Medieval and Renaissance Lactations: Images, Rhetorics, Practices ed. by Jutta Gisela Sperling (review)

Medieval and Renaissance Lactations, edited by Jutta Gisela Sperling, sketches out the contours of an understudied area in medieval and early modern studies: the history of breastfeeding and its theological, juridical, literary, and visual representation. Spurred by feminist and queer scholarship, the volume brings together essays in medieval and early modern European (largely Mediterranean) history, art history, and literature.

Sperling’s introduction provides an overview of the history of breastfeeding and wet-nursing, the theoretical presumptions about them, and representations of them, in medieval and early modern Europe; it also carefully summarizes the chapters, but could have done more to elucidate the volume’s conceptual underpinnings and structure. Perceptible in the book’s structure is a general move from historical practices to literary and artistic representations, accompanied by a less pronounced historical progression from medieval to early modern Europe (as late as the eighteenth century). The line between “reality” and “representation” is blurred, however, since the authors often have recourse to prescriptive texts (often with considerable interpretative finesse) as direct or indