of Giovanni’s daughter who is portrayed in the story is Lodovica Maria Anna, and her devotion to the name saints Mary and Anne is highlighted by the visual emphasis on their exemplary feminine purity.42 Strong faith and biographical details are not antithetical.Supposedly, only the fact that Giovanni Tornabuoni’s special saint was

Thomas explains the egocentric inclusion in the chapel’s stained glass of the legend of the girdle being passed down to Saint Thomas during the Virgin’s Assumption.43 Earlier in the century, the Dominican archbishop of Florence, later Saint Antoninus (1389–1459), had advised painters in his Summa Theologica

38 Gombrich, Warbug, 120.39 William Bonniwell, A History of the Dominican Liturgy 1215–1945 (2nd ed., New

York, 1945), 219.40

Santa Maria Novella,” in Wolfram Prinz and Max Seidel, eds, Domenico Ghirlandaio 1449–1494, Atti del Convegno Internazionale, Firenze, 16–18 ottobre 1994 (Florence, 1996), 115

Giovanni Tornabuoni,” 116.41 Bonniwell, Dominican Liturgy

Tornabuoni,” 115. 42 Her name is given in Monte Comune o della Graticola 3744, fol. 281r, published in

Sandro Botticelli and Herbert Horne: New Research (Florence, 2009), 34 n. 145.43


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


against the depiction of this apocryphal tale.44 Yet, at the very summit of the window, the scene was luminously visible to the entire congregation, even those standing at the end of the nave at the entrance portal. And in that lower zone of the church all devotees saw on a relief of the pulpit installed in the 1440s a reiteration of the very scene regarding the girdle, which was a famous relic in the nearby town of Prato.45 In other words, the detail was already a standard iconographical habit in the church and of widespread congregational rather than

the Birgittine vision of Christ’s painless birth in another relief on the pulpit and frescoed as well on the entrance wall, the girdle was associated with alleviating the pangs and dangers of childbirth.46of interest to a patriarch like Giovanni keen to see the successful birth of heirs, it was hardly either a peculiar or irreligious impulse.As an Order of Preachers, Dominicans were capable of managing rather than

prohibiting popular beliefs. Thus, for example, the notion that Mary assisted at the birth of the Baptist, disseminated in the Golden Legend, was reiterated by Cavalca and in the late fourteenth-century stained glass window of S. Maria Novella’s chapel dedicated to the Annunciation (later to become the sacristy).47 In fact, according to a lauda or song of a Florentine confraternity that met at S. Spirito during the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, Mary had been John’s wet nurse, a sign of how the city’s patron saint could approach Christological status.48 Like the miracles of her girdle and the snowy foundation of S. Maria Maggiore,

central to the mission of a convent dedicated to Mary.Antoninus objected to the episode of the girdle only because it referred to

Saint Thomas’ doubt. The theologian’s disquiet about apocryphal illustrations extended to “midwives at the Virgin’s delivery,” a proscription that had no biblical

of Christ’s pain-free, miraculous advent (which meant that midwives were not necessary). Since the Catholic Church was a large, multilayered institution, it did

44 Creighton Gilbert, Italian Art 1400–1500: Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, 1980), 148.

45 Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby, “The Images of Saint Birgitta of Sweden in Santa Maria Novella in Florence,” Renaissance Studies, 18 (2004): 509–26, especially 513–15.

46 Debby, “Saint Birgitta,” 509–16, 521–2;; Brendan Cassidy, “A Relic, Some Pictures and the Mothers of Florence in the Late Fourteenth Century,” Gesta, 30 (1991): 91–9, especially 97.

47 Reau, Iconographie, vol. 2, part 1, 433;; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 1, 330;; Umberto Baldini, ed., Santa Maria Novella: La basilica, il convento, i chiostri monumentali (Florence, 1981), 285 (illustration).

48 Blake Wilson and Nello Barbieri, eds, The Florence Laudario: An Edition of Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Banco Rari 18 (Madison, 1995), lxxv: “Holy Mary was your nurse (Nutrice tua sancta Maria).”


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

230

not control an utterly monolithic message regarding all points of belief, and about

was exercised, especially at the local level. Compromise and inconsistency should not be unexpected by historians. Many churchmen, for instance, spoke out against the practice of using wet nurses, yet the custom remained widespread.Ghirlandaio’s propensity to situate his narratives in idealized settings, elite

households, modern architecture, or Tuscan landscapes and to populate the most visible scenes with portraits reverberated with the habits of preachers. Effective preaching meant engaging as well as instructing the audience, especially by the use of exempla or anecdotes that illustrated a moral or didactic point. Visual narratives were, in a sense, sermons in paint, and Ghirlandaio’s versions of the pictorial telling of sacred stories were no exception. Akin to Saint Antoninus’ views about preaching, the clarity and detail of Ghirlandaio’s images suit the aims of impressing on the memory and moving viewers to exemplary behavior.49The fundamental tenet of Christian doctrine held that the divine entered the

human world in the Incarnation of Christ, and thus prayer, as a form of human address to the divine, often entailed the exemplary and vivid interpenetration of diurnal and divine, past and present. Long before Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises (printed in 1548), manuals of prayer and contemplation similarly advised imaginative and visual engagement with sacred history. The popular Meditations on the Life of Christ of ca. 1300, for instance, recommended active meditation, “feeling yourself in those places as if the things were done in your presence.”50 In the 1430s Thomas à Kempis recommended that the devotee “humbly bend the knee, as if you saw Mary present in the body.”51The immediacy of prayerful witness is elaborated in Nicolò da Osimo’s

Garden of Fruitful Prayer, written by the time of the author’s death in 1453 (printed in Venice in 1494 and in Florence the following year). To aid with the goal of inculcation and memorization, shared by Antoninus and other preachers, the Garden said that

example, which will be the city of Jerusalem—taking for this purpose a city that is well known to you … And then too you must shape in your mind some people, people well-known to you, to represent for you the people involved in the Passion.52

49 Peter Francis Howard, Beyond the Written Word: Preaching and Theology in the Florence of Archbishop Antoninus 1427–1459 (Florence, 1995), 114, 163–6 and passim.

50 Pseudo-Bonaventura, Meditations on the Life of Christ, trans. and ed. Isa Ragusa and Rosalie B. Green (Princeton, 1961), 387.

51 Carol J. Purtle, The Marian Paintings of Jan van Eyck (Princeton, 1982), 72–3.52 For extracts and the translation from the Zardino de oration fructuoso, see Michael

Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (2nd ed., Oxford, 1972), 46, 163–4.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


In the chapel at S. Maria Novella, thus, optical and pictorial elements blend fact

scene, for instance, as though from the direction of the chapel’s actual window. The Virgin assumes into heaven from a valley rimmed on one side by the hills of Fiesole, marked by the Villa Medici there.53 The train of the Magi includes a giraffe, accurately rendered after its arrival at the papal stables of S. Maria Novella in November 1487.54Florentines, including members of Ghirlandaio’s family and workshop as well as leaders of the Tornaquinci clan, contemplatively witness the ongoing truth of biblical events.Ghirlandaio’s depiction of the newborn Giovanni suckling at the breast of

his wet nurse is like a preacher’s enlivenment of biblical history, all the more appropriate because that babe went on to become a powerful preacher and prophet. A Dominican who had often delivered sermons in the church and its piazza early in the century was especially mindful of the instructive effect of images on young viewers. Around 1403–1405, friar Giovanni Dominici advised parents to have children imitate what they see:

have paintings in the house, of holy little boys or young virgins, in which your child when still in swaddling clothes may delight, as being like himself, and may be seized upon by the like thing, with actions and signs attractive to infancy … In the same way he may mirror himself in the holy Baptist…55

Although on display in a church rather than a household, the sights of the nourishing breast and enthusiastic natal care remained striking models of pious upbringing and symbolic guidance. In another city, and in the 1660s, one young

was later to be Saint Veronica Giuliani pressed her breast to a painted image of the Madonna del Latte and felt the Child suckle her instead, so that “the Babe seemed

56

Perhaps an actual newborn was even envisaged as one of the fresco’s ideal viewers, because the welcomed birth of Giovannino in October 1487 wrought changes in the cycle of the Baptist and spurred the production of Ghirlandaio’s large tondo of the Adoration of the Magimiracle of the Baptist’s Naming by Zacharias was granted the unusual privilege of a separate scene, a distinction not envisaged when the contract was drawn up with the painters on 1 September 1485.57 Certainly, this Giovanni di Lorenzo would

53 of the Villa Medici, Fiesole,” Burlington Magazine, 111 (1969): 597–605.

54 Simons, “Portraiture and Patronage,” vol. 1, 321;; vol. 2, 193 n. 2.55 Gilbert, Italian Art, 145.56 Rudolph Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago, 1985), 60–61. 57 Cadogan, Ghirlandaio, 350–351.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

232

have visited the chapel as a boy and seen in the Birth of John a portrait of his mother, represented when alive yet ill, before her death in October 1488.

the miraculous birth (Luke 1:58), the cluster of female portraits brings to life the contemplative technique of imagining oneself into religious history. It is often said that the oldest of the three callers is a portrait of Lucrezia Tornabuoni, but her posthumous portrait appears in the Visitation below, accompanying the by-then-

58 Nevertheless, the face of the woman at the right of the Birth bears a strong resemblance to Lucrezia, and I suggest that this may be a reconstruction of the appearance of Lucrezia’s sister Dianora, who had died decades earlier but was the step-grandmother of Giovanna degli Albizzi.59mother and the matron may be an idealized view of Giovanna’s mother Caterina, in which case this could be a group portrait of three generations of women, each related to the Tornabuoni by birth or marriage. Members of the Tornaquinci clan remained devoted to their city’s patron saint

John the Baptist and the family’s visual tradition established in their chapel. When Giovanni di Lorenzo Tornabuoni, the boy whose birth was celebrated in 1487, married as a man of nearly 30, he commissioned a set of panels on the Baptist’s life from the painter Francesco Granacci, who had worked as a youth on the chapel frescoes.60 The story of the saint’s birth, on a panel now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, adapts such features as the entering servant, now merely

other end of the room where the naked baby is tended there are no utensils for the bath, and no overt breastfeeding. Around 1526–27, for a childbirth bowl bearing the coats of arms of the Della Casa and Tornaquinci families, Pontormo painted visitors at the Naming, and as a servant lifts the infant he reaches up as though to

58 Lucrezia died on 28 March 1482. Her portrait in the Visitation closely accords with Ghirlandaio’s panel portrait of her, including the precise turn of the head, on which see Eleonora Luciano’s entry in Miklos Boskovits and David Alan Brown, Italian Paintings of the Fifteenth Century (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, 2003), 303–7 (where, however, the Visitation is inexplicably ignored).

59 Simons, “Portraiture and Patronage,” vol. 1, 312;; vol. 2, 119 n. 203, which makes the common mistake of thinking that Caterina’s actual mother was Dianora, as is also done, for example, in Gert Jan van der Sman, Lorenzo and Giovanna: Timeless Art and Fleeting Lives in Renaissance Florence (Florence, 2010), 23. But this would mean that Giovanna and her husband Lorenzo Tornabuoni were cousins, and their union would have been incestuous according to the rules of consanguinity.

60 Christian von Holst, Francesco Granacci (Munich, 1974), 24–5, 132–5, nos. 7–8;; 194 no. 162;; 199–200 no 182;; Everett Fahy, “An Overlooked Michelangelo?” Nuovi studi, 14 (2009): 51–67, especially 54–5, 60.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


gain access to her clothed breast.61 In these and other cases, nursing, even by the Virgin, waned as a Florentine subject in the sixteenth century, though Bronzino subtly alluded to it by showing Mary’s bodice partly unlaced in a painting of the Holy Family with Sts Elizabeth and John the Baptist.62The episode of breastfeeding in Ghirlandaio’s Birth of the Baptist is

exceptional. It admirably conveys the patron’s motives as stated in the contract with the painters: “as an act of piety and love of God, to the exaltation of his house and family and the enhancement of the said church and chapel.”63 Whereas the biographical, familial and civic emphases in the chapel are indeed strong, for both the Dominicans and their patrons faith was at the core of their chapel’s decoration, which preached the immanence and immediacy of the divine in everyday life, from the personal and domestic to the civic and devotional.

61 Jacqueline Marie Musacchio’s entry in Andrea Bayer, ed., Art and Love in Renaissance Italy (New York, 2008), 161–2, no.74.

62 Carlo Falciani and Antonio Natali, eds, Bronzino: Artist and Poet at the Court of the Medici (Florence, 2010), 58–9, no. I.2. In 1511 the workshop of Giovanni della Robbia produced a baptismal font for S. Leonardo in Cerreto Guidi, near Florence, and the Birth of the Baptist scene, while closely derived from Ghirlandaio’s fresco, has the child respond to the other midwife’s reaching gesture;; thus he turns away from the naked breast: Peter Thornton, The Italian Renaissance Interior 1400–1600

63 Cadogan, Ghirlandaio, 350, trans in David Sanderson Chambers, Patrons and Artists in the Italian Renaissance (London, 1970), 173.


Proof Copy


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Chapter 12 Wet Nurses, Midwives,

and the Virgin Mary in Tintoretto’s Birth of Saint John the Baptist (1563)

Jutta Gisela Sperling

in San Zaccaria, Venice’s most ancient and prestigious convent, governed at the time by Abbess Theodosia Gradenico (Figure 12.1).1 The scene depicts the birth of Saint John the Baptist—a highly unusual motif in the Venetian tradition. The topic is rendered all the more unique because of the presence of the Virgin Mary at Saint Elizabeth’s delivery, and the fact that the “precursor” is shown in the act of suckling from a wet nurse. In his Venetia città bellissima e singolare, Francesco Sansovino mentions The Birth of Saint John the Baptist (1581) as one of three most “remarkable” paintings in San Zaccaria, next to the altarpieces by Giovanni Bellini and Paolo Veronese.2Probably as a result of Michele Damaskinos’s painting The Nativity of the

Virgin Mary (ca. 1574–77), which borrowed heavily from Tintoretto’s picture in terms of the postures and gestures of the two women tending to the baby, The Birth of Saint John the Baptist was sometimes assumed to depict the birth of the Madonna instead.3 This is not a convincing idea, for a variety of reasons: a) the presence of Zachary, John’s father, at the right margin;; b) the fact that baby Mary, who would grow up to become the nurse of Christ and of all believers in Christ, was only very rarely shown to be suckling herself, and if so, certainly not from a wet nurse;;4 and c) because of an earlier, similar, painting by Tintoretto on

1 Flaminio Cornelio, editis illustratae ac in decades distributae (13 vols, Venice, 1749), vol. 11, 345.

2 Francesco Sansovino, Venetia citta nobilissima et singolare (Venice, 1581), 27v.3 Rodolfo Pallucchini and Paola Rossi, Tintoretto: Le opere sacre e profane (2 vols,

Milan, 1982), vol. 1, 185–6, catalogue entry 248.4 Berto di Giovanni’s painting The Birth of the Virgin Mary (ca. 1525) shows a baby

to be breastfeeding from a nurse, but because of the presence of Zachary in the painting, we must assume this representation to be of The Birth of John the Baptist. For the same

nativity. In Benedetto Caliari’s (1538–98) Birth of the Virgin Mary, the infant is not shown in the act of suckling but is being held by a wet nurse who has already bared her breast. To my knowledge, the only representation of baby Mary shown to be nursing is that on


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

236

Fig. 12.1 Tintoretto, The Birth of Saint John the Baptist, 1563, San Zaccaria, Venice. Photo Credit: Soprintendenza Speciale per il Patrimonio Storico Artistico et Etnoantropologico e per il polo museale della città di Venezia e dei comuni della gronda lagunare. Permission: Patriarcato di Venezia.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Wet Nurses, Midwives, and the Virgin Mary in Birth of Saint John the Baptist 237

the same subject matter (ca. 1554, Hermitage), which shows the woman holding the baby to be decorated by a halo (Figure 12.2).5 This detail reveals her to be the Virgin Mary, who, according to the Golden Legend (ca. 1275), acted as Saint Elizabeth’s midwife.6 Print versions of this painting indicate how beautiful,

Column A of Saint Mark’s ciborium, which art historians assume was either produced in the sixth century by Byzantine artists or sculpted in the twelfth century by Venetian artists as a “fake” early Byzantine art work. Here, however, in sync with the textual tradition, Mary suckles from her mother Anne. Jacqueline Lafontaine-Dosogne, Iconographie de l’enfance de la Vierge dans l’Empire byzantine et en Occident

Venezia arti: Bollettino del dipartimento di storia e critica delle arti dell’Università di Venezia, 1 (1987): 32–8.

5 Pallucchini and Rossi, Tintoretto, vol. 1, p. 167, catalogue entry 169. Andrea Gallo, “La Nascita del Battista di Jacopo Tintoretto,” , 10 (1994): 161–86.

6 Frederick Ilchman, “Two Altarpieces of John the Baptist by Jacopo Tintoretto,” Studies in Venetian Art and Conservation (Venice, 2004), 26.

Fig 12.2 Frédéric Horthemels, after Tintoretto, The Birth of Saint John the Baptist, 1729, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (original: Saint Petersburg, Hermitage, ca. 1554). Source: gallica.bnf.fr.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

238

provocative, or innovative later admirers found this composition until at least the eighteenth century.7In the foreground of Tintoretto’s San Zaccaria painting, we see two women,

one clad in a red dress with a blue cloak and a transparent veil covering her hair, the other one dressed in a white, loose blouse and a reddish skirt, her long blond

to be sitting on an invisible stool, caressing the baby gently with her right hand. With her left arm, she is holding him up to the bare breast of his wet nurse, who, in what must have been an uncomfortable kneeling position, is offering John her left breast. Behind the Virgin Mary and the wet nurse, a third woman is standing, slightly bent, holding up a white towel or blanket, ready to swaddle the infant. In front of the group, which forms what Rebecca Zorach has called a “passionate triangle,” we see a copper bowl from which a black rooster is sipping water.8 Behind the three birth assistants, clouds, two angels, and rays of light are aiming right at the infant, illuminating the three women’s white skin in a reverse triangular constellation and marking the moment of John’s recognition of the descent of the Holy Spirit (John 1, 32).9 To the left, a mantovanina (bread roll) is lying on a

is carrying a piece of wooden furniture. To the right, and behind the three women caring for baby John, we see Saint Elizabeth resting on a huge wooden bed, covered in lush blue blankets, her breasts semi-exposed. A woman dressed in red and blue fabrics is offering her a plate of food.10 In front of the bed, a servant is

colors are warm shades of red and blue.Decorating the altar of Sant’Atanasio, Tintoretto’s painting was positioned

in the nuns’ choir, but visible through the grates that separated the public part of the church from the nuns’ interior. In fact, the altar of Sant’Atanasio was perpendicular to the main altar from which the priest would have approached the grates. Thus, according to Gary Radke’s reconstruction of San Zaccaria’s liturgical spaces, the painting must have been in full frontal view of visitors and ecclesiastical personnel.11 The commissioning of a painting depicting the

7 Jacopo Tintoretto e i suoi incisori, Maria Agnese Chiari Moretto Wiel, ed. (Milan, 1994), 86, catalogue entry 84.

8 Rebecca Zorach, The Passionate Triangle (Chicago, 2011).9 Regarding the direction and meaning of baby John’s gaze, I would like to thank

Roland Krischel for his assistance.10

Mary. Antonio Manno, Sacre rappresentazioni nelle chiese di Venezia (Venice, 1994), scheda 20.

11 Gary Radke, “Nuns and Their Art: The Case of San Zaccaria in Renaissance Venice,” Renaissance Quarterly, 54, 2 (2001): 430–459, especially 434.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


Birth of Saint John the Baptist in 1563 underscores the importance the nuns of San Zaccaria attributed to the veneration of their patron saint whose full body relic they owned. This became a pressing issues when, at the re-inauguration of their church 20 years earlier, doubts seem to have arisen as to which Zachary the convent was actually dedicated: Zachary, minor prophet;; or Zachary, father of John? The reason for the confusion was the fact that the nuns celebrated the feast of Saint Zachary on 6 September—according to the Catholic Church the day

the feast of Zachary, father of John. Of course, the issue was more complex and politically charged, since Zachary, father of John, was celebrated on 5 September according to the Byzantine tradition under reference to the apocryphal Book of James (2nd century).12 This makes it reasonable to assume that the nuns of San Zaccaria followed the apocryphal Byzantine tradition in venerating their name saint—albeit with a delay of one day—until reform-minded Church authorities found offense with this practice.After the Council of Trent (1545–63), the nuns came under increasing pressure

from Rome not only to relinquish control of their precious relics but also to revise their liturgical calendar.13 In 1595, under the patriarchate of Lorenzo Priuli (1537–1600), a Tridentine hardliner, the old part of the church was cordoned off by grates,

altarpieces, and Tintoretto’s painting. In 1600, the relics were transferred over to the new, now public, part of the church.14 Also in 1595, the nuns were prohibited from celebrating the feast day of Saint Zachary on 6 September, which they must have understood as an attack on their very identity as the most ancient, prestigious, and wealthy convent of Venice.15Under Priuli’s successor Francesco Vendramin (1609–18), the nuns gathered

their strength and resources to resist the onslaught. A report written on 13 September 1611 by a certain Father Inquisitor of San Domenico analyzes the reason for San Zaccaria’s liturgical impasse in great detail. The author stresses that the lack of reliable sources surrounding Zachary’s death was responsible for the confusion. The majority of religious scholars—including Origen—followed the version popularized in the Book of James, according to which Zachary was murdered in the temple shortly after Christ’s death, but could neither agree on the way he was martyred nor the day of his death. The Roman liturgical calendar settled on 5 November as his feast day, based on equally shaky evidence.16 In the eyes of the author, the convent’s millenarian tradition of celebrating Saint

12 Enciclopedia Cattolica (12 vols, Vatican City, 1948–1954), vol. 12 (1954), 1757.13 For a list of relics, see Radke, “Nuns and Their Art,” 444.14 Ibid., 456.15 ASV, San Zaccaria, busta 6, Registro “Monastero di San Zaccaria,” parte II (1635),

15r. This report, written in 1611, mentions that the nuns had not been celebrating the feast day of their patron saint for 16 years due to intervention from Rome.

16 Registro “Monastero di San Zaccaria,” 15r.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

240

Zachary’s death on 6 September constituted historical evidence in and of itself,

ought to have been respected. Zachary could thus be reasonably celebrated on either day. The nun’s celebration of their patron saint on 6 September did not point to an erroneous dedication, which an ancient inscription seemed to suggest in the eyes of some critics, but indicated that they followed the Byzantine tradition in worshipping the saint, in sync with their foundation history as one of the oldest convents in Venice.17 In the eyes of the author, this ancient tradition ought to be resumed in an effort to undo the humiliation the nuns suffered after it had been suggested that their most ancient and prestigious convent was dedicated to an

This report is bound together with a long note by Giulio Stabilito, Bishop of Sebenico, written on the occasion of the inauguration of the “new” church of San Zaccaria in 1543, exactly 99 years after its completion. Stabilito’s report begins with a list of Venetian churches that upon reconstruction chose to change their dedication, and it lists the most ancient references to the convent and church of San Zaccaria since Emperor Leo in 827, thus offering arguments for both change and continuity.18 Most importantly, Stabilito gives a detailed chronicle of the convent, underscoring how its foundation history was intertwined with major events in the foundation history of Venice itself, thus suggesting that the prestige and historical importance of the convent ought to be respected.In addition to these two reports, the portfolio contains the minutes of two

chapter meetings from 1613, which indicate how the nuns sought to end the gridlock and resume celebrating their name saint. On 18 August, Abbess Isabella Querini proposed a motion according to which the convent would celebrate the feast day of Saint Zachary twice per year, that is, on 6 September, as was their ancient custom, and on 5 November, as was demanded by the Church of Rome. This compromise solution was accepted with 18 votes out of 28. On 29 August, the day of the decapitation of Saint John the Baptist, the abbess presented her chapter with a full indulgence the pope had granted to San Zaccaria for the embattled feast day of 6 September, thus rewarding the nuns’ efforts at reconciliation. Patriarch

on their own whether or not to accept the pope’s offer. They did, with 19 votes

references to 5 November, the Roman-imposed feast day, the nuns decided to send the bull back to Rome with a demand for revision, eager to be precise in the matter and to appease the considerable minority of their chapter that had opposed the compromise. No such revision ever arrived at San Zaccaria, which means the indulgence fell by the wayside, but the two chapter meetings in 1613 show how

fought to get their old feast day reinstalled based on the report from 1611.

17 This inscription mentioned a certain “San Zaccaria Profeta” without explicitly referring to Zachary in his capacity as father of the “precursor.” Ibid., 15v.

18 Ibid., 11v.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


The commissioning of Tintoretto’s painting The Birth of Saint John the Baptist in 1563 can thus be viewed as an early example of the nuns’ efforts to clarify

Zachary was tantamount to highlighting the convent’s ancient Byzantine roots, which came to be perceived as a sign of the nuns’ resistance against the Tridentine reform movement. In Tintoretto’s painting, allusions to Byzantine culture appear in the form of references to the apocryphal Book of James (2nd century) and its reverberations in medieval and early modern Catholic popular religious literature—most notably, Jacopo di Voragine’s Golden Legend (1275) and Pietro Aretino’s religious writings.19 Tintoretto and his contemporaries might not have been aware

thus, by extension, on Aretino’s treatises, but the Book of James had just achieved new notoriety on its own due to Guillaume Postel’s discovery of an ancient copy of the text and his Latin translation in 1551.20 This apocryphal gospel and its later derivatives give women great prominence in the stories surrounding the life of Christ in their capacities as mothers, servants, midwives, and wet nurses—in other words: as narrative embodiments of allegorized charity. Breastfeeding, food-preparation, and related acts of mothering loom large in the Book of James, the Golden Legend, and Aretino’s writings, as they do in many of Tintoretto’s religious paintings. In his Presentation of the Virgin to the Temple (1553–56), different versions of the Last Supper, and the decorative program at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, for example, women “extras” not only provide a visual point of entry into his paintings but also function as key witnesses of important moments in eschatological history, in addition to symbolizing charity as the main perspective from which to unlock the meaning of Christ’s promise of redemption.21Guillaume Postel (1510–82) emphasized such connections between charity,

the highest theological virtue in Catholicism, and the reproductive work of women as well. He not only speculated about the advent of a second messiah in the form

the mystic and living saint Giovanna of Verona (d. 1549). Giovanna ran a soup kitchen and a foundling home at the hospital of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, where he

19 Iconographie, vol. 2, 9–15. Pietro Aretino, L’Humanità di Cristo (1st ed., Venice, 1535);; and idem, La Vita di Maria Vergine (1st ed., Venice, 1538).

20 Irena Backus, “Guillaume Postel. Théodore Bibliander et le “protévangile de Jacques: Introduction historique, édition et traduction française du MS. Londres, British Library, Sloane 1411, 260r–267r,” Apocrypha, 6 (1995): 6–65, especially 7.

21 Jutta Sperling, “Allegories of Charity and the Practice of Poor Relief at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco,” Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch, 70 (2009): 119–46;; Martin Seidel, Venezianische Malerei zur Zeit der Gegenreformation: Kirchliche Programmschriften und künstlerische Bildkonzepte bei Tizian, Tintoretto, Veronese und Palma il Giovane, Bonner Studien zur Kunstgeschichte 11 (Münster, 1996), 245–6.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

242

was chaplain for two years prior to her death.22 After his return from the Middle East in 1551, Postel travelled all throughout Europe, taught at the University of Padua in 1554, was sentenced by the Inquisition in 1555 to life-long imprisonment, escaped to France in 1559 but was re-imprisoned shortly thereafter, and died in a French monastery in 1582. In the eyes of Valentina Sapienza, Tintoretto was

work at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco—his paintings Santa in lettura and Santa in meditazione (1583–84)—illustrates in her view key ideas of Postel’s theory: the two reading female saints, situated in a mysterious landscape, represent the messianic “mother of the world,” or basic maternal virtue, which according to Postel resides in or emanates from the exposed roots of the two gigantic trees so prominent and puzzling in the two paintings.23the wise men in Tintoretto’s Adoration of the Magi (1582) as a portrait of Postel, painted as an obituary to his former friend the year he died.24In this chapter, I would like to show how references to women “extras” in

the Book of James, which Postel had just discovered and translated, but also in Voragine’s Golden Legend and Aretino’s religious writings, inform the peculiar composition of our painting at San Zaccaria—namely, the inclusion of the Virgin Mary as Saint Elizabeth’s midwife and the depiction of baby John in the act of breastfeeding from a wet nurse. Both compositional elements were rare variations

all in Tuscan art but also in Padua and other cities of the Venetian terraferma.25

room scene can be found in late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Central Italian

and breviaries.26 The lactation scene was, however, depicted only once prior to

22 Postel elaborates on these ideas in Il libro della divina ordinatione (Padua, 1555), and Prime nove dell’altro mondo (Venice, 1555). Valentina Sapienza, “Miti, metafore e profezie: Le Storie di Maria di Jacopo Tintoretto nella sala terrena della Scuola Grande di San Rocco,” , 33 (2007): 49–139, especially 61–4.

23 Sapienza, “Miti, metafore e profezie,” 81–6.24 This is not a claim I follow. Given how many bearded men were represented in late

Renaissance art in a similar fashion, I fail to recognize an unambiguous likeness between a portrait of Postel and this alleged crypto-portrait in Tintoretto’s Adoration of the Magi. Sapienza, “Miti, metafore e profezie,” 56–72.

25 Jacqueline Marie Musacchio, The Art and Titual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy (Princeton, 1999).

26 The Index of Christian Art, Princeton, mentions ten such works of arts;; see above all the late thirteenth-century Sienese altar frontal of Saint John the Baptist in the Pinacoteca of Siena. Piero Torriti, La Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena (2 vols, Genoa, 1980), vol. 1, 45. In addition, many so-called Nativities of the Virgin Mary are in reality depictions of the Birth of Saint John the Baptist, easily recognizable through the presence of the Virgin Mary as Elizabeth’s birth assistance. See, for example, Don Silvestro dei Gherarducci, Initial G with the Birth of the Virgin [erroneous title] (Florence, ca. 1375), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, access. no. 21.168.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


Tintoretto’s rendering of the motif: in Domenico Ghirlandaio’s fresco The Birth of Saint John the Baptist at the Florentine church of Santa Maria Novella (1490) (Figure 11.1). Tintoretto may or may not have heard of this fresco, which seems

and Renaissance Tuscan art rather than references to Byzantine apocryphal texts. The absence of the Virgin Mary as Elizabeth’s midwife in Ghirlandaio’s fresco suggests that he was deliberately not following the iconographic tradition inspired by the Golden Legend. Regardless of whether Tintoretto knew of Ghirlandaio’s fresco, his vision of suckling John might have been rather inspired by the depiction of Saint Anne in the act of nursing Mary on a sixth-century Byzantine ciborium in San Marco, illustrating the life of Mary according to the Book of James (Figure 12.3).27necessitated her to be breastfed by her mother, who had conceived without male intervention, and thus produced milk untainted by the stain of eternal sin, baby John did not need to be restricted to such exclusive maternal nursing.The integration of elements from Mary’s and John’s nativity narratives—

Mary’s breastfeeding from her mother Anne, and the presence of the Virgin Mary as Elizabeth’s midwife, respectively—suggests how Tintoretto may have viewed

structurally similar and interrelated. In addition, the substitution of maternal nursing with non-maternal milk-sharing allowed Tintoretto to highlight wet-nursing as a reproductive capacity of highly symbolic value, i.e., as an embodiment of charity, supreme virtue among Catholics. Tintoretto’s religious paintings are unique in the Venetian context for representing women who prepare, serve, beg for, and share food or breastfeed and take care of children as both allegories of charity and eye witnesses of important scenes in salvation history. This compositional device was later picked up by Palma the Younger.28

27 Lafontaine-Dosogne, Iconographie.28 See, among others, the following works by Palma Giovane: Passover (Venice,

Church of San Giacomo all Orio, 1580/81);; Saint Laurence Shows the Mass of Poor People Blessed by the Church to the Tyrant Valeriano (Venice, Church of San Giacomo all’Orio, 1581–82);; Pope Alexander III (Venice, Ducal Palace, Sala del Maggior Consiglio, 1583);; Last Supper (Venice, Church of San Moisé, 1585);; Baptism of Christ (Palermo, Church of San Giorgio dei Genovesi, now Galleria Regionale di Palazzo Abatellis, 1604);; Christ’s Presentation to the Temple (Castelfranco, Cathedral, 1610);; Christ’s Presentation to the Temple (Padua, Church of Santi Simeone, Giuda e Bartolomeo, 1610);; The Engagement of the Virgin (Venice, Church of Spirito Santo, 1611);; The Multiplication of Bread and Fishes (Venice, Church of San Giacomo all’Orio, 1614).

On the representation of charity and poor relief in sixteenth-century Venetian art in general, see Bernard Aikema, “L’Immagine della Carità Veneziana,” Nel regno dei poveri: Arte e storia dei grandi ospedali veneziani in età moderna 1474–1797, ed. Bernard Aikema (Venice, 1988), 71–98;; Tom Nichols, “Secular Charity, Sacred Poverty: Picturing the Poor in Renaissance Venice,” Art History, 30, 2 (2007): 139–69;; idem, Tintoretto: Tradition and


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

244

Fig. 12.3 Anon., Saint Anne Breastfeeding the Virgin Mary, either 6th or 12th century, Scenes from the Life of Mary, column A, ciborium of Saint Mark’s Chapel, Venice. Photo Credit: Studio Bohm – Venezia.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


In focusing on women engaged in reproductive labor as embodiments of charity, Tintoretto was able to draw on canonical and apocryphal texts as well as popular religious literature. Already the Gospel of Luke mentions that Mary, right after conceiving from the Holy Spirit, went to visit her cousin Elizabeth,

how John leaps with joy in her womb upon sensing the presence of Mary, future mother of Christ (Luke 1:42). Mary is noted to have stayed with her cousin for three months. Luke does not specify that Mary helped with Elizabeth’s delivery,

Golden Legend: “The blessed Virgin remained with her cousin for three months, assisting her, and picked up the newborn baby from the ground with her own hands, as can be read

sitter, so to speak.”29 In his L’Humanità di Christo (1535), Pietro Aretino endows

as if he were a wise man.”30 This seems to be the moment we are witnessing in Tintoretto’s painting, in which the newborn baby catches a glimpse of his

if she were his foster- or godmother. Aretino also mentions the presence of a wet nurse, who, in “her tender care,” sprinkles John with rose water.31 In his La Vita di Maria Vergine (1539), Aretino gives a slightly different account of the same moment: “In the meantime, the hour of delivery of the happy matron had come, and, noticing this, Mary assumed the task of a careful midwife, and, after having

Identity (London, 1999);; and Francesco Mozzetti, “Educare per immagini: Gesti di carità e attivismo caritatevole,” , 16 (1998): 53–80.

On the religious art of Jacopo Bassano, which did not feature as many female embodiments of charity as did Tintoretto’s, see Aikema, Jacopo Bassano and His Public: Moralizing Pictures in an Age of Reform ca. 1535–1600 (Princeton, 1996). On Tintoretto’s “manner” of introducing breastfeeding women as decorative elements into his religious paintings, see Robert Echols, “Tintoretto, Christ at the Sea of Galilee, and the Unknown Later Career of Lambert Sustris,” , 12 (1996): 93–149. Echols,

and he takes this feature of Tintoretto’s art to be an indication of Sustris’s authorship.

Krischel, Jacopo Tintoretto 1519–1594 (Cologne, 2000). On Tintoretto’s representation of midwives in his “Adoration of the Shepherds,” see Adriano Mariuz, L’adorazione dei pastori di Jacopo Tintoretto: “Una stravagante invenzione” (Verona, 2010).

29 Iacopo da Varazze (Voragine), Legenda aurea, ed. Giovanni Paolo Maggioni, trans. Francesco Stella (2 vols, Florence, 2007), vol. 1, 607.

30 Pietro Aretino, “L’Humanita di Christo,” in

Beato (Venice, 1552), 5v.31 Ibid., 5v.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

246

alleviated the labor pains that Elisabeth felt in delivering this precious fruit … picked up the new born baby from the ground.”32By contrast, Anne gave birth to Mary without assistance. Only the Book of

James mentions in passing the presence of a midwife, but neither Voragine nor Aretino paid attention to this detail. Mary herself was thought to have had two midwives, however, if for no other reason than to verify her unbroken hymen after delivery.33 According to Postel’s Protevangelio, Joseph endows his eldest son James with Mary’s care upon their arrival in Bethlehem, “and left to look for a midwife.”34 Walking about in the darkness, he happens upon a woman who

virgin and conceived from the Holy Spirit, the woman becomes curious and agrees to help with the delivery. This, however, does not turn out to be necessary, as a luminous cloud is descending from heaven the moment they arrive back at the grotto, and “a little bit at a time the light was fading, revealing the presence of a small infant;; and he suckled from the breast of his mother Mary.”35 Upon seeing this event, the midwife exclaims: “How grand this day is for me today, which has witnessed such great miracle.”36 She leaves the grotto and encounters Salome,

grotto and asks Mary to lie down so that Salome can give her an exam, which she does. For this offensive need of empirical proof, Salome is punished with the freezing of her hand and is forgiven only when she repents her error in judgment and touches the baby.37 This story is repeated in Jacopo di Voragine’s Golden Legend and Pietro Aretino’s Life of the Virgin Mary, while it does not appear in Aretino’s somewhat sterner and more serious, perhaps more “masculine,” account of the Humanity of Christ.38 Tintoretto draws on this apocryphal scene in his painting of the Adoration of the Shepherds in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco (1578–81), another instance in which he shows his interest in representing women engaged in reproductive activities as participants in the history of salvation.39

midwives as add-ons, such as the story of her own delivery of Christ. In Tintoretto’s

32 Pietro Aretino, “La Vita di Maria Vergine,” in A la somma bonta di Giulio III

(Venice, 1552), 46r.33 Backus, “Guillaume Postel,” 57.34 Ibid., 62.35 Ibid., 63.36 Ibid.37 Ibid.38 Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda aurea, vol. 1, 77;; Aretino, “Vita di Maria Vergine,” 50r.39 Mariuz, L’Adorazione dei pastori, 37–8;; Sperling, “Allegories of Charity.”


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


Birth of Saint John the Baptist, however, she appears to be assisting John and his wet nurse rather than Elizabeth, who is receding into the background of the picture plane with just one servant attending to her. The wet-nursing scene is, as already mentioned, highly unusual and almost devoid of precedents. Other than Tintoretto’s Hermitage version of the topic, only Ghirlandaio’s fresco shows John in the act of suckling from a wet nurse (see article by Patricia Simons). Given that

growing number of birth assistants seem to the vying for John’s attention, only the complete lack of textual references surrounding breastfeeding at John’s delivery can explain this conspicuous scarcity of pictorial representations.40The situation is different when we look at accounts of the birth of the Virgin

Mary. While Saint Anne did not have much need of midwives, her delivery being painfree and effortless, breastfeeding rhetoric pervades the various apocryphal accounts of her immaculate conception of Mary, delivery of Mary, and Mary’s youth. In the Book of James, Anne’s servant Judith explains to her grieving mistress that God must have had a good reason for “closing her bosom.”41 After giving birth to Mary, Anne gives her the breast even before naming her. During

would have ever said to the sons of Reuben that Anne would breastfeed? Look and see, look and see, you twelve tribes of Israel, that Anne is breastfeeding!”42 Such

Saint Anne breastfeeds Mary for three full years until the girl’s presentation to the temple.43 Moreover, Anne seems to have breastfed many other infants besides her daughter. When Mary, at age 14, leaves the temple to become engaged to Joseph, seven of her female companions are referred to as her “milk-sisters.”44 Despite the abundance of textual sources regarding Anne’s nursing of Mary, the visual tradition in the West neglects this circumstance almost entirely—in contrast to the Byzantine column at Saint Mark’s ciborium mentioned above.Pietro Aretino, who drew heavily on the Golden Legend, integrates similar

references to milk-sharing in his Vita di Maria Vergine, intended above all to demonstrate Anne’s immaculate conception of her daughter Mary. Because of the resulting emphasis on the Virgin’s purity and modesty, he refrained from narrating the breastfeeding scene in any great detail;; instead, he refers to Anne summarily as “procreator and nurturer of Mary.”45 Nonetheless, numerous references to milk, breasts, and breastfeeding women embellish his account: at the moment of

40 Musacchio, The Art and Ritual of Childbirth.41 Backus, “Guillaume Postel,” 55.42 Ibid., 57–8.43 Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, vol. 2, 1009.44 Ibid., 1011.45 Aretino, La Vita di Maria Vergine, 9r.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

248

[of Anne].”46because of the crowds of breastfeeding mothers and nurses gathered in front of the temple: “Nobody had ever seen such a crowd … in front of him were women who breastfed, or let their children breastfeed, whereupon mothers and nurses jointly came forward … they clutched their infants to their breasts, trying to ward off being jostled about.”47mothers and nurses gather in the piazza, accompanying her procession.48 When Mary, grown up and pregnant herself, visits her cousin, the baby in Elizabeth’s womb “tastes the milk of her sweet greeting.”49Such references to breastfeeding mothers and wet nurses in Aretino’s

account of the Life of the Virgin Mary, which Tintoretto most certainly had read, provide the textual backdrop to his frequent depiction of lactation scenes. In his Presentation of the Virgin to the Temple (1553–56), for example, three mother-daughter couples, one of them nursing, watch Mary’s ascent of the staircase to the temple (Figure 12.4). In his two paintings of the Birth of Saint John the Baptist,

reminds of her representation and veneration as Madonna Lactans in late medieval and Renaissance Italian art and devotion. Moreover, Mary’s tender attentions

extends to her own, yet-to-be-born, son, and foreshadow her future role as mother of all believers in Christ. In contemporary depictions of the Madonna Lactans, Mary very often establishes eye contact with John the Baptist while baby Christ is nursing from her breast.50Unlike in Ghirlandaio’s fresco of the same motif, the breastfeeding episode in

Tintoretto’s Birth of Saint John the Baptist is functionally related to the presence of the Virgin Mary. In Ghirlandaio’s classicizing representation, the Virgin Mary is conspicuously absent, but she seems to have been replaced by what Aby Warburg took to be a reminder of antiquity, a dynamic parergon [bewegtes Beiwerk] in the

head as cornucopia.51 This omission of the Virgin Mary—alluded to in the Gospel of Luke and “well-documented” in the Golden Legend—points to a more secular understanding of the lactation scene, perhaps in reference to the more widely acknowledged role of wet-nursing and non-maternal infant care in Florence, Siena,

46 Ibid., 11v.47 Ibid., 13r.48 Ibid., 13v.49 Ibid., 44v.50 See, for example, Andrea del Sarto, Madonna and Child with Saints Catherine,

Elizabeth, and John (1519), Saint Petersburg, Hermitage Museum.51 Patricia Simons, “The Social and Religious Context of Iconographic Oddity:

Breastfeeding in Ghirlandaio’s Birth of the Baptist,” present volume;; Aby Warburg, The , trans. David Britt (Los Angeles, 1999), 380, 398–9.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


and other Tuscan cities.52 In Tintoretto’s spiritualized, but also more eroticized, representation, the breastfeeding scene links the three miraculous pregnancies and deliveries of Anne, Elizabeth, and Mary, united by their emphasis on asexual fertility, preannouncements and foreshadowing. The circularity of Mary’s identity as “she who has generated him who has generated her,” and her triple role as mother, daughter, and bride of Christ creates a certain excess of connectivity in its break with the demands of linear temporality and causality.53 Such a spillover of

capture in depicting Mary as “almost” breastfeeding the precursor. In addition, the artist’s well-known virtuosity at foreshortening appears to be a formal application of the foreshadowing of Christ-centered events in the religious literature that inspired him.

52 Diana Bullen Presciutti, “Picturing Institutional Wet-Nursing in Medicean Siena,” present volume.

53 Aretino, L’Humanità di Christo, 8v.

Fig. 12.4 Tintoretto, Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, 1553–65, Madonna dell’Orto, Venice. Photo Credit: Studio Bohm – Venezia.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

250

Tintoretto’s repeated, even programmatic, use of lactation imagery is unique in the Venetian context. While the iconography of the Madonna Lactans was booming in central and northern Italy since the fourteenth century—including Verona and Padua—and the allegorical representation of Charity as a breastfeeding woman rapidly developing, similar imagery remained rare in Venice.54 Apart from the early medieval Byzantine ciborium with its depiction of Saint Anne breastfeeding the Virgin Mary, no lactation imagery seems to have been produced until Paolo Veneziano (d. 1358), Lorenzo Veneziano (1356–72), Giovanni da Bologna (active in Venice 1377–89), and an unknown artist participated in a short-lived Venetian craze for representations of the Madonna Lactansbreastfeeding imagery was especially rare: one sculpted Charity was produced for the Arch of Foscari at the Ducal Palace, and a mosaic under this title can be found, next to Faith and Hope, in Saint Mark’s Chapel. In the art of Carpaccio and the Bellini clan, lactation imagery is conspicuously absent.When, in 1509, Giorgione (1477/78–1510) painted his Tempest, featuring an

enigmatic, nude, breastfeeding woman sitting in a landscape, he single-handedly re-introduced lactation imagery to Venetian art, not without revolutionizing its usage and meaning. In this painting, the allegorical function of breastfeeding is presented as a riddle to be solved. The woman’s nude and lactating female body,

Charity but the

Cranach (1472–1553), whose many nude charities share the transparent veil pioneered by Giorgione.55 In 1515, Tiziano invented the iconography of what I like to call “the breastfeeding woman in the corner” in his huge print depicting the Crossing of the Red Sea, which inspired Tintoretto and later Palma the Younger.

the peace, fertility, and happiness the Israelites hope for after their exodus from Egypt. Titian might have known of the use of the motif by Giovanni Antonio Corona (1481–1528), who, a few years earlier, had painted a similar breastfeeding scene as part of his fresco The Preaching of Saint Anthony (1508–09) in the Scuola del Santo in Padua.56 Also on the terraferma, Marcello Fogolino (ca. 1483–1525) created a frieze with mythological scenes in the Villa Trissino-Muttoni in Vicenza, featuring an allegory of Charity

54 Margaret Miles, “The Virgin’s One Bare Breast: Female Nudity and Religious Meaning in Tuscan Early Renaissance Culture,” in Susan R. Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture (Cambridge, MA, 1986), 193–208;; Megan Holmes, “Disrobing the Virgin: The Madonna Lactans in Fifteenth-Century Florentine Art,” in Geraldine A. Johnson and Sara F. Matthews Grieco, eds, Italy (Cambridge, 1997), 167–95.

55 Jutta G. Sperling, “Charity’s Nudity and the Veil of Allegory,” in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Joseph Connors (Milan and Cambridge, MA, forthcoming 2013).

56 Mauro Lucco, ed., (3 vols, Milan, 1996), vol. 1, 173–4;; and ibid., vol. 3, 1282. I am grateful to Monika Schmitter for having mentioned this image to me.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


20).57of the Padri Riformati in Asolo, showing Saint Anne with Baby Mary, Enthroned.

engorged breast to the viewer.58These are some of the visual resources Tintoretto might have drawn on in

developing his own agenda for the representation of breastfeeding women as

painting was The Presentation of Christ in the Temple in the church of Santa Maria dei Carmini (1541–42), depicting a breastfeeding woman in the lower left corner, who is watching the circumcision of Jesus while soothing her own son and waiting for his turn (Figure 12.5).59 This painting was followed by a long line of religious paintings that feature breastfeeding women and women with small children in their care, but also servants in the act of preparing and serving of food. These women “extras” are always prominently displayed in the foreground of his pictures, oversized due to his love for extreme foreshortening. The representation of women engaged in a variety of reproductive activities not only embellishes and enlivens the scenes in which they participate as servants or innocent by-standers

compelled to assume.60

Venetian art. Apart from the Byzantine ciborium mentioned above, he might have been familiar with fourteenth-century depictions of the Birth of Saint John the Baptist and the Birth of the Virgin Mary in Padua, particularly the renderings by Giotto in the Scrovegni Chapel and by Giusto de’ Menabuoi in the Basilica

the Nativity of the Virgin Mary after designs by Michele Giambono and Jacopo Bellini;; and an altarpiece on the same topic by Bartolomeo Vivarini in the church of Santa Maria Formosa. To my knowledge, no other such picture was made in Venice until Tintoretto’s Hermitage painting in 1554.Tintoretto’s introduction of the nativity of Saint John the Baptist into

and religious traditions of his hometown. Saint John the Baptist was, after all, the patron saint of Florence, which is why the story of his birth needed to be

57 This frieze is now at the Ca d’Oro, Venice.58 I am grateful to Patricia Simons for having pointed out this painting to me.

Alessandro Ballarin, Jacopo Bassano. Tavole 59

di Jacopo Tintoretto ai Carmini: Lettura per frammenti di una pala e di un contesto,” Venezia , 31 (2006): 189–272, especially 216;; Roland Krischel, “Ein unbekanntes und

einige wenige beachtete Gemälde des Jacopo Tintoretto,” Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch, 53 (1992): 45–94.

60 Sperling, “Allegories of Charity.”


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

252

Fig. 12.5 Tintoretto, Circumcision of Christ, 1541–42, Santa Maria dei Carmini, Venice. Photo Credit: Studio Bohm – Venezia.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344


particularities consist of references to early Christian apocryphal texts such as the Protevangelio or Book of James and their repercussions in pre-Tridentine popular religious literature, as well as Byzantine art displayed in Saint Mark’s Chapel. These references imply a vivid focus on the representation of women engaged in reproductive activities—women who, in Tintoretto’s art, assume the triple role of decorative detail, embodied Charity, and active participants in the narrative of salvation history. All of these features provide a counter-discourse to the Roman Church’s contemporary stress on orthodoxy, especially after the Council of Trent (1545–63). The emphasis on breastfeeding as allegorized charity shows how Tintoretto’s vision of piety deviates from the Tridentine Church’s normative ideals. Rather than depicting charity as an abstract virtue or institutionalized ideal of giving, Tintoretto views it as an extension of maternal practices, and he insists

connectivity creates for the community of Christian believers as well as their neighbors. Moreover, he presents Charity as a distinctly Venetian ideal. The nuns of San Zaccaria, then, must have viewed Tintoretto’s depiction of their name saint’s son and the circumstances of his birth as useful in their efforts to distance themselves from the dictates of the Church of Rome, and to insist on their ancient convent’s Byzantine traditions.


Proof Copy


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Chapter 13 Full of Grace:

Lactation, Expression and “Colorito” Painting in Some Early Works by Rubens

J. Vanessa Lyon

And though we cannot but observe in all his [Rubens’s] Paintings, somewhat of great and noble;; yet it must be confess’d, that generally speaking, he design’d not correctly: But for all the other parts of Painting, he was as absolute a Master of them, and possess’d them all as throughly as any of his Predecessors in that noble Art. His principal Studies were made in Lombardy, after the Works of Titian, Paul Veronese and Tintoret;; whose Cream he has skimm’d (if you will allow the Phrase) and extracted from their several Beauties many general Maxims and infallible Rules, which he always follow’d.1

In December of 1609, Peter Paul Rubens, a 32-year-old bachelor, abruptly returned to Antwerp following eight transformative years of artistic study and practice in Rome, Genoa, Mantua, Verona, and various Italian courts and cities in between.2 His mother, Maria Pipelinncx, was dying, and he had rushed back to the Spanish Netherlands to see her one last time, having sadly arrived too late. Just a few months later, presumably encouraged by Philip, his newlywed younger brother, Peter Paul married the rich, educated, and beautiful Isabella Brant, cousin of his brother’s equally well-off wife, Maria de Moy. Children soon followed. On 21

Serena. This beloved daughter was the couple’s only charge for three years until, in 1614, a son, Albert Rubens, joined the family. Four years later, in 1618, Isabella gave birth to a third child, Nicolas.Rubens’s touchingly candid drawings and genteel oil portraits of his children

in their early years are well known.3 It would seem the bustling Italianate palazzo/studio on the Wapper was never without an infant or a toddling child from around

1 Charles-Alphonse Dufresnoy, The Art of Painting, trans. John Dryden (London, 1695), 225.

2 For Rubens’s engagement of the Italian tradition, see Michael Jaffè, Rubens and Italy (Ithaca, 1977).

3 See, e.g., the chalk drawings in the Albertina, Vienna: Head of a Young Girl, probably Clara Serena, ca. 1615;; A Boy with a Coral Necklace, probably Nicolas, ca. 1619;; Nicolas Rubens, ca. 1625. See also the full-length portrait of Albert and Nicolas Rubens, ca. 1626, Sammungen des Fürsten von Liechtenstein, Vaduz.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

256

1611 until the early 1620s. This incursion of family life on high art is borne out in many of Rubens’s contemporaneous history paintings and devotional works from the productive ten years following his return to Antwerp. Indeed, although the connection is not generally remarked, Rubens’s substantial corpus of “lactation imagery” closely corresponds to the decade when his three children would have been nursed and weaned, quite possibly by their mother.4 Nor is it coincidental that many of the splendid “garland paintings” of the Madonna and Child—often

Jan Brueghel—date from this period as well. It has been persuasively argued that Rubens’s children served as models for the apple-cheeked putti he contributed to many of these ebullient and meticulously observed works.5As one might expect from an artist recently returned to post-iconoclasm

Antwerp—a devoutly Catholic city whose patroness was the Virgin Mary—scenes of Marian motherly tenderness and family feeling frequently appear in Rubens’s compositions. But while it may not be surprising that Rubens’s artistic choices

and lactation imagery from this period has little to do with mothers and babies. In fact, depictions of the Madonna actively or actually suckling Jesus are wholly

thousand works, Rubens portrays Mary expressing milk for her infant son only once.The Potsdam “Nursing Madonna” (Figure 13.1) can be situated among a

group of formally related lactation paintings dating from the second decade of the seventeenth century. Executed around 1614–15, it is a small (65.8 cm x 51.2 cm) work presumably intended for private devotions.6 The panel may owe its modest scale and unabashed display of Mary’s breast and nipple to the Flemish

half-length format. Like earlier Netherlandish artists, Rubens has modernized the Virgin, imagining her as a dark-haired, rather serious-looking local girl who bears

4 to send her children to a wet nurse in the country, which was often deemed safer and more

an early age may also indicate his access to them at home. For early modern breastfeeding practices, see the invaluable Valerie Fildes, Wet Nursing (Oxford/New York, 1988), especially 79–100.

5 On this point, see David Freedberg, “On the Origins and Rise of the Flemish Madonnas in Flower Garlands,” Münchner Jahrbuch, 32 (1981): 134. For the collaborative nature of the garland paintings see Rubens and Brueghel: A Working Friendship, exh. cat. Anne T. Woollett and Ariane van Suchtelen, eds, with Tiarna Doherty, Mark Leonard, and Jørgen Wadum (Los Angeles, 2006), 116–21.

6 Many copies were evidently made of this panel;; the version discussed here (Sanssouci) is considered autograph by Michael Jaffé, Rubens: Catalogo Completo (Milan, 1989), 200, no. 280.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Full of Grace 257

7 His Mary awkwardly braces herself over a corpulent charge whose bent-kneed posture echoes the expansively

baby Jesus reaches not for his mother’s almost imperceptibly lactating breast but for her sweetly solicitous face, as if to acknowledge her adoration and perhaps her prescience as well. For in the baby’s supine, cloth-bound pose Rubens may have wished to foreshadow the adult Christ’s entombment.Despite the reciprocity of their body language, Rubens’s baby Jesus makes no

physical contact with Mary. Following convention, the painter might easily have portrayed him with his lips at Mary’s nipple. Instead, this seemingly affectionate encounter between the Madonna and her holy child is predicated on distance and separation.8 Although Jesus looks to his mother, Rubens expertly redirects our attention to him such that Mary’s focus becomes our focus. Indeed, the painter’s determination not to show a Nursing Madonna suggests that he may have been reluctant to portray the Son of God in the midst of so mortal an act as suckling and thus explicitly reliant on bodily sustenance derived from a woman. Reticence on theological grounds to render the Christ child in a position underscoring his ontological vulnerability accords well with Rubens’s typological tendency to

7 Compare, for example, Rubens’s likeness of a youthful Isabella portrayed as Glycera or Flora (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).

8 Literally “laid to rest” before his adoring Mother, Jesus’ posture resembles that

Madonna, ca. 1460 (Metropolitan Museum of Art) and the Virgin and Child with Saint John and a Female Saint, before 1504 (Galleria dell’Accademia di Venezia). On the meanings and representation of maternity in Bellini’s Madonnas of this type, see the pioneering studies by Rona Goffen, “Icon and Vision: Giovanni Bellini’s Half-Length Madonnas,” The Art Bulletin, 57, 4 (1975): 487–518;; and Julia Kristeva, “Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini,” in Leon S. Roudiez, ed., Desire in Language (New York, 1980), 237–70.

Fig. 13.1 Peter Paul Rubens, Nursing Madonna, ca. 1614, Schloss Sanssouci, Potsdam. Photo Credit: Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

258

would become Christ standing unaided on his Mother’s lap.Clearly, Rubens sought an alternative to the earthier nursing Madonnas shown

in media res by his near contemporaries Agostino Carracci, El Greco, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Jusepe de Ribera. This can be seen in his Holy Family, ca. 1615

Nursing MadonnaHere a sleepy Jesus sweetly chucks his mother’s chin as his only slightly older second cousin, John, steadies himself on Mary’s knee. His back to the beholder, Saint John moves in excitedly to get a look at the baby in the manner a curious Clara Rubens might have responded to her new brother.Like John’s aged father, Zachariah, Mary is attentive to Jesus’ toddling

precursor, whose posture recalls the passage from John 3:29: “but the friend of the bridegroom, who standeth and heareth him, rejoiceth with joy because of the bridegroom’s voice.” Lowering her eyes to both Jesus and John, Mary has already eased her breast from the constricting, shelf-like neckline of an anachronously seventeenth-century, blue-sleeved vermillion dress. Neither her hands nor the baby’s mouth are positioned near the hint of an areola that seems to project a

to the nursing Madonnas by the artists mentioned above, Rubens seems wary of drawing, and drawing attention to, the raw mechanics and pleasurable mutuality of breastfeeding Jesus.Although infant and child mortality rates were exceedingly high in seventeenth-

century Europe—particularly in the Netherlands, which was repeatedly ravaged by plague—Rubens was a fortunate father. Unlike many in his town, he saw each child in turn reach toddlerhood and was undoubtedly aware of the crucial role of breastfeeding in the growth and survival of his family. Yet lactation evidently held an exalted status for Rubens beyond the familial and maternal. As a life-giving act, I want to suggest, nursing was, in a sense, too powerful to associate with the

redeem, but never as her subordinate. Rubens thus takes a tropological approach to nursing, recasting the everyday activity of feeding as a redemptive good work.

nursing symbolizes caritas, or Christian charity.But there may be something further to Rubens’s portrayal of feeding from the

breast as a transformative and meta/physical act of sensual, if not sexual, healing. Beyond a pictorial theology of charity, in other words, Rubens’s lactations might suggest an analogous relationship between the creative power of nursing and the creative power of painting. In this sense there was for him, it seems, a useful slippage between feeding the body, feeding the soul, and feeding the eyes;; between a woman’s capacity to nourish an infant with a crudely self-generated substance and his own ability to create human forms from colors derived out of equally base or primitive materials. In vividly depicting the female capacity to generate, mediate, and recuperate through milk-making, Rubens displays his parallel abilities as a


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Full of Grace 259

Fig. 13.2 Peter Paul Rubens, Holy Family with Saints Elizabeth and John the Baptist, ca. 1615, oil on panel (114.5 x 91.5 cm), Major Acquisitions Fund, 1967.229, Gallery 208, The Art Institute of Chicago (1967.229). Photo Credit: The Art Institute of Chicago.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

260

What follows is a discussion of three of Rubens’s extra-maternal “lactation” paintings from around 1611–15. It is intriguing that the most fully realized scenes of this type involve an attractive young mother and a much older man. Psychoanalytical implications aside, the painter’s recurrent re/staging of the subject offers the male artist-as-beholder the best of both worlds: he may imagine himself not only as the titillated recipient of the salutary milk but also as the mother, or creator, of its beautiful and virtuous source. What I wish to argue here is that by compositionally foregrounding an exclusively female act, and by representing it in a startlingly lifelike and naturalistic manner, Rubens exploits what was in his time the critically overdetermined “guilt by association” of colorito, or “painterly,” painting, perilously sensual female subjects, and their inevitably feminized (male) creators. Viewed in this light, Rubens’s lactation paintings help to construct nationalistic conventions of Flemish art as much as they exemplify them.

Style and the Man

Scholars have long recognized a change in Rubens’s style after the completion of the Michelangelesque altarpiece known as the Raising of the Crossca. 1611. Max Rooses notes of Rubens’s suddenly “calmer, sweeter and more human tone” in the central panel of the Descent from the Cross, the darkly solemn triptych installed in Antwerp’s cathedral church of Our Lady in 1614: “Whatever the reason that led him to adopt this new manner, he remained faithful to it for many years.”9 Perhaps one reason was the advent of Rubens’s family. For, along with his return to Flanders and his marriage, Rubens’s fatherhood corresponds to this decisive shift in his tone and the further construction of his identity as a Flemish painter in a characteristically Venetian mode.Nationalism, artistic style, and gender conventions are intimately connected in

the history of Renaissance and Baroque painting. At this point it may therefore be

the cinquecento aestheticization of the “robust male nude,” Rubens, as a Fleming, was perceived by critics from the outset of his career as a painter indebted to northern Italian exemplars.10 In the erstwhile critical debate over the superiority of disegno to colore, early modern art writers unanimously associated him with the painterly style embodied by Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto. One explanation for this was that for Rubens, as for his Venetian predecessors, the oil sketch—for

9 Max Rooses, Rubens, trans. Harold Child (London/Philadelphia, 1904), 171. 10 For Rubens’s early Michelangelesque drawings, see especially, Catherine Lusheck,

“Content in Form: Rubens’s Kneeling Man and the Graphic Reformation of the Ideal, Robust, Male Nude,” Jaarboek van het Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (2000): 126–63.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Full of Grace 261

which he seems to have coined the telling neologism “dissegno colorito”—was as much the norm as the pen or charcoal preparatory drawing.11As Flemish painting in a Venetian key, moreover, Rubens’s art was doubly

feminine in the minds of many theorists and critics. In his Roman Dialogues of 1548, Michelangelo’s Portuguese admirer, the painter Francisco de Holanda, famously attributed to the Florentine artist the assertion that painting in Flanders “is done without reason or art”—which inescapably renders it pleasing to the devout, most women, and others lacking appropriate discernment and cognitive skills.12 Similarly, in the revised edition of his Vite (1568), a likeminded Vasari, in the guise of Michelangelo, had not-so-subtly belittled Titian in the name of Florentine conceptual supremacy. As Vasari reported, when the divine Michelangelo had occasion to witness the execution of Titian’s famed reclining nude, the glittering Danae intended for Philip II, he observed that while the Venetian artist had pleased with his “coloring and style,” it was nonetheless “a shame that in Venice they did not learn to draw well from the beginning.”13 Much closer to Rubens’s time, Karel Van Mander, in his Schilder-Boek of 1604, duly takes issue with Michelangelo’s supposed reference to oil painting, of which Flemish artists were the acknowledged innovators, as “women’s work” in contrast to the “manly art” of Italian fresco.14 In this heated and parochial discourse of style, the Flanders-born but Amsterdam-

based Van Mander (1548–1606) forms an important link between Florentine antipathy and French enthusiasm for richly decorative, coloristic painting.15 In an anticipation of Roger de Piles’ polemical veneration of the informed practice of coloris painting over against the Roman tradition in part by underscoring its technical

16

essential practices used by the best Northern painters, many of which, such as

11 The phrase appears in a memorandum to Rubens’s patron, the Archduke Albert, in 1614. See Gregory Martin, “Rubens’s ‘Dissegno Colorito’ for Bishop Maes Reconsidered,” The Burlington Magazine, 110, 785 (1968): 434. For the evolution of the term from Rubens’s early use through the later seventeenth century, see Linda Bauer and George Bauer, “Artists’ Inventories and the Language of the Oil Sketch,” The Burlington Magazine, 141, 1158 (1999): 520–530.

12 For an elucidating revisionist account of de Holanda’s nuanced rhetoric (the subtleties of which were nonetheless ostensibly lost on most early modern readers), see Laura Camille Agoston, “Male/Female, Italy/Flanders, Michelangelo/Vittoria Colonna,” Renaissance Quarterly, 58, 4 (2005): 1175–219.

13 Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists, trans. George Bull (2 vols, London, 1965–87), vol. 1 (1965), 455.

14 Walter Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel Van Mander’s Shilder-Boeck (Chicago, 1991), 106.

15 On Van Mander’s formation and training, see Marjolein Leesberg, “Karel van Mander as a Painter Author,” Simiolus, 22 (1993–94): 5–57.

16 On the de Pilesian formulation of coloris, see Jacqueline Lichtenstein, The , trans. Emily

McVarish (Berkeley, 1989), especially 147, 156.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

262

lichtveerdic[heyt], or the “illusion of facile execution,” and poselijck[heyt], the

“deft handling of malleable pigment”), herald the signature qualities of Rubens’s art.17 But Van Mander is an exception in a period when nationalistic chauvinism

even the deftest naturalism threatened to descend into feminine caprice, instability, and want of technique whereas draftsmanship was equated with forethought, rationality, and masculine intellect.18As numerous drawings from his Italian period attest, Rubens was a practiced

and virtuosic draftsman. It was arguably his “feminized” subject matter: sensuous

destined him for the ranks of Titian’s painterly successors. Another Renaissance Venetian, Giorgio da Castelfranco, known as Giorgione, had shown in his enigmatic Tempesta, ca. 1507, that the chromatically dense and swift-handed painting style for which Rubens, too, was beginning to be known was indubitably well suited to a naturalistic rendering of a beautiful nursing or lactating woman. As Giorgione’s painting implies: if making painted bodies required the production and transformation of color by the presumably male artist, women were by nature capable of yielding not only milk but also children, those all-important heirs and descendants Rubens would describe to a fellow artist as “childworks.”19 As viscous and vital to an infant’s survival as a painter’s pigments were to his professional livelihood, breast milk was held in high esteem in Rubens’s age despite the conventionally inferior biological and intellectual status of its female source.

Juno and the Peacock

Latin Doctor Augustine of Hippo, whose commentaries are frequently punctuated with the imagery of nursing: “It was you [God] who, through them, gave me the food of my infancy.”20 For the more prosaic-minded, however, the origin of maternal

17 Van Mander cited in Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon, 104–5.18 On the gendering of the debate, see, for example, the pioneering

article by Patricia L. Reilly, “The Taming of the Blue: Writing Out Color in Italian Renaissance Theory,” in Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, eds, The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History (New York, 1992), 86–99. More recent studies include Philip Sohm, “Gendered Style in Italian Art Criticism from Michelangelo to Malvasia,” Renaissance Quarterly, 48, 4 (1995): 759–808;; Fedrika H. Jacobs, “Aretino and Michelangelo, Dolce and Titian: Femmina, Masculo, Grazia,” The Art Bulletin, 82, 1 (2000): 51–67.

19 See Rubens’s Letter (No. 250) to Lucas Fayd’herb, Antwerp, 9 May 1640, in Ruth Magurn, The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens (Evanston, 1957), 415. Rosenthal, Gender Politics, 230.

20 Augustine, Confessions, I: 6, quoted in Margaret Miles, A Complex Delight: The Secularization of the Breast, 1350–1750 (Berkeley, 2008), x.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Full of Grace 263

milk was surely the body of a woman, who, as even Aristotle and Aquinas had put it, “conceives in herself.” Accordingly, this procreative act, for it was nothing if not that, could sometimes ascribe to the nursing woman a degree of agency, power,

complex mythological works closely following Rubens’s return to Antwerp, the stunning and idiosyncratic painting known as Juno and Argus (ca. 1610–11) (Figure 13.3), bears mentioning in this context, for it characterizes the spectrum of color itself as the co-creation of two female divinities.21The storm has passed in the bright empyrean realm where the stately and

elegant queen of the Gods, Juno, has risen from a gleaming chariot to gather drops of breast-milk from her loyal lady-in-waiting. Rather than show the violent encounter between beleaguered Io’s hundred-eyed protector, Argus, and the messenger Mercury, who slays him at Juno’s behest, Rubens’s originary myth unfolds sometime after the violent fact. Nearest to the beholder, the headless body of Argus, here a sprawling, classicized nude, has fallen at Juno’s feet like

peacocks achieve a compositional prominence that far exceeds their rather perfunctory presence in frescoes of Juno by Veronese and Annibale Carracci near the end of the previous century.The fact that nearly half the canvas is allocated to these symbolic avian bodies

makes their narrative and interpretive value immediately clear. Hence it is the brilliantly fanned tail of the displaying bird and the leading left-to-right diagonal created by its mate that helps the viewer identify the myth through its dramatis personae. Noting that the splendid long-necked birds bracket the watchman’s decapitated head, the seventeenth-century mind might even have contrasted the goddess’ decollation of Argus with her decoration of the birds’ tail feathers. Yet in

Metamorphoses, the author is mainly concerned to explain the circumstances leading up to the creative act on which Rubens has chosen to focus:

Then [Mercury] rapidly struck with his magic wand to make sure [Argus] was out. Then he rapidly struck with his sickle-shaped sword at his nodding victim/just where the head comes close to the neck, and hurled him bleeding/down

light that had glittered in all those stars/was extinguished;; a hundred eyes were eclipsed in a single darkness. Juno extracted those eyes and gave them a setting like sparkling jewels in the feathers displayed on the tail of the peacock, her own bird (Met: I: 717–26).22

21 On Juno and Argus, see Aneta Geogievska-Shine, Rubens and the Archeology of Myth, 1610–1620 (Burlington, VT/Surrey, UK, 2009), 111–51. And see also Eveliina Juntunen, Peter Paul Rubens’ bildimplizite Kunsttheorie in ausgewählten mythologischen Historien (1611–1618) (Petersberg, 2005).

22 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. David Raeburn (London, 2004).


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

264

Hence the headless, if oddly sanitized, nude and the imposing constellation of tail feathers. But what of the lactating woman? Given the particulars of Ovid’s tale, the representation of Juno essentially milking her bare-breasted companion is necessarily recognized as a fascinating novelty in Rubens’s painting. Because she often occupies the role of Juno’s “handmaiden,” Rubens’s golden-

haired young woman is generally assumed to be Iris, an inchoate mythological 23 Elsewhere

in Metamorphoseswhere “Juno’s messenger, decked in her mantle of many colors, Iris the rainbow, sucked up moisture to thicken the clouds.”24 This meteorological reference likely explains the painting’s residually ominous cloud formations;; dark skies are reminders of the radiant rainbow’s dependence on moisture, itself gendered feminine in humoral terms.

23 Georgievska-Shine, Rubens and the Archaeology of Myth, 128.24 Ovid, Metamorphoses, I: 269–72.

Fig. 13.3 Peter Paul Rubens, Juno and Argus, ca.1610–11, oil on canvas, Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne. Photo Credit: Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Full of Grace 265

Yet, as Aneta Georgievska-Shine has noted, Iris was not frequently depicted by early modern artists.25 In Juno and Argus, a work viewed by some art historians as a visual-theoretical excursus on vision, sight and the production of color, Rubens conceives Iris as an alluring young woman swathed not in a coat of many colors but in monochromatic blue. Only the rainbow above her head intimates Iris’ role as the embodiment of insubstantial color, refracted through her being in an almost limitless range of hues.26capacities of “Iris, the rainbow” by grounding her in a human form;; his Iris is a vessel of feminine materiality in all its sticky alchemical abundance. When Juno the protector of women takes Iris as a wet nurse, the rainbow’s milk becomes the substrate of the peacock’s resplendent eyes, themselves an allegory of creative vision and representation.Notwithstanding Rubens’s unusual decision to personify Iris in so sensual

and corporeal a manner, it is her supposedly abstract meaning—rather than his employment of lactation—that has formed the basis of most studies of the painting to date. Beginning with investigations of Rubens’s color theory in relation to the optical ideas of his Jesuit friend and sometime collaborator Franciscus Aguilonius, Juno and Argus has been viewed almost entirely within the realm of science and philosophy, with little consideration of its gendered rhetoric. As Charles Parkhurst Jr. observed: “[W]hat is important is not the detailed understanding of the iconography, but that the subject is fundamentally an optical one dealing with eyes

pavonibus pictis.”27 Absent from the painted scene, as the author goes on to note, are the male actors Jupiter, Pan, and Mercury, a further indication that “history” is not really the artist’s interest. Rubens almost certainly had in mind the pictorial interdependence of color, light, and optics when he took up the origin of the feathered “eyes” of the “painted” bird. But it seems equally true that he sought to assert the natural

of Roman disegno). He meant to show, in other words, the marvelous artistic effects that could be derived from the judicious management of a rainbow of pigments and shades.In the discussion of color mixing in Aguilonius’ Optics (1613), for which

Rubens created six accompanying illustrations and a now well-known architectonic title page crowned with Juno and her peacock, the Jesuit author writes of a “nearly

28 How better to evoke the manifold splendors of color than by suggesting that the

25 Iris does, however, make an important appearance in Shakespeare’s The Tempest,

marriage masque, where she refers to Zeus’ consort as her “bounteous sister.”26 Georgievska-Shine, Rubens and the Archaeology of Myth, 130–133.27 See Charles Parkhurst, “Aguilonius’ Optics and Rubens’ Color,” Nederlands

Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 8 (1961): 35–49.28 Quoted in Parkhurst, “Aguilonius’ Optics,” 48.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

266

with drops of breast milk issuing from the mother of color herself? On careful examination, we see that this is exactly what takes place in the painting. For while Iris busies herself with the surgical slicing, or “extraction,” of the eyes, Juno

the bead of milk, an apt example of what Van Mander designated , or 29

may have to do with medicine no less than optics. It is worth noting that Rubens’s

of the eye. Thus the unusually explicit rendering of Juno’s method of adhering

medicinal, even thaumaturgical, qualities of milk. As the English doctor Thomas Muffet wrote in a medical treatise published in 1584: “Neither is women’s milk best only for young and tender infants, but also for men and women of riper years, fallen by age or by sickness into compositions.”30 Muffet’s recommendation indicates that in Rubens’s time the topos of Roman Charity—of an aged parent sustained by the milk of a nursing daughter—may have been understood in a more

Art historians have not been quick to make the correlation between milk and vision. Yet, as Marylynn Salmon has shown, “reliance on breast milk to treat eye problems may have been extensive” in early modern Europe and the American colonies. The pioneering French obstetrician Jacques Guillemeau observed in 1612:

some to milke into his eyes, if he should chance to have any imperfections there.”31 The fact that mother’s milk was commonly administered—often directly from the breast to the cornea or pupil, as in Rubens’s painting—was therefore likely to have

viewers might also appreciate Rubens’s homey explication of the painted bird’s starry eyes as the product of Iris’ milk, just as that plentiful constellation, the Milky Way, owed its mythological origins to Juno’s breast.32

29 Van Mander’s ideas are discussed in relation to other, more theoretical, aspects of the painting in Georgievska-Shine, Archaeology of Myth, 137. is described

Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon, 71.30 Thomas Muffet, Health’s Improvement (1584), quoted in Marylynn Salmon, “The

America,” Journal of Social History, 28, 2 (1994): 248–9.31 Jacques Guillemeau, Child-Birth or, The Happy Deliverie of Women (London,

1612) quoted in 32 Tintoretto had represented the story ca. 1575 in his Origin of the Milky Way (London,

National Gallery);; Rubens would not depict the subject until ca. 1636–38 (Madrid, Museo del Prado).


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Full of Grace 267

Regarding a related play of word and image, both Georgievska-Shine and Matthias Winner have pointed out the wittily homonymous coincidence of pupilla [eye] and papilla [breast]. Georgievska-Shine, in her painstaking philological study, suggests that Rubens would likely have wished to suggest a “simile between Iris’s breast [gemma] and Argus’s eyes as the ‘starry jewels’ [gemmis stellantibus] by relating them to the contemporary use of gems as paradigmatic examples of the colors of the spectrum.”33 She then goes even further, tentatively proposing Iris as an “aspect of ‘Virgo lactans’.”34 Yet the pursuit of this interesting possibility with respect to Rubens’s perception of maternity and/or breastfeeding, or in comparison with his contemporary Marian imagery, is never explored. Instead Iris’ crucial place in the painting’s narrative action is immediately translated into evidence of the underlying Neo-Platonism of Rubens’s “discourse” on cognition.While the painting’s most recent interpreters have also noted, with varying

degrees of emphasis, the empirical and Aristotelian underpinnings of the image vis-à-vis Aguilonius’ optical treatise, they have not made the distinctly Aristotelian connection between the (dangerous) sensuality of color and the moralized gendering of painterly colorito painting.35 Aristotle investigates the nature of the rainbow in the Meteorologica where he infers the relationship between ethereal clouds, rain, and the “trace of rainbow coloring.”36 Elsewhere in his works (De Anima II, De Sensuaccident of (female) matter rather than the substance of seminal (male) form.37 This characteristically dichotomous formula leads in turn to the conjunction of sensuality with femininity—for the perception of colorsense of sight. Thus the devalued notional network of matter, color, sensuality—and by extension, of an art availing itself of unbridled painting (versus cerebral draftsmanship)—is designated womanly or effeminate.

33 Aneta Georgievska-Shine, Archaeology of Myth, 130. See also the article that postdates Georgievska-Shine’s 1999 dissertation on the same subject, Matthias Winner, “Peter Paul Rubens’ ‘Juno and Argus’,” Ekkehard Mai and Eva Hartmann, eds, Die Zukunft Der Alten Meister (Wien, 2001), 197–8.

34 Georgievska-Shine, Archeology of Myth, 130. The author’s emphasis on the “Neo-Platonic” underpinnings of the painting as an allegory of the separation of Argus’ soul from

experience of the visible world. 35

of interest (and debate), for which see, for example, Michael Jaffé, “Rubens and Optics: Some Fresh Evidence,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 34 (1971): 362–6;; and Julius Held, “Rubens and Aguilonius: New Points of Contact,” The Art Bulletin, 61, 2 (1979): 257–64.

36 Aristotle, Meteorologica 375b, quoted in Raymond Lee and Alistair Fraser, The Rainbow Bridge: Rainbows in Art, Myth, and Science (University Park, 2001), 107.

37 See Deborah Karen Ward Modrak, “Sensation and Desire,” in Giorgios Anagnostopoulos, ed., A Companion to Aristotle (Oxford, 2009), 312–13.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

268

Moreover, just as Plato had gendered rhetoric itself as feminine, aligning it with the deceptive stylishness of “beauty culture,” Aristotle and Cicero saw color as an ornamental aspect of rhetoric.38 For the rhetor, color was additive and cosmetic, to be used sparingly and with care. And further, as David Summers explains:

central to classical rhetoric in its whole long tradition, its excess was a vice which was often metaphorically sexual and more or less explicitly gendered, the faulty style being “effeminate” or, worse, “wanton” or “seductive.”39During the Renaissance, “natural” excess and abundance themselves were

femininely gendered, though sometimes in positive terms, as Rebecca Zorach has demonstrated.40 Rubens’s painting is animated by each of these overlapping artistic, philosophical, and rhetorical conceits: nature’s excess and female fecundity, the sometimes adversarial relationship of masculine form and feminine matter, and the seductive persuasiveness of color/painting in and of themselves. Hence, to view Juno and Argus in a manner that admits its gendered valences even at the most elementary level is to recognize Rubens’s representation of a duo of female divinities partnered in the creative business of ornamenting nature by means of the uniquely sensual, sensible, material—and womanly—properties of lactation.

Charity: Roman and Otherwise

the Roman Charity in 1612 (Figure 13.4).41 To many modern viewers it is one of the least appealing, if not most disturbing, of his recurring themes. Yet the story was well known at the time, even serving as the unlikely central image for a large Flemish majolica serving platter dated on the reverse 1601.42 Not unlike the anonymous pottery painter, Rubens follows the general format for the scene established by numerous artists with whose works he would have been familiar,

38 See Plato, Gorgias, trans. Walter Hamilton (London, 1960), 44;; quoted in Lisa Ede, Cheryl Glenn, and Andrea Lunsford, “Border Crossings: Intersections of Rhetoric and Feminism,” Rhetorica, 13, 4 (1995): 422.

39 For an invaluable explication of the effects of Aristotelian form and matter on the gendering of art and (formalist) art history, see David Summers, “Form and Gender,” New Literary History, 24, 2 (Spring, 1993): 254–8 and 269–70, n. 23.

40 Rebecca Zorach, Blood, Milk, Ink Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance (Chicago, 2005), especially 83–103.

41 Elizabeth McGrath, Rubens: Subjects from History, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard (2 vols, London, 1997), vol. 2, pt. 13, 97–114.

42 For more on this platter, now in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, see Marcel Laurent, “Guido di Savino & the Earthenware of Antwerp,” The Burlington Magazine, 41, 237 (1922): 288–97.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Full of Grace 269

such as Giulio Romano and Perino del Vaga.43 For these sixteenth-century Italian artists, the formula consisted of a nubile young woman kneeling on the straw-

Having opened the undershirt beneath her simple dress, the young woman guides her breast to the lips of a listless old man slumped against the wall beside her, his arms invisibly bound behind him.So familiar was this peculiar-sounding encounter that the barest details would

have revealed its source. The key passage appears in a compilation of anecdotes,

43 Giulio Romano had included Cimon and Pero in a study for a classicized ceiling panel of the Sala degli Stucchi at the and Perino del Vaga, whose works Caravaggio had likely seen in Genoa, had executed a painting of the scene for the Palazzo Doria—with which Rubens was also familiar from his years in Genoa. For a summary of the Caravaggio literature concerning this painting and the subject of the Roman Charity more generally, see Anna Tuck-Scala, “Caravaggio’s Roman Charity in the Seven Acts of Mercy,” in Jeanne Chenault Porter and Susan C. Scott, eds, Parthenope’s Splendor: Art of the Golden Age in Naples (University Park, 1993), 130–146.

Fig. 13.4 Peter Paul Rubens, Roman Charity, ca. 1612, oil on canvas (140.5 x 180.3 cm), Collection of Count Cobenzl, Brussels 1768, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo Credit: The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

270

or exempla, designed to encourage moral living and known as the Facta et Dicta Memorabilia (Memorable Deeds and Sayings) of Valerius Maximus, a near

century Rome. Valerius treats of the “dutiful actions” of Pero toward her father Cimon (Mycon):

Her father, Mycon, when he was a very old man, suffered the same misfortune and was likewise sent to jail. Pero took his head to her breast and nursed him, as if he were a baby. When people look at a painting of this deed, they are amazed and cannot take their eyes away. As they admire the representation in front of them, the reality of what happened so long ago is brought back to life. In the silent depiction of those human forms, they believe they can see living and breathing bodies.44

The work was widely available, in translation, from the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century and was approvingly cited by Juan Luis Vives, Montaigne, and Rabelais, among many others.Rubens’s admired Italian predecessor, the bold and original Michelangelo

Merisi da Caravaggio, had been dead at least a year when Rubens painted his Roman Charity. It is highly improbable that the Fleming would have seen

the rather bizarre treatment of the story created by the Lombard painter just a few years earlier for an altar secreted away in the Neapolitan church of the Pio Monte della Misericordia. Closer to Antwerp, as Elizabeth McGrath has shown, sixteenth-century Northern printmakers such as Barthel and Hans Sebald Beham had already taken up the moralized breastfeeding theme, albeit in pointedly classicizing black and white images of a much smaller scale. It was a topos of enduring interest, however, as sometime after 1651, a popular print of Rubens’s Roman Charity made by Cornelis van Caukercken (1625–80) was dedicated to the painting’s owner at the time, Carel van den Bosch, the bishop of Bruges. As McGrath further notes, both the bishop’s possession of the painting and the dedicated print’s inscription, which begins: “now you see what real love is […]” attest to contemporary perception of Rubens’s image as an orthodox “exemplum pietatis.”45Why this should be the case is explained by a lingering pre-Tridentine impulse

to reconcile “pagan” exempla with Christian doctrine, oftentimes by reconceiving

New Testament. Juno, the queen of the Gods, for example, might be thought to anticipate Mary, as queen of heaven. Likewise, Pero’s daughterly love was thought to have been superseded by mother Mary, who extends the provision of comfort and sustenance beyond her immediate family to all believers, through the same curative properties of breast milk. As Saint Thomas observed in the Summa

44 Valerius Maximus, Memorable Words and Deeds, trans. Henry John Walker (Indianapolis, 2004), V. 4 ext. 1, 180.

45 McGrath, Rubens: Subjects from History, 99–101.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Full of Grace 271

Theologica, couching the quality in properly Aristotelian terms, the “moving cause of all the virtues” is charity:

Because we use the word “mother” of someone who conceives in herself, we call charity the “mother” of all the virtues, insofar as it is the end proper to charity that conceives to produce the actions of the other virtues. For the same reason, charity is called the root of all the virtues. (Q. 27 art. 3)46

Similarly, the “root” synecdoche of the trope of Roman Charity was therefore the breast, through which goodness was delivered for its ultimate purpose.Graphically and naturalistically depicted by prominent Counter-Reformation

artists, Mary’s naked breast may have been more symbolically and sexually charged in the seventeenth century than it had been in Aquinas’ time. As tireless assaults on nudity made by Tridentine clerics imply—and as Margaret Miles has argued—the breast seems to have acquired an even wider range of semiotic, and progressively erotic, meanings in Rubens’s era.47 Despite the story’s time-honored moral thrust and Christian meaning, Rubens’s pairing of Cimon and Pero surely skirts the boundaries of decorum. For unlike Caravaggio’s couple, divided by obvious age difference and a wall, Rubens’s unsettlingly athletic-looking father is offered not only an unmediated breast but the bare nipple of his pleasing daughter—a disarmingly lifelike representation of an exemplum whose potentially prurient details may be better left to the imagination.Nevertheless, Rubens and his studio would return to this seemingly irresistible

tale on subsequent occasions.48 It is presumably one of the four known versions of Cimon and Pero that is mentioned in the inventory of works in Rubens’s possession at the time of his death in 1640.49 At this earlier juncture in his career, however, the Roman Charitybeauty, can be seen as an incipient attempt to negotiate the ever-changing representational boundaries between naked piety and the irreverent nude. Rubens’s Roman Charity is consequently a painting whose pious message is destabilized by a daring coupling of chaste subject matter and eroticized form. Caravaggio had perhaps sought to mitigate the profane implications of his father-daughter

46 E.M. Atkins, Thomas Williams, eds, Virtues, trans. E.M. Atkins (Cambridge, 2005), 125.

47 Miles, A Complex Delight, 14.48 In addition to the painting discussed here (1612) and presently in St. Petersburg,

Hermitage, Rubens painted a version of the subject usually dated around 1625 and sold to a private collector in 1954;; a subsequent version of the subject (whereabouts unknown) was once in the collection at Blenheim;; chronologically the latest in the series is the canvas of ca. 1630 Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. See, on this subject, “Notable Works of Art Now on the Market: Supplement,” The Burlington Magazine, 96, 621 (1954): pl. X.

49 The painting may be the one listed in the inventory as: “a peice of the mayde that gave her father suck in the Prison,” see ibid., no.141. See also McGrath, Rubens, Subjects from History, 101.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

272

pair by inserting them within a broader doctrinal context. In the Italian painter’s mystical, composite vision of the Seven Works of Mercytwo charitable acts: visiting prisoners and feeding the hungry—the virtuous nature of which is underscored by the presence of Mary, Jesus, and a pair of angels. For Rubens, by contrast, the classical text provides an opportunity to portray a secularized and ostensibly private episode of adult suckling. In his painting the touch of lips to breast is therefore the central act. Perhaps unwittingly obscuring the boundaries between history and fantasy, Rubens presents a quasi-modern male/female dyad whose real world complementarity, or lack thereof, complicates

Caught Between

With similarly mismatched protagonists in mind, an early medieval French version of a popular Cistercian legend describes the well-known lactation “vision” of Saint

saint had eventually fallen asleep, when: “our Lady put her holy breast into his mouth and he received the divine knowledge.”50 Through the expression of milk, Mary thus allowed Bernard to “taste and see” as he literally ingested spiritual sight with the substance of her bodily excretions. Drawing on his visions, Bernard explained the symbolic meaning of his experience in sermons written for the liturgical period following Mary’s heavenward “Assumption.” The saint was well known for his special devotion to the Virgin, and mystical preaching of this kind was meant to establish Mary’s place within the Church’s hierarchy of intercession. As an explication of Mary’s celestial life after her earthly death, then, Bernard’s words were intended to clarify the Virgin’s continued spiritual value for believers: “Mary came to pour salvation’s antidote over both man and woman. […] She bared the breast of mercy to all men so that they might all receive its abundance, and

comfort, the sinner, forgiveness.”51 This Marian allegory contains a theological suggestion that becomes quite radical in the hands of the crusading monk. Bernard acclaims Mary not only as mediatrix but also as co-redemptrix or co-Redeemer, stating openly that her resurrection grants her the ability to forgive sinners—just as Christ does. The notion that Mary performs a parallel function alongside Christ derives from numerous sources, including the apocryphal legends of her dormition. When Mary is called to heaven as her son’s bride, the ensuing allegorical marriage of Christ and his Church necessitates a surprisingly equilateral, or gender neutral, understanding of power-sharing between the newlyweds.

50 G. Blangez, ed. Ci nous dit. Receuil d’examples moraux (Paris, 1979–86), 205;; cited in Victor Stoichita, Visionary Painting in the Golden Age of Spanish Art (London, 1995), 135.

51 Patrologia Latina 183, col. 438;; cited in Stoichita, Visionary Painting, 144.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Full of Grace 273

The tropological conceit of Roman Charity—of the adult male receiving sustenance from the young mother—resonates well with the Bernardine lactation

52 For example, widely distributed Flemish prints by the Wierix brothers depicting Mary as co-redemptrix

St. Augustine between Christ and the Virgin Mary of ca. 1615 (Figure 13.5), a painting based on a phrase inaccurately attributed at the time to Saint Augustine. Thus to the author of the Confessions and The City of God, seventeenth-century Catholics also ascribed an uncharacteristic expression of gendered uncertainty: “Hinc pascor a vulnere: hinc lactor ab ubere. Positus in medio, quo me vertam nescio” [From this source, I gaze at the wound;; from this source, I nurse at the breast. Placed in the middle, I do not know where to turn].53John Knipping traced the origin of Rubens’s odd painting not only to the

pseudo-Augustinian passage but also to his knowledge of a heated but short-lived controversy over a legendary Dutch stained-glass window devoted to the same topos. In 1597, according to this story, Gijsbert Masius, the long-suffering Catholic bishop of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, had commissioned for the Church of the Holy Cross the aforementioned window—or possibly a painting—representing himself,

52 For Bernardine lactation scenes in early sixteenth-century Cistercian convents, see Andrea Pearson, “Nuns, Images, and the Ideals of Women’s Monasticism: Two Paintings from the Cistercian Convent of Flines,” Renaissance Quarterly, 54, 4, part 2 (2001): 1356–1402.

53 Patrologia Latina, 185, col. 878. See also John Knipping, Iconography of the Counter Reformation in the Netherlands (2 vols, Nieuwkoop, 1974), vol. 2, 275.

Fig. 13.5 Peter Paul Rubens, St. Augustine between Christ and the Virgin Mary, ca. 1615, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid. Photo Credit: Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

274

Virgin. An anonymous print of 1614, just slightly earlier than Rubens’s painting, purports to represent the historical circumstances.54 Not surprisingly, perhaps, local reaction to the peculiar image by the Dutch Calvinist majority had resulted in a brief pamphlet war, the details of which are fairly predictable: despite its supposed patristic/textual origins, the Catholic cleric’s image was deemed idolatrous, and the bishop himself was lampooned for his silly and faithless inability to choose.

one should ultimately place one’s faith and trust, given the choice between the Son of God and a virtuous but otherwise normal human woman. From the standpoint of Calvinist piety, the brouhaha accompanying the print attests to the dangerous leveling effect of proposed equivalences between Mary’s breast/milk and Christ’s wound/blood. Moreover, the Dutch bishop’s indecision mirrors the devotional quandary—itself an inconstant, inherently female state of mind—in which many seventeenth-century Catholic believers might have found themselves. Flanked by

No answer is provided by Rubens’s Augustine, who kneels on one of the hefty tomes that often accompany him. Despite the slightly awkward incursion of Mary on his left and Christ on his right, the swarthy and redoubtable bishop of Hippo addresses his eyes resolutely heavenward. This although Rubens is quite explicit

gash in his side, staining his pristine white mantle. Here, recalling the Nursing Madonna of the same year, Rubens treats Mary’s body with the same nipple-baring

gesture seen in Gentileschi and Carracci’s breastfeeding Madonnas. Making a

improbably high, but believably full breast. Matronly and attractive, Mary’s face

Saint Augustine as if to assure him that he has but to turn her way to avail himself

unusual reversal of gendered weather conditions, the Virgin is bathed in a solar radiance she herself seems to generate while Christ exudes only a faint, lunar luminosity from the depths of a black, tumultuous sky. Perhaps most importantly, the reality and validity of Marian intercession receives Christ’s blessing. With an air of fascination, the lithe, soft-bodied Son of God directs his gaze, and with it the beholder’s attention, to his mother’s breast, watching approvingly as she makes her charitable offering to the father of Charity himself. This bold transformation

presented as living, or at least physical, beings whose bodies occupy the same

54 Knipping, Iconography of the Counter Reformation, vol. 2, 275.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Full of Grace 275

space as the saint. Using lactation as the signal trope, Rubens proposes a world in which Mary’s equality with Christ, evinced by her embodiment and provision of loving forgiveness, can be safely represented as perceptible, palpable, and full of painterly color and grace.In Flanders, as in France—and Italy, where the falsely Augustinian passage

may have originated—there were numerous printed and painted precedents for the display of Mary’s lactating breast. But none possessed the rich color, sensual immediacy, and ambitious, even heroic, scale of Rubens’s painting.55 Surely beholders familiar with the artist’s earlier works would have been struck by the infantilizing effect of so Junoesque a mother on Rubens’s uncharacteristically subdued Church father. Perhaps it is not surprising in this respect that the painting, housed today in Madrid’s Museo de las Bellas Artes de San Fernando, was intended for a Spanish patron for whom a blazingly brilliant Rubensian version of the Bernardine legend may have held a particular appeal.The upright Mary of the Augustine picture wears a periwinkle-lined, ultramarine

mantle. Yet her blood-red dress and billowing gauze veil echo the crimson gown of Rubens’s somewhat younger-looking, and by Petrarchan standards prettier, lactating Pero. This standing co-redemptrix Mary also closely resembles Rubens’s right-facing Juno, whose cleavage spills over her bodice—just as the divine Juno relates in turn to the image with which we began, the non-nursing Nursing Madonna of 1614.

Conclusion

sought to express a range of values and capacities through what was apparently

representing the Virgin Mary—for Catholics the archetype of virtuous mothers and exceptional women—with a suckling Jesus at her breast. Instead, lactating

allegorical settings where their essentially generative and generous natures, rather than their biological motherhood as such, were emphasized.That these women who offer their breasts also unanimously bow their heads,

looking not to the viewer but to the male or males with whom they share the composition, implies, I think, a certain Rubensian ambivalence about their power. Having created such alluring mediators, Rubens seems intent on curtailing their engagement of the beholder even as he delights in making them narratively central and invitingly life-like. Rubens’s rather short-lived valorization of breastfeeding is not, in any case, a seventeenth-century example of art imitating life. With the telling exception of the Nursing Madonna, the genteel mothers he represents

55 For a useful survey of musical, visual, and literary treatments of this pseudo-Augustinian text, see Kate Bartel, “Portal of the Skies: Four Scenes in the Musical Life of the Virgin Mary, ca. 1500–1650” (PhD diss., UCLA, 2007), 25–143.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

276

are not involved in the nourishment and sustenance of children like his own. In fact, Rubens seems ultimately to have judged the nursing theme prohibitively provocative except in the most profane of subjects (one thinks of the insatiable baby satyrs and their animalistic, balloon-breasted mothers in the Silenus paintings that also derive from Rubens’s childrearing years).In the hands of so talented a colorist, the “graphic” representation of the

sensual and benevolent act of suckling might unintentionally subordinate the infant Christ or perversely eroticize the Virgin breast. As has often been observed,

proportion to its excellence. Going forward, then, Rubens seems to have tempered his desire to paint the virtuously bare nursing breast with a refusal to portray its use or “function” as a source of life, strength, and, potentially, desire and pleasure. In this he may have wished to proclaim Marian exceptionality by isolating her, in the end, from the everyday experience of even the noblest of women, such as his own wife. He may also have wished to emphasize Christ’s status as the Son of God rather than the son of Mary. He may even have wished to excite the viewer with a believable rendering of a portion of woman’s body not normally on view,

“executed with one dash of the brush and infused with one breath,” as Bellori would later begrudgingly describe them.56Whatever his reasons, Rubens would not return in earnest to the subject of the

Holy Family and the affective relations between the Virgin mother and child until the time of his second marriage to the teenage Helena Fourment, with whom he fathered four children between 1632 and 1637. In these paintings, too, however, the baby Jesus stands on the knee of his mother, whose exposed breast is seemingly offered for the visual delight of Rubens’s viewers rather than the feeding of her son.

Postscript

In 1621, the celebrated Dutch scholar-poet Anna Roemer Visscher (1581–1651)

the act of breastfeeding, his Nursing Madonnaand the painter were friends and mutual admirers. Roemer Visscher, who was a practiced decorator of glass, took the occasion to compose for Rubens several passages of verse describing her attempts to make a copy of the “miraculous” painting that, thanks to its creator, “speaks without voice.” To Roemer Visscher, the charms of the painting were both its subject and its style. She especially appreciates—and makes good rhetorical use of—Rubens’s ability to capture the delightful “badinage” between the new mother and her divine son. “My sweet little angel,” she hears Mary cooing, “are you well fed?” This dramatic ekphrasis

56 Giovan Pietro Bellori, The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Alice Sedgwick Wohl, notes by Hellmut Wohl, introduction by Tomaso Montanari (New York, 2005), 206.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Full of Grace 277

concludes with a description of the admirable manner in which Mary “once more presses her breast and expresses white milk onto the sweet face of her innocent babe.”57Like the purchase of Rubens’s Roman Charity by a Catholic bishop of

Flanders, Roemer Visscher’s poem is remarkably apposite. It neatly conforms to “Michelangelo’s” description of the typical audience of Flemish (devotional) painting, i.e., women in general as well as monks, nuns, and other irrational but pious types. In addition, the poem usefully documents one woman’s “typical” enthusiasm for Rubens’s lively “colorito” in the service of a sensual subject. Women, by the standard appraisal, were attracted to and moved by images of women and other colorful and cloying subjects, which in Roemer Visscher’s case seems true.Yet the Dutch poet’s letter also demonstrates some ways in which a familiar,

domestic image of motherhood created by a male artist was vulnerable not only to imitation but also appropriation, and revision, by a woman. Indeed, Roemer Visscher was not interested in sentiment alone. An artist herself, she includes a revealing query among the many compliments paid to Rubens in the letter containing her nursing verse: Would he be so kind, she coyly asks, to inform her how he grinds his “white” to remain so bright with hardly any trace of yellowing or age?58 In the midst of making a Rubens of her own, the Dutch artist asks pressing questions about artistic technique, gleaning what she can about mixing colors from a Flemish master celebrated for his handling of paint as well as women. In this respect, Rubens and his Nursing Madonna were literally feminized by precisely the kind of empathetic female beholder his Vasarian critics imagined for them.

57 The text of the poem is reproduced in the original Dutch in Rooses, Rubens, 253. 58 “Je vous prie de bien vouloir m’écrire comment vous faites broyer votre blanc qui

French are mine.


Proof Copy


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Bibliography

Abelly, Louis, Sacrement de l’Eucharistie, par Messire Louis Abelly, Evêque de Rhodez (Paris: Chez la Veuve Georges Josse, 1678).

Acoromboni, Girolamo, Tractatus de Lacte (Venice, 1536).Adelman, Janet, “Born of Woman’: Fantasies of Maternal Power in Macbeth,” in Marjorie Garber, ed., Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce: Estranging the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 90–121.

Ago, Renata, “Oltre la dote: i beni femminili,” in Angela Groppi, ed., Il lavoro delle donne (Bari: Laterza, 1996), 164–82.

Agoston, Laura Camille, “Male/Female, Italy/Flanders, Michelangelo/Vittoria Colonna,” Renaissance Quarterly, 58, 4 (2005): 1175–1219.

Ahl, Diane Cole, Benozzo Gozzoli (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).Aikema, Bernard, Jacopo Bassano and His Public: Moralizing Pictures in an Age of Reform ca. 1535–1600 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

———, “L’Immagine della Carità Veneziana,” in Bernard Aikema, ed., Nel regno dei poveri: Arte e storia dei grandi ospedali veneziani in età moderna 1474–1797 (Venice: IRE, Istituzioni di Ricovero e di Educazione, 1988), 71–98.

Albala, Ken, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

Alberti, Leon Battista, I libri della famiglia, ed. Ruggiero Romano, Alberto Tenenti, and Francesco Furlan, 2nd ed. (Turin: G. Einaudi, 1994).

———, The Albertis of Florence: L.B. Alberti’s Della famiglia, trans. Guido A. Guarino (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1971).

———, The Family in Renaissance Florence, trans. Renée New Watkins (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1969).

Aldobrandino of Siena, Le régime du corps de maître Aldebrandin de Sienne, ed. Louis Landouzy and Roger Pépin (Paris: Champion, 1911).

Alfonso X, King of Castile and León, Cantigas de Santa María, ed. Walter Mettmann (2 vols, Vigo: Edicións Xerais de Galicia, 1981).

———, Songs of Holy Mary of Alfonso X, The Wise, A Translation of the Cantigas de Santa María, trans. Kathleen Kulp-Hill (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000).

Alighieri, Dante, , trans. Marianne Shapiro (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990).

———, , ed. Pio Rajna (Florence: Sanson, 1896).———, “De la volgare eloquenzia,” in Epistola del Trissino de le lettere nuovamente aggiunte ne la lingua italiana (Vicenza, 1529).

Amelang, James S., Honored Citizens of Barcelona. Patrician Culture and Class Relations, 1490–1714 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy

Medieval and Renaissance Lactations280

Aquapendente, Hieronymus Fabricius, The Embryological Treatises of , trans. Howard B. Adelmann (First

ed. 1621;; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1942).Aretino, Pietro, “L’Humanita di Christo,” in A la somma bonta di Giulio III

(Venice, 1552).———, “La Vita di Maria Vergine,” in A la somma bonta di Giulio III … (Venice, 1552).

Armistead, Samuel G., Joseph H. Silverman, and Israel Katz, Folk Literature of the Sephardic Jews: Judeo-Spanish Ballads from Oral Tradition;; Epic Ballads (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), vol. 2.1.

Aristotle, “The Generation of Animals,” in Jonathan Barnes, ed., The Complete Works of Aristotle (2 vols, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), vol. 1.

———, “History of Animals,” in Jonathan Barnes, ed., The Complete Works of Aristotle (2 vols, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), vol. 1.

———, Generation of Animals, trans. A.L. Peck (Loeb Classical Library, 366) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 1943).

———, History of Animals, Books I–III, trans. A.L. Peck (Loeb Classical Library, 437) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 1965).

Aselli, Gaspare, De lactibus sive lacteis venis, novo invento, ed. by Paolo Franceschini (Milan: Episteme, 1972) (First published 1628).

Atkins, E.M., and Thomas Williams, eds, on the Virtues, trans. E.M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Atkinson, Clarissa W., The Oldest Vocation: Christian Motherhood in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).

Backus, Irena, “Guillaume Postel. Théodore Bibliander et le “protévangile de Jacques: Introduction historique, édition et traduction française du MS. Londres, British Library, Sloane 1411, 260r–267r,” Apocrypha, 6 (1995): 6–65.

Badinter, Elisabeth, Mother Love: Myth and Reality, foreword Francine du Plessix Gray;; trans. Roger De Garis (New York: Macmillan, 1981).

Baldini, Umberto, ed., Santa Maria Novella: La basilica, il convento, i chiostri monumentali (Florence: Nardini, 1981).

Ballarin, Alessandro, Jacopo Bassano: Tavole (3 vols, Padua: Cittadella, 1996).Banchi, Luciano, I rettori dello Spedale di Santa Maria della Scala di Siena (Bologna: Tip. Fava e Garagnani, 1877).

Banchi, Luciano, ed., Statuti senesi scritti in volgare ne’ secoli XIII e XIV e pubblicati secondo i testi del R. Archivio di stato in Siena (3 vols, Bologna: G. Romagnoli, 1863–77), vol. 3 (1877).

Bar, Virginie, (Dijon: Faton, 2003).Barbaro, Francesco, “On Wifely Duties,” in Benjamin G. Kohl and Ronald G. Witt, eds, The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists on Government and Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978).


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Bibliography 281

———, “De re uxoria,” A. Gnesotto, ed., Atti e memorie della R. Accademia di scienze, lettere ed arti di Padova, n.s. 32 (1915–16): 6–105.

———, Centotrenta lettere inedite di Francesco Barbaro, ed. Remigio Sabbadini

Barbeau, Marius, Folk-Songs of Old Québec, National Museum of Canada Bulletin, 75 (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1964).

Barberino, Francesco da, Reggimento e costumi di donna, ed. Giuseppe E. Sansone (Turin: Loescher-Chiantore, 1957).

of the Villa Medici, Fiesole,” Burlington Magazine 111 (1969): 597–605.Barker, Sheila, “Poussin, Plague, and Early Modern Medicine,” The Art Bulletin 86, 4 (2004): 659–89.

Bartel, Kate, “Portal of the Skies: Four Scenes in the Musical Life of the Virgin Mary, ca. 1500–1650” (PhD diss., UCLA, 2007).

Bartholin, Thomas, The anatomical history of Thomas Bartholinus, doctor and kings professor, concerning the lacteal veins of the thorax, observ’d by him lately in man and beast publickly proposed by Michael Lyserus answering (London: Francis Leach for Octavian Pulleyn: 1653).

Batlle i Gallart, Carmen, El “llibre del consell” de la ciutat de Barcelona, segle XIV: Les eleccions municipals (Barcelona: Consell Superior d’Investigacions

———, Els Ciutadans Honrats de Barcelona: L’exemple dels Gualbes (segle xiv) (Barcelona: Rafael Dalmau, 2007).

Bätschmann, Oskar, , trans. Claire Brunet (Paris: Flammarion, 1994).

Baucells i Reig, Josep, “L’estament dels aprenents dels segles XIII i XIV segons els contractes notarials de Barcelona,” Estudios históricos y documentos de los Archivos de Protocolos, 6 (1978): 85–142.

Bauer, Linda, and George Bauer, “Artists’ Inventories and the Language of the Oil Sketch,” The Burlington Magazine, 141, no. 1158 (Sep., 1999): 520–530.

Baumgarten, Elisheva, Mothers and Children. Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

Baxandall, Michael, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972).

Beck, James H., Jacopo della Quercia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).

Béguin, Sylvie, “La Charité, un tableau de l’École de Fontainebleau récemment entré au Louvre,” L’Œil 210–211 (1972): 13–18.

Bell, Rudolph M., How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

Bell, Rudolph, Holy Anorexia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).Bellori, Giovan Pietro, The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Alice Sedgwick Wohl, notes by Hellmut Wohl;; introduction by Tomaso Montanari (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy


Benkheira, Mohammed Hocine, “Alliance, asymétrie et différence des sexes,” Islamic Law and Society, 13, 2 (2007): 191–7.

———, “Donner le sein c’est comme donner le jour,” Studia Islamica, 92 (2001): 5–52.

Benkheira, Mohammed Hocine, Avner Giladi, Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen, and Jacqueline Sublet, La famille en islam (Paris: forthcoming 2013).

Bensch, Stephen, “Apprenticeship, Wages and Guilds at Puigcerdà (1260–1300),” in Salvador Claramunt, ed., El mòn urbà a la corona d’Aragò del 1137 decrets de nova planta (3 vols, Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, 2003), vol. 1, 209–22.

Benson, Larry Dean, The Riverside Chaucer (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Bergmann, Emilie L., “Milking the Poor: Wetnursing and the Sexual Economy of Early Modern Spain,” in Eukene Lacarra, ed., Sexuality, Love and Marriage in Medieval and Early Renaissance Iberia, Hispanic Issues, 26 (London: Routledge, 2002), 139–76.

———, “Language and ‘Mother’s Milk’: Maternal Roles and the Nurturing Body in Early Modern Spanish Texts,” in Miller and Yavneh, eds, Maternal Measures, 105–20.

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Cantica Canticorum. Eighty-six Sermons on the Song of Solomon, Samuel J. Eales, ed. (London: Stock, 1895).

San Bernardino da Siena, Le prediche volgari di San Bernardino da Siena dette nella piazza del Campo l’anno 1427, ed. Luciano Banchi (Siena: Tip. edit. all’inseg. di S. Bernardino, (3 vols, 1880–1888), vol. 2 (1884).

Medieval Views of Kinship,” in David I. Kertzer and Richard P. Saller, eds, (New Haven: Yale University

Press, 1991), 150–167.Blunt, Anthony, Art and Architecture in France 1500–1700 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

Boeckle, Christine M., Images of Plague and Pestilence: Iconography and Iconology, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies LII (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2000).

Boerhaave, Herman, A New Method of Chemistry;; including the theory and practice of that art: Laid down on mechanical principles, and accommodated to the uses of life, trans. P. Shaw, and E. Chambers (London: J. Osborn and T. Longman, 1727);; (First Latin ed. Institutiones et experimenta chemiae Paris: [s.n.] 1724).

Bonfait, Olivier, “De Paleotti à G.B. Agucchi: théorie et pratique de la peinture dans les milieux ecclésiastiques à Rome du Caravage à Poussin,” in Michel Hochmann, ed., Roma 1630: Il trionfo del pennello, exhibition catalogue, Rome, Villa Médicis, 1994–1995 (Milan: Electa, 1994), 83–96.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Bibliography 283

Bonfait, Olivier, and Neil MacGregor, eds, Le Dieu caché: Les peintres du Grand , exhibition catalogue, Rome, Académie de France,

19 October 2000–28 January 2001 (Rome: Edizioni de Luca, 2000), 47–57.Bonfante, Larissa, “Nursing Mothers in Classical Art,” in Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow and Claire L. Lyons, eds, Naked Truths: Women, Sexuality, and Gender in Classical Art and Archaeology (New York: Routledge, 1997), 174–96.

Bonniwell, William, A History of the Dominican Liturgy 1215–1945 (2nd ed., New York: Joseph Wagner, 1945).

Borgia, Luigi, et al., Le Biccherne: Tavole dipinte delle magistrature senesi (secoli XIII–XVIII) (Rome: Ministero per i beni culturali e ambientali, 1984).

Boschetto, Luca, (Florence: Olschki, 2000).

Boskovits, Miklos, and David Alan Brown, Italian Paintings of the Fifteenth Century (Washington DC: National Gallery of Art, 2003).

Bossy, John, Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

Boyer, Jean-Claude, “Un amateur méconnu de Poussin: Gérard de Daillon,” in Alain Mérot, ed., Musée du Louvre du 19 au 21 octobre 1994 (2 vols, Paris: Musée du Louvre, 1996), vol. 2, 695–717.

Brême, Dominique, and Virginie Bar, les symboles de C. Ripa et J. Baudouin (Dijon: Faton, 1999).

Browne, John, Adenochoiradelogia, or, An anatomick-chirurgical treatise of glandules & strumaes (…) (London: Tho. Newcomb, 1684).

Brundage, James A., Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

Burke, Peter, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1st ed. 1978, 2nd 1994;; 3rd ed. 2009).

Butler, Judith, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

———, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993).

Bynum, Caroline Walker, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991).

———, Women (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987).

———, Jesus as Mother: Studies of the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley/Los Angeles/New York: University of California Press, 1982).

Cabré, Montserrat, “Medieval Women’s Writing in Catalan: Textual Inscriptions of Feminine Authority,” La Corónica, 32, 1 (2003): 23–41.

———, “Women or Healers? Household Practices and the Categories of Health Care in Late Medieval Iberia,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 82, 1 (2008): 18–51.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy


Cadden, Joan, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Cadogan, Jean, Domenico Ghirlandaio: Artist and Artisan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).

Carl, Doris, Benedetto da Maiano (2 vols, Turnhout: Brepols, 2006).Carli, Enzo, (Florence: Electa Editrice, 1950).

Cassidy, Brendan, “A Relic, Some Pictures, and the Mothers of Florence in the Late Fourteenth Century,” Gesta, 30 (1991): 91–9.

Castiglione, Caroline, Accounting for Affection: Mothering and Politics in Rome, 1640–1730, (forthcoming).

———, “Mothers and Children,” in John Jeffries Martin, ed., The Renaissance World (New York/London: McGraw-Hill, 2007), 381–97.

———, Patrons and Adversaries: Nobles and Villagers in Italian Politics, 1640–1760 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Cavalca, Fra Domenico, Vite de’ Santi Padri, ed. Bartolommeo Sorio and A.

Cavallo, Sandra, Artisans of the Body in Early Modern Italy: Families and Masculinities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).

Cecchini, Giovanni, “Le grance dell’ospedale di S. Maria della Scala di Siena,” Economia e storia, 3 (1959): 405–22.

Certaldo, Paolo da, “Libro di buoni costumi,” in Vittore Branca, ed., Mercanti scrittori: Ricordi nella Firenze tra Medioevo e Rinascimento (Milan: Rusconi, 1986).

Ceschi, Carlo, “La madre di Leon Battista Alberti,” Bollettino d’Arte, 33 (1948): 191–2.

Padova,” Archivio storico italiano, 40 (1907): 233–84.C[hamberlayne], T[homas] et al., The compleat midwifes practice, in the most weighty and high concernments of the birth of man. Containing perfect rules for midwifes and nurses, as also for women in their conception, bearing, and nursing of children: From the Experience not onely of our English, but also the most accomplisht and absolute Practicers among the French, Spanish, Italian, and other Nations … (London: Nath. Brooke: 1656).

Chambers, David Sanderson, Patrons and Artists in the Italian Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1970).

Abbé Chanut, Paul III, Jules III et Pie IV, Souverains Pontifes, nouvellement traduit, troisième édition (Paris: chez Sébastien Cramoisy, 1686).

Charleton, Walter, Natural History of Nutrition, Life, and Voluntary Motion: Containing all the new discoveries of anatomist’s and most probable opinions of physicians, concerning the oeconomie of human nature: Methodically delivered in exercitations physico-anatomical (London: Henry Herringman, 1659).


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Bibliography 285

Cicchetti, Angelo, and Raul Mordenti, “La scrittura dei libri di famiglia,” in Letteratura italiana, ed. Alberto Asor Rosa (8 vols, Turin: Einaudi, 1982–91), vol. 3 (1984), 1117–59.

Cid, Jesús Antonio, “De La nourrice du roi a La nodriza del infante: Apertura de

eds, (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 1995), 103–27.

Clifton, James, “Art and Plague at Naples,” in Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Pamela M. Jones, Franco Mormando, and Thomas W. Worcester, eds, Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague, 1500–1800 (Worcester, MA: Clark University, 2005), 97–115.

Clinton, Elizabeth, Countess of Lincoln, The Countess of Lincoln’s Nursery (1622).

Maria di Jacopo Tintoretto ai Carmini. Lettura per frammenti di una pala e di un contesto,” , 31 (2006): 189–272.

Comuzzi, Elizabeth, “Apprenticeship and Wage Labor in Castelló d’Empúries 1260–1300” (Highest Honors, Thesis in Medieval Studies, Swarthmore College, 2011).

Condivi, Ascanio, Vita di Michelagnolo Buonarroti, ed. Giovanni Nencioni (Florence: SPES, 1998).

Cornelio, Flaminio, editis illustratae ac in decades distributae (13 vols, Venice: Pasqualus, 1749), vol. 11.

Santa Maria della Scala di Siena,” Iconographica, 3 (2004): 110–147.Cousinié, Frédéric, (Rennes: Presses Universitaires, 2007).

Cramer, Daniel, Zehen Catechismus Predigten. Das ist: Die Vernunfftige Lautere Milch des Heiligen Catechissmi Lutheri (Stettin: David Rehten, 1635).

Cressy, David, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Crooke, Helkiah, Mikrokosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man,

Translated out of all the best Authors of Anatomy, especially out of Gasper Bauhinus and Andreas Laurentius (London: W. Iaggard, 1615).

Cropper, Elizabeth, and Charles Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

Cruz, Anne J., “Genre Transformations and the Question of Gender. La bella malmaridada as Ballad and Play,” Arv: Scandinavian Yearbook of Folklore, 43 (1987): 45–58.

D’Amelia, Marina, “Becoming a Mother in the Seventeenth Century: The Experience of a Roman Noblewoman,” in Anne Jacobson Schutte, Thomas Kuehn, and Silvana Seidel Menchi, eds, Time, Space, and Women’s Lives in Early Modern Europe (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2001), 223–44.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy


Danese, Roberto M., ed., , conference proceedings Urbino, 28–29 April, 1998 (Urbino: Quattro venti, 2000).

Dassier, Lazare, L’Evangile de grâce, ou sermons pour tous les dimanches de l’année composés et préchés en plusieurs Cathedrales du Royaume, Par le R.P. Lazare Dassier, Religieux de l’Ordre des F.F. Prêcheurs du Couvent de l’Annonciation de Paris (2 vols, Lyon: Chez Jean Certe, 1682), vol. 1.

De Luca, Joannis Baptistae, Theatrum veritatis et justitiae … (3 vols, Cologne, 1690), vol. 2.

Debby, Nirit Ben-Aryeh, “The Images of Saint Birgitta of Sweden in Santa Maria Novella in Florence,” Renaissance Studies, 18 (2004): 509–26.

Demaitre, Luke, “The Idea of Childhood and Child Care in Medical Writings of the Middle Ages,” Journal of Psychohistory, 4, 4 (1977): 461–90.

Deonna, Waldemar, “La légende de Pero et de Micon et l’allaitment symbolique,” Latomus, 13 (1954): 140–166;; 356–75.

DiPasquale, Theresa M., Donne, Aemilia Lanyer, and John Milton, Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2008).

Deusing, Anton, Genesis Microcosmi seu de generatione foetus in utero dissertatio: Accesserunt curae secundae de generatione de nutritione (Amstelodami: Apud Petrum van den Berge, 1665).

Deyon, Pierre, “A propos du paupérisme au milieu du XVIIe siècle: Peinture et charité chrétienne,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 22, 1 (1967): 137–53.

Díaz-Mas, Paloma, Romancero (Barcelona: Crítica, 1996 [1994]).Diefendorf, Barbara B., From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Dillard, Heath, 1100–1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

Dinan, Susan E., Women and Poor-Relief in Seventeenth-Century France: The Early History of the Daughters of Charity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).

Dixon, Suzanne, “From Ceremonial to Sexualities: A Survey of Scholarship on Roman Marriage,” in Beryl Rawson, ed., A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds (Chichester/Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 245–61.

Dominici, Giovanni, Regola del governo di cura familiare, ed. Donato Salvi (Florence: A. Aarinei, 1860).

Doncieux, Georges, Le Romancero populaire de la France (Paris: É. Boillon, 1904).

Donno, Elizabeth Story, Elizabethan Minor Epics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963).

Doyle, Teresa, “La nourrice du roi,” Cradle on the Waves (Toronto: Bedlam, 2003). Music CD.

Duden, Barbara, The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Bibliography 287

Duffy, Eamon, Stripping the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580, 2nd ed. (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2005).

Dufourq, Charles-Emmanuel, “Honrats, mercaders et autre dans le Conseil des Cent au XIVeme siecle,” En la España Medieval, Norteamérica 7 (1985): 1361–95.

Dufresnoy, Charles-Alphonse, The Art of Painting, trans. John Dryden (London: Rogers, 1695).

Ebert-Schifferer, Sybille, “L’expression des passions: Le rôle de Poussin dans l’élaboration d’un art civiliateur,” in Olivier Bonfait and Christophe Luitpold Frommel, eds, Poussin et Rome (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1996), 329–52.

Echols, Robert, “Tintoretto, Christ at the Sea of Galilee, and the Unknown Later Career of Lambert Sustris,” , 12 (1996): 93–149.

Eckstein, Nicholas, “‘The Widow’s Might’: Women’s Identity and Devotion in the Brancacci Chapel,” Oxford Art Journal, 28, 1 (2005): 99–118.

Ede, Lisa, Cheryl Glenn, and Andrea Lunsford, “Border Crossings: Intersections of Rhetoric and Feminism,” Rhetorica, 13, 4 (1995): 401–41.

Edwards, Karen, “Wolf,” Milton Quarterly, 43, 4 (2009): 278–87.Enciclopedia Cattolica (12 vols, Vatican City, 1948–54), vol. 12 (1954).Encyclopédie, où dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert (17 vols, Paris: Editions sociales, 1751–65).

Ensemble Hesperion XX, Weltliche Musik im christlichen und jüdischen Spanien (1450–1550) [sound recording] (Cologne: EMI, p1976).

Falciani, Carlo, and Antonio Natali, eds, Bronzino: Artist and Poet at the Court of the Medici (Florence: Mandragora, 2010).

Fallopia, Gabriele, Observationes Anatomicae (2 vols, Venice, 1561).Félibien, André, Les conférences de l’Académie Royale de peinture et de sculpture pendant l’année 1667 (Paris: Marbre-Cramoisy, 1667).

Fernel, Jean, The Physiologia of Jean Ferneled. 1567;; Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2003).

Fildes, Valerie, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988).

———, Breasts, Bottles, and Babies: A History of Infant Feeding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1986).

Filios, Denise, Performing Women in the Middle Ages: Sex, Gender, and the Iberian Lyric (New York: Palgrave, 2005).

Fissell, Mary E., Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Fondaras, Antonia, “‘Our Mother the Holy Wisdom of God’: Nursing in Botticelli’s Bardi Altarpiece,” Storia dell’arte, 111, 3 (2005): 7–34.

Föllinger, Sabine, Differenz und Gleichheit Das Geschlechterverhältnis in der Sicht griechischer Philosophen des 4. bis 1. Jahrhunderts v. Chr. (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1996).


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy


Fontaine, André, ed., Les conferences inédites de l’Académie Royale de Peinture (Paris:

Fontemoing, 1903).Fontijin, Claire, “The Virgin’s Voice: Representations of Mary in Seventeenth-Century Italian Song,” in Miller and Yavneh, eds, Maternal Measures, 135–62.

Fosi, Irene, Papal Justice: Subjects and Courts in the Papal State, 1500–1750 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press 2011).

Foster Baxendale, Susannah, “Exile in Practice: The Alberti Family In and Out of Florence 1401–1428,” Renaissance Quarterly, 44 (1991): 720–756.

a Series,” in Robert Enggass and Marilyn Stockstad, eds, Hortus imaginum: Essays in Western Art (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1974), 147–54.

Freccero, Carla, “Economy, Woman, and Renaissance Discourse,” in Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari, eds, and the Italian Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).

Freedberg, David, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

———, “On the Origins and Rise of the Flemish Madonnas in Flower Garlands,” Münchner Jahrbuch, 32 (1981): 115–50.

Frenk, Margit, Entre folklore y literatura (México: El Colegio de México, 1971).Freyhan, Robert, “The Evolution of the Caritas Figure in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 11 (1948): 68–86.

Alberti. Studio e edizione,” Rinascimento, 12 (1972): 21–78.Fumaroli, Marc “Muta eloquentia: La vision de la parole dans la peinture de Nicolas Poussin,” in Marc Fumaroli, L’Ecole du Silence, le sentiment des

(Paris: Flammarion, Champs Arts, 1998), 189–231.Furetière, Antoine, Dictionnaire universel contenant generalement tous les mots

(3 vols, La Haye: A. et L. Leers, 1690).Furth, Charlotte, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History, 960–1665 (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1999).

Gady, Bénédicte, “D’un ministre à l’autre, rencontre entre Poussin et Le Brun,” in Bénédicte Gady and Jean-Claude Boyer, eds, Richelieu, patron des arts (Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2009), 337–67.

Galen, A Translation of Galen’s Hygiene (De sanitate tuenda), trans. Robert

Gallavotti Cavallero, Daniela, Lo Spedale di Santa Maria della Scala in Siena: Vicenda di una committenza artistica (Pisa: Pacini, 1985).

Gavitt, Philip, “Charity and State-Building in Cinquecento Florence: Vincenzio Borghini as Administrator of the Ospedale degli Innocenti,” The Journal of Modern History, 69 (1997): 230–270.

———, Charity and Children in Renaissance Florence: The Ospedale degli Innocenti, 1410–1536 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990).


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Bibliography 289

Gallo, Andrea, “La Nascita del Battista di Jacopo Tintoretto,” , 10 (1994): 161–86.

García Gutierrez, Daniel, ed., Libro del Arte de las Comadres o Madrinas y del Regimiento de las Preñadas y Paridas y de los Niños por médico Damián Carbón (Zaragoza: Textos Medievales, 2000).

García Lorca, Federico, “On Lullabies,” Deep Song and Other Prose, trans. Christopher Maurer (New York: New Directions, 1980), 7–22.

———, “Bodas de sangre. Tragedia en tres actos y siete cuadros,” Obras completas, ed. Arturo del Hoyo (Madrid: Aguilar, 1954), 1079–180.

———, “Las nanas infantiles,” Obras completes, ed. Arturo del Hoyo (Madrid: Aguilar, 1954), 50–67.

———, “Blood Wedding: Tragedy in Three Acts and Seven Scenes,” in Three Tragedies, trans. James Graham-Luján and Richard L. O’Connell (New York: New Directions, 1941), 34–99.

Garnsey, Peter, “Child Rearing in Ancient Italy,” in David I. Kertzer and Richard P. Saller, eds, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 48–65.

Gellius, Aulus, The Attic Nights, trans. John C. Rolfe (3 vols, London: Heinemann, 1927–28) vol. 2 (1927).

Geogievska-Shine, Aneta, Rubens and the Archeology of Myth, 1610–1620 (Burlington, VT/Surrey: Ashgate, 2009).

Giladi, Avner, Infants, Parents, and Wet Nurses: Medieval Islamic Views on Breastfeeding and Their Social Implications (Leiden: Brill, 1999).

Giladi, Avner, “Breast-Feeding in Medieval Islamic Thought: A Preliminary Study of Legal and Medical Writings,” Journal of Family History, 23, 2 (1998): 107–23.

Gilbert, Creighton, Italian Art 1400–1500: Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1980).

Gill, Katherine, “Open Monasteries for Women in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy: Two Roman Examples,” in Craig A. Monson, ed., The Crannied Wall (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 15–48.

Gilman, Ernest, Plague Writing in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

Gimaret, Daniel, (Paris: Cerf, 1990).Girvan, Allison, “La nourrice du roi,” Resonance ([Nelson, B.C.]: Allison Girvan, 2007). Music CD.

Goffen, Rona, “Icon and Vision: Giovanni Bellini’s Half-Length Madonnas,” The Art Bulletin, 57, 4 (1975): 487–518.

Goldstein, Carl, “L’Académie de Poussin,” in Pierre Rosenberg and Louis-Antoine Prat, eds, Nicolas Poussin: 1594–1665 (Paris: Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, RMN, 1994), 74–78.

Gombrich, Ernst Hans, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London: Warburg Institute, 1970).


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy


Gonçalves, Rui, (Lisbon,

1785;; 1st ed. 1557).Goodland, Katharine, Female Mourning in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama: From the Raising of Lazarus to King Lear (Aldershot/Burlington: Ashgate, 2005).

Gouge, William, Of domesticall duties eight treatises (London, 1622).Greisel, Johann Georg, indagata natura lactis et arthritidis tandem rationibus, et experientiis allatis, diaeta lactea, optima arthritidem curandi methodus, proponitur (Leipzig: Ioh.

Guillemeau, Jacques, Child-Birth or, The Happy Deliverie of Women (London, 1612).

Gutton, Jean-Pierre, Guide du chercheur en histoire de la protection sociale (2 vols, Paris: Comité d’histoire de la sécurité sociale, 1994) vol. 1, Fin du Moyen Age–1789.

Haas, Louis, The Renaissance Man and his Children: Childbirth and Early Childhood in Florence, 1300–1600 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998).

Haas, Louis, “Il Mio Buono Compare: Choosing Godparents and the Uses of Baptismal Kinship in Renaissance Florence,” Journal of Social History, 29, 2 (1995): 341–56.

Hackett, Helen, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (Houndmills/London: Macmillan, 1995).

Hanawalt, Barbara A., “Childrearing Among the Lower Classes of Late Medieval England,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 8 (1977): 1–22.

Harawî, Al-nâsikh wa-l-mansûkh (Riad: Maktabat al-Rushd, 1997).Hale, Rosemary Drage, “Imitatio Mariae: Motherhood Motifs in Late Medieval German Spirituality” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1992).

Harris, Barbara, English Aristocratic Women, 1450–1550: Marriage and Family, Property and Careers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

Harris, Jonathan Gil, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

———, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Harvey, William, The Works of William Harvey, trans. from the Latin by Robert Willis (London: Printed for the Sydenham Society, 1847).

Sandro Botticelli and Herbert Horne: New Research (Florence: Syracuse University in Florence, 2009), 7–61.

———, “Giovanni Tornabuoni, i fratelli Ghirlandaio e la cappella maggiore di Santa Maria Novella,” in Wolfram Prinz and Max Seidel, eds, Domenico Ghirlandaio 1449–1494: Atti del Convegno Internazionale, Firenze, 16–18 ottobre 1994 (Florence: Centro Di, 1996), 112–7.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Bibliography 291

Hegarty, Stephanie, “Donkey Milk Can Help Children with Milk Allergies,” BBC News Health (12 May 2011): http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-13208989 [25 February 2012].

Helas, Philine, “Die Repräsentation von Armut und Armenfürsorge in italienischen Städten des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts—ein ‘republikanisches’ Thema?” in Philine Helas and Gerhard Wolf, eds, Armut und Armenfürsorge in der italienischen Stadtkultur zwischen 13. und 16. Jahrhundert: Bilder, Texte und soziale Praktiken (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2006), 191–245.

Held, Julius, “Rubens and Aguilonius: New Points of Contact,” The Art Bulletin, 61, 2 (1979): 257–64.

Herlihy, David, and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).

Herlihy, David, Medieval Households (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).

Herklotz, Ingo, “Poussin et Pline l’Ancien: À propos des monocromata,” in Marc Bayard, ed., Rome-Paris 1640: Transferts culturels et renaissance d’un centre

(Paris: Somogy, 2010), 13–29.Hernando i Delgado, Joseph, “L’alimentació làctia dels nadons durant el segle XIV, les nodrisses o dides a Barcelona, 1295–1400, segons els documents dels protocols notarials,” Estudis històrics i documents dels arxius de protocols, 14 (1996): 39–157.

———, Els esclaus islàmics a Barcelona: Blancs, negres, llors i turcs: De l’esclavitud a la llibertat (s. XIV) (Barcelona: Consell Superior d’Investigacions

Heywood, Colin, A History of Childhood: Children and Childhood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times, Themes in History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).

Sharâ’i’ al-islâm (Beirut, 1986), part 2.Hipp, Elisabeth, “Poussin’s The Plague at Ashdod,” in Franco Mormando and Thomas Worcester, eds, , Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies 78 (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2007), 177–223.

———, Nicolas Poussin: Die Pest von Asdod (Hildesheim: Olms, 2005).The Hippocratic Treatise On glands, ed. and trans. with introduction and commentary by Elizabeth M. Craik (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2009).

Holland, Abraham, A description of the great, fearefull and prodigious plague, in Hollandi post-humana (London, 1626).

Holmes, Megan, “Disrobing the Virgin: The Madonna lactans in Fifteenth-Century Florentine Art,” in Geraldine A. Johnson and Sara F. Matthews Grieco, eds,

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 167–95.

Holst, Christian von, Francesco Granacci (Munich: Bruckmann, 1974).Howard, John M., and Walter Hess, History of the Pancreas: Mysteries of a Hidden Organ (New York: Kluwer, 2002).


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy


Howard, Peter Francis, Beyond the Written Word: Preaching and Theology in the Florence of Archbishop Antoninus 1427–1459 (Florence: Olschki, 1995).

Studies in Philology, 73, 3 (1976): 302–19.

Humboldt, Alexander von, and Aimé Bonpland, Personal Narrative of Travels (7 vols, London: Longman,

Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1818–29), vol. 3 (1818).Hygin, Fables, ed. and trans. Jean-Yves Boriaud (Paris: Les belles lettres, 1997).Ilchman, Frederick, “Two Altarpieces of John the Baptist by Jacopo Tintoretto,” in Save Venice, Inc., Studies in Venetian Art and Conservation (Venice: Save Venice, Inc., 2004), 24–9.

Jacobs, Fedrika H., “Aretino and Michelangelo, Dolce and Titian: Femmina, Masculo, Grazia,” The Art Bulletin, 82, 1 (2000): 51–67.

Jacobus, Mary, “‘Incorruptible Milk’: Breastfeeding and the French Revolution,” in First Things: The Maternal Imagery in Literature, Art, and Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 2005).

Jaffé, Michael, Rubens: Catalogo Completo (Milan: Rizzoli, 1989).———, Rubens and Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977).———, “Rubens and Optics: Some Fresh Evidence,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 34 (1971): 362–6.

Jaggar, Alison M., and William L. McBride, “‘Reproduction’ as Male Ideology,” in Azizah Y. al-Hibri and Margaret A. Simons, eds, Hypatia Reborn: Essays in Feminist Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).

Jean, Rodrigue, director, Lost Song (Toronto, Ont.: Mongrel Media, 2009). Motion picture.

Jed, Stephanie H., Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).

Jordan, Constance, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).

Juntunen, Eveliina, Peter Paul Rubens’ bildimplizite Kunsttheorie in ausgewählten mythologischen Historien (1611–1618) (Petersberg: Imhof, 2005).

Kalavrezou, Ioli, “Images of the Mother: When the Virgin Became the ‘Meter Theou’,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 44 (1990): 165–72.

Kecks, Ronald, Domenico Ghirlandaio und die Malerei der Florentiner Renaissance (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2000).

Keill, James, The Anatomy of the Human Body Abridg’d: or, a short and full view of all the parts of the body. Together with their several uses, drawn from their compositions and structures, 7th ed., corrected (London: John Clarke: 1723).

Kelleher, Marie, The Measure of Women: Law and Female Identity in the Crown of Aragon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).

Kelley, Theresa M., Reinventing Allegory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

King, Margaret L., Women of the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Bibliography 293

———, Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).

———, “Caldiera and the Barbaros on Marriage and the Family,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 6 (1976): 19–50.

Kirshner, Julius, “Materials for a Gilded Cage: Non-Dotal Assets in Florence, 1300–1500,” in David I. Kertzer and Richard P. Saller, eds, The Family in

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 184–207.

Kirshner, Julius, and Anthony Molho, “The Dowry Fund and the Marriage Market in Early Quattrocento Florence,” Journal of Modern History, 50 (1978): 403–38.

Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, “Le dernier enfant: fécondité et vieillissement chez les Florentines XIVe–XVe siècles,” in Jean-Pierre Barder, François Lebrun, and René Le Mée, eds,

(Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1993), 277–90.———, “Women Servants in Florence during the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” in Barbara Hanawalt, ed., Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 56–80.

———, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

———, “Blood Parents and Milk Parents: Wet Nursing in Florence, 1300–1530,” in Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 132–64.

———, “The ‘Cruel Mother’: Maternity, Widowhood, and Dowry in Florence in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” in Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family and Ritual, 117–31.

Klein, Melanie, The Selected Melanie Klein, ed. Juliet Mitchell (New York: Free Press, 1986).

Knipping, John, Iconography of the Counter Reformation in the Netherlands (2 vols, Nieuwkoop: DeGraff, 1974), vol. 2.

Koenig, John, “Saving Siena: A Renaissance State’s Religious Response to Political and Military Crisis,” Bullettino senese per la storia patria, 111 (2004): 40–204.

Koepplin, Dieter, “Cranach’s Paintings of Charity in the Theological and Humanist Spirit of Luther and Melanchthon,” in Bodo Brinkmann, ed., Cranach (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2007), 63–80.

Koerner, Joseph Leo, The Reformation of the Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

Kohl, Benjamin G., “Introduction to Francesco Barbaro’s On Wifely Duties,” in Benjamin G. Kohl and Ronald G. Witt, with Elizabeth G. Welles, eds, The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists on Government and Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), 189–228.

Koppelman, Kate, “Devotional Ambivalence: The Virgin Mary as “Empresse of Helle,” Essays in Medieval Studies, 18:1 (2001): 67–82.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy


Kouffman, Avra, “Maternity and Child Loss in Stuart Women’s Diaries,” in Kathryn M. Moncrief and McPherson, eds, Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Aldershot/Burlington: Ashgate, 2007), 171–81.

Kreitzer, Beth, Reforming Mary: Changing Images of the Virgin Mary in Lutheran Sermons of the Sixteenth Century, Oxford Studies in Historical Theology (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Krischel, Roland, Jacopo Tintoretto 1519–1594 (Cologne: Könemann, 2000).———, “Ein unbekanntes und einige wenige beachtete Gemälde des Jacopo Tintoretto,” Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch, 53 (1992): 45–94.

Kristeva, Julia, “Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini,” in Leon S. Roudiez, ed., Desire in Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 237–70.

Kuehn, Thomas, “Reading Between the Patrilines: Leon Battista Alberti’s Della Famiglia in Light of His Illegitimacy,” in Law, Family, and Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy (Chicago: Univeristy of Chicago Press, 1991), 157–75.

Lafontaine-Dosogne, Jacqueline, Iconographie de l’enfance de la Vierge dans l’Empire byzantine et en Occident (2 vols, Bruxelles: Palais des Académies,

Laforte, Conrad, , Chansons en laisse (6 vols, Québec: Université de Laval, 1977), vol. 1.

Landi, Fausto, Gli ultimi anni della Repubblica di Siena 1525–1555 (Siena: Edizioni Cantagalli, 1994).

Lanham, Richard A., A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

Laqueur, Thomas, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA/London: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

———, “Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology,” in Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur, eds, The Making of the Modern Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 1–41.

Laurent, Marcel, “Guido di Savino & the Earthenware of Antwerp,” The Burlington Magazine, 41, 237 (1922): 288–97.

Laurentius, Andreas, Historia anatomica humani corporis et singularum eius partium multis (Francofurti, s.a.: 1600).

LeBlanc, Suzie, “La nourrice du roi,” La mer jolie: Chants d’Acadie (Toronto: Atma Classique, 2004). Music CD.

Le Brun, Charles, Conférence de M. Le Brun … sur l’expression générale et (Paris: Picard, 1698).

Lee, Raymond, and Alistair Fraser, The Rainbow Bridge: Rainbows in Art, Myth, and Science (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001).

Lee, Rensselaer W., Ut Pictura Poesis, Humanisme & Théorie de la peinture, (Paris: Macula, 1998).

Leesberg, Marjolein, “Karel van Mander as a Painter Author,” Simiolus, 22 (1993–94): 5–57.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Bibliography 295

Legay, Charles, “Testament de Nicolas Poussin,” in Société de l’histoire de Normandie. Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de Normandie (Rouen, 1875–80), 148–55.

Lemaire, Ria. “Explaining Away the Female Subject: The Case of Medieval Lyric,” Poetics Today, 7, 4 (1986): 729–43.

Le Roy, Guillaume, enfants (Paris: Chez Guillaume Duprez, 1675).

Levi d’Ancona, Mirella, The Garden of the Renaissance: Botanical Symbolism in Italian Painting (Florence: Olschki, 1977).

Lewalski, Barbara K., Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning, and Art of Paradise Regained (Providence: Brown University Press, 1966).

Liberati, Alfredo, “Nuovi documenti sul Pellegrinaio,” La Diana, 4 (1929): 239–43.Lichtenstein, Jacqueline, the French Classical Age, trans. Emily McVarish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

Lichtenstein, Jacqueline, and Christian Michel, eds, Conférences de l’Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (2 vols, Paris: École nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts, 2006–2008), tome I, vol. 1 (2006).

Lillie, Amanda, “The Patronage of Villa Chapels and Oratories Near Florence: A Typology of Private Religion,” in Eckart Marchand and Alison Wright, eds, With and without the Medici: Studies in Tuscan Art and Patronage 1434–1530 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 19–46.

Lincoln, Evelyn, “Curating the Renaissance Body,” Word and Image: A Journal of , 17, 1 & 2 (2001): 42–61.

Lonie, Iain M., The Hippocratic Treatises “On Generation” “On the Nature of the Child” “Diseases IV” (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 1981).

Lymphatics,” Medical History, 12, 2 (1968): 174–84.Lucco, Mauro, ed., (3 vols, Milan: Electa, 1996).

Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, trans. W.H.D. Rouse, rev. M.F. Smith, The Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1975).

Lusheck, Catherine, “Content in Form: Rubens’s Kneeling Man and the Graphic Reformation of the Ideal, Robust Male Nude,” Jaarboek van het Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (2000): 126–63.

Luther, Martin, “La Troisième prédication, le mardi après le dimanche d’Invocavit, le 11 mars 1522,” in Daniele Menozzi, ed., L’Église et les arts visuels (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1991), 163–5.

MacLehose, William, “A Tender Age”: Cultural Anxieties Over the Child in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (New York: Columbia University, the e-Gutenberg series, 2006).

———, “Nurturing Danger: High Medieval Medicine and the Problem(s) of the Child,” in John Carmi Parsons and Bonnie Wheeler, eds, Medieval Mothering (New York: Garland, 1996), 3–24.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy


Magurn, Ruth, The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1957).

Makhlûf, Hasanayn Muhammad, Fatâwâ shar’iyya (Cairo: 1965), vol. 2.Mancini, Giacomo, Vita di Leon Battista Alberti, 2nd ed. (Florence: Carnesecchi, 1911 [repr. 1967]).

Mani, Nikolaus, Die historischen Grundlagen der Leberforschung: Die Geschichte der Leberforschung von Galen bis Claude Bernard (2 vols, Basel: Schwabe, 1959), vol. 2.

Manley, Lawrence, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Manno, Antonio, Sacre rappresentazioni nelle chiese di VeneziaVeneziane, 1994).

Mardock, James D., “‘Thinking to Pass Unknown’: Measure for Measure, the Plague, and the Accession of James I, in Totaro and Gilman, Representing the Plague, 113–29.

Marin, Louis, On Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).Marino, John A., (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).

Mariuz, Adriano, L’adorazione dei pastori di Jacopo Tintoretto: “Una stravagante invenzione” (Verona: Scripta Edizione, 2010).

Marsh, David, “Leon Battista Alberti and the Volgare Dialogue,” in The Quattrocento Dialogue: Classical Tradition and Humanist Innovation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 78–99.

Marshall, Louise, “Manipulating the Sacred: Image and Plague in Renaissance Italy,” Renaissance Quarterly, 47, 3 (1994): 485–532.

Martellucci, Maura, “I bambini di nessuno. L’infanzia abbandonata al Santa Maria della Scala. Secoli XIII –XV,” Bullettino senese per la storia patria, 108 (2001): 9–221.

Martin, Gregory, “Rubens’s ‘Dissegno Colorito’ for Bishop Maes Reconsidered,” The Burlington Magazine, 110, 785 (1968): 434–7.

Martin, Henri-Jean, Livre, pouvoir et société à Paris au XVIIe (Geneva: Droz, 1969).

Matthews Grieco, Sara F., “Breastfeeding, Wet Nursing and Infant Mortality in Europe (1400–1800),” in Historical Perspectives on Breastfeeding (Florence: Unicef and the Istituto degli Innocenti, 1991), 15–62.

Maximus, Valerius, Memorable Words and Deeds: One Thousand Tales from Ancient Rome, trans. Henry John Walker (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004).

McCormick, Anne Catherine, “Revealing Tales: Sex, Violence, and Gender in the Miracle Collections of Gautier de Coinci, Gonzalo de Berceo, and Alfonso X, el Sabio,” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1996).

McGrath, Elizabeth, Rubens: Subjects from History, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard (2 vols, London: Harvey Miller, 1997), vol. 2, pt. 13, 97–114.


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Bibliography 297

McLaughlin, Mary Martin, “Survivors and Surrogates: Children and Parents from the Ninth to the Thirteenth Centuries,” in The History of Childhood, ed. Lloyd DeMause (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1974) 101–81.

McNamara, JoAnn, “Women and Power through the Family Revisited,” in Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski, eds, Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 17–30.

McTavish, Lianne, Childbirth and the Display of Authority in Early Modern France (Aldershot: Ashgate: 2005).

Melion, Walter, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel Van Mander’s Shilder-Boeck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

Le Ménagier de Paris, ed. Georgine E. Brereton and Janet M. Ferrier (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).

Mercuriale, Girolamo, De morbis mvlieribus praelectiones ex ore Hieronymi Mercvrialis iam dudum à Gaspare Bauhino exceptae, ac paulo antea inscio autore editae: nvnc vero per Michaelem Colvmbvm ex collatione plurium exemplarium consensu auctoris locupletiores, & emendatiores factae (Venice: apud Felicem Valgrisium, 1587).

Mérot, Alain, Poussin (Paris: Hazan, 1990),Milá y Fontanals, Manuel, Romancerillo catalán: Canciones tradicionales (Barcelona: Álvaro Verdaguer, 1882).

Milanesi, Gaetano, ed., Le Opere di Giorgio Vasari (9 vols, Florence: Sansoni, 1906), vol. 4.

———, ed., Documenti per la storia dell’arte senese (3 vols, Siena: Onorato Porri, 1854–56) vol. 2 (1855).

Miles, Margaret R., A Complex Delight: The Secularization of the Breast 1350–1750 (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008).

———, “The Virgin’s One Bare Breast: Female Nudity and Religious Meaning in Tuscan Early Renaissance Culture,” in Susan Rubin Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1986), 193–208.

Miller, Naomi J., and Naomi Yavneh, eds, Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000).

Miller, Paul W., “The Elizabethan Minor Epic,” Studies in Philology, 55, 1 (1958): 31–8.

Modrak, Deborah Karen Ward, “Sensation and Desire,” in Georgios Agnastopolous, ed., A Companion to Aristotle (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 310–321.

Morgan, Jennifer, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

Mozzetti, Francesco, “Educare per immagini: gesti di carità e attivismo caritatevole,” , 16 (1998): 53–80.

Muggins, William, Londons mourning garment (London, 1603).Muir Wright, Rosemary, Sacred Distance: Representing the Virgin (New York: Manchester University Press, 2006).


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy


Munkhoff, Richelle, “Contagious Figurations: Plague the Impenetrable Nation after the Death of Elizabeth,” in Totaro and Gilman, Representing the Plague, 98–112.

Murphy, Caroline P., “Il Ciclo della vita femminile: Norme comportamentali e pratiche di vita,” in Sara F. Matthews-Grieco, ed., with the assistance of Sabrina Brevaglieri, Monaca, moglie, serva, cortigiana: Vita e immagine delle donne tra Rinascimento e Controriforma (Florence: Morgana, 2001), 14–47.

Musacchio, Jacqueline Marie, catalogue entry, in Andrea Bayer, ed., Art and Love in Renaissance Italy (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008), 161–2.

———, The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

Kitâb al-nâsikh wa-l-mansûkh1996).

Najemy, John M., “Giannozzo and His Elders: Alberti’s Critique of Renaissance Patriarchy,” in William J. Connell, ed., Society and Individual in Renaissance Florence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 51–78.

Nancy, Jean-Luc, Dominique Jacquot, Maximilien Durand, and Guillaume Kazerouni, eds, (Strasbourg: Editions des musées de Strasbourg, 2005).

Needham, Joseph, A History of Embryology, 2nd ed. (New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1959).

Neill, Michael, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press;; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Newcome, Henry, The compleat mother (1695).Nichols, Tom, “Secular Charity, Sacred Poverty: Picturing the Poor in Renaissance Venice,” Art History, 30, 2 (2007): 139–69.

———, Tintoretto: Tradition and Identity (London: Reaktion Books, 1999).Nivelon, Claude, Vie de Charles Le Brun et description détaillée de ses ouvrages par Claude Nivelon, Lorenzo Pericolo, ed. (Geneva: Droz, 2004).

“Notable Works of Art Now on the Market: Supplement,” The Burlington Magazine, 96, 621 (1954): pl. X.

Da’â’im al-islâmOakes, Catherine, Ora Pro Nobis: The Virgin as Intercessor in Medieval Art and Devotion (London/Turnhout: Harvey Miller, 2008).

Olchowy, Gloria, “Murder as Birth in Macbeth,” in Kathryn M. Moncrief and McPherson, eds, Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Aldershot/Burlington: Ashgate, 2007), 197–210.

Origo, Iris, “The Domestic Enemy: The Eastern Slaves in Tuscany in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” Speculum, 30, 3 (1955): 321–66.

Orland, Barbara, “White Blood and Red Milk: Analogical Reasoning in Medical Practice and Experimental Physiology (1560–1730),” in M. Horstmannshoff, H. King, and C. Zittel, eds, Blood, Sweat and Tears: The Changing Concepts of

, Intersections, Yearbook for Early Modern Studies, 18 (Leiden/Boston: Brill, forthcoming 2012).


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Bibliography 299

———, “Enlightened Milk: Reshaping a Bodily Substance into a Chemical Object,” in Ursula Klein and E.C. Spary, eds, Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe: Between Market and Laboratory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 163–97.

Orlandini, Alessandro, Gettatelli e pellegrini: Gli affreschi nella sala del Pellegrinaio dell’Ospedale di Santa Maria della Scala di Siena (Siena: Nuova immagine, 1997).

Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. David Raeburn (London: Penguin, 2004).Padoa Rizzo, Anna, “Paolo Schiavo: fornitore di disegni per ricami,” Rivista d’Arte, 41 (1989): 26–56.

Pagarolas i Sabaté, Laureà, “Introducció,” in Inventari de L’Arxiu històric de protocols de Barcelona, vol. 1, Segles XIII–XV (Barcelona: Fundacío Noguera, 2001), 9–21.

Pagel, Walter, New light on William Harvey (Basel: Karger, 1976).Paleotti, Gabriele, Discorso intorno al le immagini sacre et profane (1582), ed. Stefano della Torre, trans. Gian Franco Freguglia (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, Cad & Wellness, 2002).

Pallucchini, Rodolfo, and Paola Rossi, Tintoretto: Le opere sacre e profane (2

Paré, Ambroise, and Adriaan van de Spieghel, The workes of that famous chirurgion Ambroyse Parey, translated out of Latin and compared with the French, by Tho. Johnson. Whereunto are added three tractates of Adrianus Spigelius of the veines, arteries, & nerves (London: Richard Cotes, and Willi Dugard, John Clarke, 1649).

Park, Katharine, “The Rediscovery of the Clitoris: French Medicine and the Tribade,” in David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, eds, The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 1997), 171–94.

Park, Katharine, and Lorraine Daston, “Destiny is Anatomy,” essay review of Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990), The New Republic (18 February 1991): 53–7.

———, “Itineraries of the ‘One-Sex-Body’: A History of an Idea,” unpublished manuscript.

Parkes, Peter, “Milk Kinship in Islam: Substance, Structure, History,” Social Anthropology, 13:3 (2005): 307–29.

———, “Fosterage, Kinship and Legend: When Milk was Thicker than Blood?” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 46 (2004): 587–615.

———, “Milk Kinship in Southeast Europe: Alternative Social Structures and Foster Relations in the Caucasus and the Balkans,” Social Anthropology, 9, 3 (2004): 341–58.

———, “Fostering Fealty: A Comparative Analysis of Tributary Allegiances of Adoptive Kinship,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 45, 4 (2003): 761–3.


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy


———, “Alternative Social Structures and Foster Relations in the Hindu Kush: Milk Kinship Allegiance in Former Mountain Kingdoms of Northern Pakistan,” Comparative Studies in History and Society, 43, 1 (2001): 4–36.

Parkhurst, Charles, “Aguilonius’ Optics and Rubens’ Color,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 8 (1961): 35–49.

Paster, Gail Kern, Humoring the Body. Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

———, The Body Embarrassed (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).Paxson, James J., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

Pearson, Andrea. “Nuns, Images, and the Ideals of Women’s Monasticism: Two Paintings from the Cistercian Convent of Flines,” Renaissance Quarterly, 54, 4, part 2 (2001): 1356–1402.

Pettegree, Andrew, Foreign Protestant Communities in Sixteenth-Century London (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

Phillippy, Patricia, Women, Death and Literature in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Physical essays on the parts of the human body and animal oeconomy (London: John Clarke, 1734).

Piccialuti, Maura, L’Immortalità dei beni: Fedecommessi e primogeniture a Roma nei secoli xvii e xviii (Rome: Viella, 1999).

Pitt, Christopher, The Plague of Marseilles: A Poem. By a Person of Quality (1721).

Piccinni, Gabriella, and Laura Vigni, “Modelli di assistenza ospedaliera

nell’ospedale di Santa Maria della Scala di Siena,” in Giuliano Pinto, ed., La società del bisogno: Povertà e assistenza nella Toscana medievale (Florence: Salimbeni, 1989): 131–74.

Plato, Gorgias, trans. Walter Hamilton (London: Penguin, 1960).Pliny the Elder, “Remedies Derived from Woman’s Milk,” Natural History (written 77–79 CE), book 28, chapter 21.

———, Natural History, trans. John Bostock and Riley Henry Thomas (6 vols, London: H.G. Bohn, 1857), vol. 6.

Polacco, Renato, “Le colonne del ciborio di San Marco,” Venezia arti: Bollettino del dipartimento di storia e critica delle arti dell’Università di Venezia, 1 (1987): 32–8.

Poliziano, Angelo, Prose volgare inedite e poesie Latine e Greche edite e inedite, ed. Isidoro del Lungo (Florence: Barbèra, 1867).

Pomata, Gianna, “Family and Gender,” in John Marino, ed., Early Modern Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 69–86.

———, “Menstruating Men. Similarity and Difference of the Sexes in Early Modern Medicine,” in Valeria Finucci and Kevin Brownlee, eds, Generation and Degeneration: Tropes of Reproduction in Literature and History from


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Bibliography 301

(Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2001), 109–52.

———, “A Christian Utopia of the Renaissance: Elena Duglioli’s Spiritual and Physical Motherhood (ca. 1510–1520),” in Kaspar von Greyerz, Hans Medick, and Patrice Veit, eds, Von der dargestellten Person zum erinnerten Ich: Europäisce Selbstzeugnisse als historische Quellen (1500–1850) (Cologne: Böhlau, 2001), 323–53.

———, “Blood Ties and Semen Ties: Consanguinity and Agnation in Roman Law,” in Mary Jo Maynes et al., eds, Gender, Kinship, Power (New York: Routledge, 1996), 43–64.

———, “La meravigliosa armonia: il rapporto fra seni ed utero dall’anatomia vascolare all’endocrinologia,” in Giovanna Fiume, ed., Madri. Storia di un ruolo sociale (Venice, Marsilio, 1995), 45–81.

———, “Legami di sangue, legami di seme: consanguinità e agnazione nel diritto romano,” Quaderni Storici, 86, 2 (1994): 299–334.

Poussin, Nicolas, Lettres et propos sur l’art, ed. Anthony Blunt, with the assistance of Jacques Thuillier and Arikha Avigdor (Paris: Hermann, 1994).

Préaud, Maxime, “Nicolas Poussin dans les éditions d’Etienne Gantrel,” in Alain Mérot, ed., Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), du Louvre du 19 au 21 octobre 1994 (2 vols, Paris, 1996), vol. 2, 671–93.

Presciutti, Diana Bullen, “Carità e potere: Representing the Medici Grand Dukes as ‘Fathers of the Innocenti’,” Renaissance Studies, 24, 2 (2010): 234–59.

Pseudo-Bonaventura, Meditations on the Life of Christ, trans. and ed. Isa Ragusa and Rosalie B. Green (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961).

Pseudo-Plutarch, “De liberis educandis,” in Moralia (16 vols, London: William Heinemann, 1927–69), vol. 1 (1927), 5–69.

Purtle, Carol J., The Marian Paintings of Jan van Eyck (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).

Mughnî (14 vols, Cairo: Hijr, 1986–90), vol. 11.Queller, Donald E., and Thomas F. Madden, “Father of the Bride: Fathers, Daughters, and Dowries in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Venice,” Renaissance Quarterly, 46 (1993): 685–711.

Quermann, Andreas, Domenico di Tommaso di Currado Bigordi Ghirlandaio 1449–1494 (Cologne: Könemann, 1998).

Radke, Gary, “Nuns and Their Art: The Case of San Zaccaria in Renaissance Venice,” Renaissance Quarterly, 54, 2 (2001): 430–459.

Raffaelli, Renato, Roberto M. Danese, and Settimio Lanciotti, eds, Pietas e (Urbino: Quattro

venti, 1997).Ramazzini, Bernardino, (Modena: Antonii Capponi, 1700).

Ramazzini, Bernardino, (Diseases of Workers), trans. Wilmer Cave Wright (New York: Hafner, 1964).


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy


Randolph, Adrian W.B., Engaging Symbols: Gender, Politics, and Public Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).

Rapoport, Yossef, Marriage, Money, and Divorce in Medieval Islamic Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Read, Kirk, “Mother’s Milk from Father’s Breast: Maternity without Women in Male French Renaissance Lyric,” in Kathleen P. Long, ed., High Anxiety: Masculinity in Crisis in Early Modern France, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies (Kirksville, MO, Truman State University Press: 2002), 71–92.

Reau, Louis, Iconographie de l’art chrétien (3 vols, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1955–59), vol. 2 (1956–57).

Reilly, Patricia L. Reilly, “The Taming of the Blue: Writing Out Color in Italian Renaissance Theory,” in Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, eds, The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).

Novella in Firenze,” Archivio Storico Italiano, ser. 5, 6 (1890): 426–56.Riolan, Jean, professeur du roy en anatomie & en pharmacie, reveuës & augmentees d’une

(2 vols, Paris: Denis Moreay: 1628–29), vol. 2.

Ripa, Cesare, Iconologia, introduced by Erna Mandowsky, repr. of the Rome ed., 1603 (New York, G. Olms, 1970).

———, L’Iconologie, trans. Jean Baudouin (Paris, 1636).———, Iconologia (Rome, 1603).Rittgers, Ronald K., “Protestants and Plague: The Case of the 1562/63 Pest in Nurnberg,” in Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Pamela M. Jones, Franco Mormando, and Thomas W. Worcester, eds, Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague, 1500–1800 (Worcester, MA: Clark University, 2005), 132–55.

Italian Frescoes: The Early Renaissance (1400–1470) (New York: Abbeville, 1996).

Roger, Jacques, The Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century French Thought, trans. K.R. Benson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).

Roig, Jaume, Spill o Llibre de les dones, ed. Marina Gustà (Barcelona: Ediciones 62, 1978).

Rojo Vega, Anastasio, El siglo de oro: Inventario de una época (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León: Consejería de Educación y Cultura, 1996).

El Romancero judeo-español en el Archivo Menëndez Pidal: catälogo-ïndice de romances y canciones, ed. Samuel G. Armistead with the collaboration of Selma Margaretten, Paloma Montero and Ana Valenciano (3 vols, Madrid: Cátedra-Seminario Menéndez Pidal, 1978).

Rooses, Max, Rubens, trans. Harold Child (London/Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott and Duckworth & Co., 1904).

Rosand, David, Myths of Venice: The Figuration of a State (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001).


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Bibliography 303

Rosenberg, Pierre, and Louis-Antoine Prat, eds, Nicolas Poussin: 1594–1665 (Paris: Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, RMN, 1994).

Rosenthal, Lisa, Gender Politics and Allegory in the Art of Rubens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Ross, James Bruce, “The Middle-Class Child in Urban Italy, Fourteenth to Early Sixteenth Century,” in Lloyd DeMause, ed., The History of Childhood (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1974]), 183–228.

Rothschuh, Karl E., Geschichte der Physiologie (Berlin: Springer, 1953).Rubin, Miri, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

Rueff, Jacob, De conceptu et generatione hominis, lib. primus (Frankfurt: Petrus Fabricus, 1580).

Early Modern England and America,” Journal of Social History, 28, 2 (1994): 247–69.

Sahnûn, MudawwanaSansovino, Francesco, Venetia citta nobilissima et singolare (Venice, 1581).Sapienza, Valentina, “Miti, metafore e profezie: Le Storie di Maria di Jacopo Tintoretto nella sala terrena della Scuola Grande di San Rocco,” Venezia

, 33 (2007): 49–139.Sarakhsî, MabsûtSarasúa, Carmen, Criados, nodrizas y amos: El servicio doméstico en la formación del mercado de trabajo madrileño, 1758–1868 (Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno, 1994).

Sassier, Philippe, e–XXe (Paris: Fayard, 1990).

Savonarola, Michele, Il trattato ginecologico-pediatrico in volgare: Ad mulieres ,

ed. Luigi Belloni (Milan: Stucchi, 1952).Scharf, Friedhelm, Der Freskenzyklus des Pellegrinaios in S. Maria della Scala zu Siena: Historienmalerei und Wirklichkeit in einem Hospital der Frührenaissance (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2001).

Schiebinger, Londa, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon, 1993).

Schnapper, Antoine, “Inventaires après-décès et amateurs de Poussin au XVIIe siècle,” in Pierre Rosenberg and Louis-Antoine Prat, eds, Nicolas Poussin: 1594–1665 (Paris: Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, RMN, 1994), 70–72.

Schneider, Daniel, Allgemeines Biblisches Lexicon: In welchem nebst denen Namen, das Wesen derer Sachen, das ist, so weit davon in heiliger Schrifft Erwehnung geschiehet (…), Dritter Theil (Franckfurt am Mayn: Friedrich Daniel Knoch, 1731).

Schütze, Sébastian, “Aristide de Thèbes, Raphael et Poussin: La représentation des affetti dans les grands tableaux d’histoire de Poussin des années 1620–1630,” in Alain Mérot, ed., Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665),


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy


organisé au Musée du Louvre du 19 au 21 octobre 1994 (2 vols, Paris: Musée du Louvre, 1996), vol. 2, 573–89.

Schwartz, Louis, Milton and Maternal Mortality (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Seidel, Martin, Venezianische Malerei zur Zeit der Gegenreformation: Kirchliche Programmschriften und künstlerische Bildkonzepte bei Tizian, Tintoretto, Veronese und Palma il Giovane, Bonner Studien zur Kunstgeschichte 11 (Münster: Lit, 1996).

Seidel, Max, “Ubera Matris: Die vielschichtige Bedeutung eines Symbols in der mittelalterlichen Kunst,” Städel-Jahrbuch, N.F., 6 (1977): 41–99.

UmmShah, Mazhar, The General Principles of Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine (Karachi: Naveed Clinic, 1966).

Shahar, Shulamith, Childhood in the Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 1990).Sharp, Jane, The Midwives Book, Or the Whole Art of Midwifry Discovered, ed. Elaine Hobby, Women Writers in English 1350–1850 (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

MuhaddabSilleras-Fernández, Núria, “Between Expectation and Desire: Widowhood and Sexuality in Late Medieval Iberia,” Viator, 42, 2 (2011): 353–70.

Simons, Patricia, “Giovanna and Ginevra: Portraits for the Tornabuoni Family by Ghirlandaio and Botticelli,” I Tatti Studies (forthcoming).

———, “Portraiture and Patronage in Quattrocento Florence with Special Reference to the Tornaquinci and their Chapel in S. Maria Novella” (2 vols, Ph.D. diss., University of Melbourne, 1985);; http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/78007.

Singleton, Charles S., ed. Canti carnascialeschi del rinascimento (Bari: G. Laterza, 1936).

Slack, Paul, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (1985;; repr. Oxford: Clarendon Press;; New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

Slackman, Michael, “A Compass That Can Clash With Modern Life,” New York Times, 12 June 2007.

Sman, Gert Jan van der, Lorenzo and Giovanna: Timeless Art and Fleeting Lives in Renaissance Florence (Florence: Mandragora, 2010).

Soergel, Philip M., ed., Sexuality and Culture in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (New York, AMS, 2005).

Sohm, Philip, “Gendered Style in Italian Art Criticism from Michelangelo to Malvasia,” Renaissance Quarterly 48, 4 (1995): 759–808.

Soranus, Soranus’ Gynecology, trans. Owsei Temkin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991 [1956]).

Storia dell’Arte, 79 (1993): 341–50.

Sperling, Jutta, “Charity’s Nudity and the Veil of Allegory,” in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Joseph ConnorsHarvard University Press forthcoming 2013).


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Bibliography 305

———, “Las Casas and His Amerindian Nurse: Tropes of Lactation in the French Colonial Imaginary (ca. 1770–1810),” Gender & History, 23, 1 (2011): 47–71.

and Baroque Art,” in Allison Levy, ed., Sex Acts in Early Modern Italy: Practice, Performance, Perversion and Punishment (Farnham, Surrey/Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 165–80.

———, “Péro et Cimon, entre la charité et la loi: l’exemple d’une réciprocité manquée?” in Lucien Faggion and Laure Verdon, eds, Le don et le contre-don (Aix: Université de Provence, 2010), 145–68.

———, “Allegories of Charity and the Practice of Poor Relief at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco,” Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch, 70 (2009): 119–46.

Sprat, Thomas, The Plague of AthensStarn, Randolph, and Loren W. Partridge, Arts of Power: Three Halls of State in Italy, 1300–1600 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

Staub, Susan C., ed., Mother’s Advice Books, The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works, Printed Writings, 1641–1700 (Aldershot/Burlington: Ashgate, 2002) series 2, part 1, vol. 3.

Stern, Gertrud Marriage in Early Islam (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1939).Stoddard, Richard Henry, The Life Travels and Books of Alexander von Humboldt (New York: Rudd & Carleton, 1819).

Stoichita, Victor, Visionary Painting in the Golden Age of Spanish Art (London: Reaktion, 1995).

Stolberg, Michael, “Die Lehre vom ‘calor innatus’ im lateinischen ‘Canon Medicinae’ des Avicenna,” Sudhoffs Archiv, 77 (1993): 33–53.

Stolberg, Michael, “Menstruation and Sexual Difference in Early Modern Medicine,” in Andrew Shail and Gillian Howie, eds, Menstruation. A Cultural History (Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 90–101.

Stolberg, Michael, “The Monthly Malady: A History of Pre-Menstrual Suffering,” Medical History, 44 (2000): 301–22.

Summers, David, “Form and Gender,” New Literary History, 24, 2 (1993): 243–71.

Sussman, George D., Selling Mother’s Milk: The Wet-Nursing Business in France 1715–1914 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982).

Swieten, Gerard van, Commentaries upon Boerhaave’s aphorisms concerning the knowledge and cure of diseases (18 vols, Edinburgh: Charles Elliot, 1776).

Syson, Luke, et al., Renaissance Siena: Art for a City (London: National Gallery, 2007).

Tapié, Alain, (Caen: Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen, 1986).

Tatar, Maria, The Hard Facts of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales (2nd ed., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003 [1987]).

Thiemann, Susanne, “Sex trouble: Die bärtige Frau bei José de Ribera, Luis Vélez de Guevara und Huarte de San Juan,” in Judith Klinger and Susanne Thiemann, eds, Geschlechtervariationen: Gender-Konzepte im Übergang zur


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy


Neuzeit, Potsdamer Studien zur Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung, N.F. 1 (Potsdam: Universitätsverlag, 2006), 47–82.

Thornton, Peter, The Italian Renaissance Interior 1400–1600 (New York: Harry Abrams, 1991).

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. C.F. Smith, Loeb Classical Library 108 (4 vols, 1919, 1921;; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991–96), vol. 1, books 1–2 (1991).

Thuillier, Jacques, chronologie de l’œuvre complet (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2000).

———, (Rennes: Musée des Beaux-Arts, 1998).———, “L’image au XVIIe siècle: De l’allégorie à la rhétorique des passions,” in 4, 1 (1988): 88–98.

Tomei, Alessandro, ed., dell’economia moderna (Rome: Retablo, 2002).

Tornabuoni de’ Medici, Lucrezia, Sacred Narratives, ed. and trans. Jane Tylus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

Torriti, Piero, Il pellegrinaio: Nello spedale di Santa Maria della Scala a Siena (Siena: Lions Club, 1987).

———, La Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena (2 vols, Genoa: Sagep, 1980), vol. 1.Totaro, Rebecca, The Plague Epic in Early Modern England: Heroic Measures, 1603–1721 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012).

Totaro, Rebecca, ed., The Plague in Print: Essential Elizabethan Sources, 1558–1603, Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2010).

Totaro, Rebecca, and Ernest B. Gilman, Representing the Plague in Early Modern England, Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2010).

———, Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English Literature from More to Milton, Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2005).

Richard C. Trexler, “Infanticide in Florence: New Sources and First Results,” and “The Foundlings of Florence, 1395–1455,” in Dependence in Context in Renaissance Florence (Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1994 [originally published in 1973]), 203–58.

———, “Celibacy in the Renaissance: The Nuns of Florence,” in Trexler, Dependence in Context in Renaissance Florence [the essay originally appeared in 1972]), 343–72.

Trubowitz, Rachel, “‘I was his nursling once’: Nation, Lactation, and the Hebraic in Rachel Samson Agonistes,” in Catherine Gimelli Martin, ed., Milton and Gender (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 167–83.

———, “‘But Blood Whitened’: Nursing Mothers and Others in Early Modern Britain,” in Miller and Yavneh, eds, Maternal Measures, 82–101.

Tuck-Scala, Anna, “Caravaggio’s Roman Charity in the Seven Acts of Mercy,” in Jeanne Chenault Porter and Susan C. Scott, eds, Parthenope’s Splendor: Art


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Bibliography 307

of the Golden Age in Naples (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 126–63.

Tucker, Judith E., In the House of the Law: Gender and Islamic Law in Ottoman Syria and Palestine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

Tûsî, Abû Ja’far, Mabsût———, Tahdîb al-ahkâmUrban, Marsha, Seventeenth-Century Mother’s Advice Books (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

Varazze (Voragine), Iacopo da, Legenda aurea, ed. Giovanni Paolo Maggioni, trans. Francesco Stella (2 vols, Florence: SISMEL, 2007), 2 vols.

Vasari, Giorgio, Le Vite de’ piú eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani …. Nell’edizione per i tipi di Lorenzo Torrentino, Firenze 1550, ed. Luciano Bellosi and Aldo Rossi (2 vols, Turin: Einaudi, 1991), vol. 1.

———, Lives of the Artists, trans. George Bull (2 vols, London: Penguin, 1965–87), vol. 1.

———, The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, ed. William Gaunt (8 vols, London/New York: Dent/Dutton, 1963), vol. 4.

Vaughan, Megan, Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).

Velasco, Sherry, Male Delivery: Reproduction, Effeminacy, and Pregnant Men in Early Modern Spain (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006).

Venditti, Gianni, ed., with the assistance of Beatrice Quaglieri, Archivio Boncompagni Ludovisi: Inventorio (5 vols, Vatican City: Archivio Segreto Vaticano, 2008), vol. 5.

Verdi, Richard, “Situation de Poussin dans la France et l’Angleterre des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles,” in Pierre Rosenberg and Louis-Antoine Prat, eds, Nicolas Poussin: 1594–1665 (Paris: Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, RMN, 1994), 98–105.

Vial, Marie-Paul, ed., Pierre Puget: Peintre, sculpteur, architecte, 1620–1694, exhibition catalogue, Marseille, Centre de la Vieille Charité, Musée des Beaux-Arts, 28 October 1994–30 January 1995 (Marseille: Laffont, 1994).

Voragine, Jacobus de, The Golden Legend, trans. William Granger Ryan (2 vols, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), vol. 1.

Waddy, Patricia, Seventeenth-Century Palaces: Use and the Art of the Plan (New York: Architectural History Foundation, 1990).

Walsh, Lorena S., “‘Till Death Us Do Part’: Marriage and Family in Seventeenth-Century Maryland,” in Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman, eds, The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1979), 126–52.

Warburg, Aby, , trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999).

Warner, Marina, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976).


1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Proof Copy


Watkins, John, Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England: Literature, History, Sovereignty (New York/Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Watkins, Renée, “L. B. Alberti in the Mirror: An Interpretation of the Vita with a New Translation,” Italian Quarterly, 30 (1989): 5–30.

Watt, Montgomery, Muhammad at Medina (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956).Wear, Andrew, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Weber am Bach, Sibylle, der Reformation (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2006.

Wiel, Maria Agnese Chiari Moretto, ed., Jacopo Tintoretto e i suoi incisori (Milan: Electa, 1994).

Wiesner, Merry E., Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Wildenstein, Georges, “Le goût pour la peinture dans la bourgeoisie parisienne au début du règne de Louis XIII,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 6 (1950): 154–273.

Williamson, Beth, The Madonna of Humility: Development, Dissemination & Reception, c. 1340–1400 Bristol Studies in Medieval Culture (Suffolk, UK: Boydell, 2009).

Willis, Thomas, Dr. Willis’s Practice of Physick, being all the medical Works of that renowned Physician. Containing these ten several Treatises (London: T. Dring, C. Harper, and J. Leigh: 1681).

Wilson, Blake, and Nello Barbieri, eds, The Florence Laudario: An Edition of Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Banco Rari 18 (Madison: A-R Editions, 1995).

Wind, Edgar, “Charity: The Case History of a Pattern,” Journal of the Warburg Institute, 1, 4 (1938): 322–30.

Winer, Rebecca Lynn, “Agents or Pawns? The Experiences of the Peasant Women of Roussillon in the Blanquet Family Parchments, 1292–1345,” in Writing Medieval Women’s Lives, ed. Charlotte Goldy and Amy Livingstone (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, forthcoming 2012).

———, “Conscripting the Breast: Lactation, Slavery and Salvation in the Realms of Aragon and Kingdom of Majorca, c. 1250–1300,” Journal of Medieval History, 34, 2 (2008): 164–84.

———, Women, Wealth, and Community in Perpignan, c.1250–1300: Christians, Jews and Enslaved Muslims in a Medieval Mediterrean Town (Burlington: Ashgate, 2006).

Winner, Matthias, “Peter Paul Rubens’ ‘Juno and Argus,’ in Ekkehard Mai and Eva Hartmann, eds, Die Zukunft Der Alten Meister (Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2001), 187–217.

Wither, George, Britain’s Remembrancer (1628).Wolf, Jacqueline H., Don’t Kill Your Baby: Public Health and the Decline of Breastfeeding in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001).


Proof Copy

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344

Bibliography 309

Womens Secrets: A Translation of Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’ de Secretis Mulierum with Commentaries, trans. Helen Rodnite Lemay (Albany: State University of New York Press: 1992).

The Winter’s Tale,” in Kathryn M. Moncrief and McPherson, eds, Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Aldershot/Burlington: Ashgate, 2007), 183–95.

Woollett, Anne T., and Ariane van Suchtelen, eds, with Tiarna Doherty, Mark Leonard, and Jørgen Wadum, Rubens and Brueghel: A Working Friendship, exhibition catalogue (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2006), 116–21.

Wright, Alison, The Pollaiuolo Brothers: The Arts of Florence and Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

Wunder, Heide, “Frauenmilch-Muttermilch. Eine Geschichte aus dem 18. Jahrhundert,” in Barbara Duden, Karen Hagemann, Regina Schulte, and Ulrike Weckel, eds, Geschichte in Geschichten. Ein historisches Lesebuch (Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 2003), 295–305.

Yalom, Marilyn, A History of the Breast (New York: Ballantine, 1997).Yavneh, Naomi, “To Bare of Not too Bare: Sofonisba Anguissola’s Nursing Madonna and the Womanly Art of Breastfeeding,” in Miller and Yavneh, eds, Maternal Measures, 65–81.

Zarri, Gabriella, “Living Saints: A Typology of Female Sanctity in the Early Sixteenth Century,” in Daniel Bornstein and Roberto Rusconi, eds, Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 219–303.

Zorach, Rebecca, The Passionate Triangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

———, Blood, Milk, Ink Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).


Proof Copy


Medieval and Renaissance Lactations: Images, Rhetorics, and Practices, ed. by Jutta Sperling...

Documents

Transcript of Medieval and Renaissance Lactations: Images, Rhetorics, and Practices, ed. by Jutta Sperling...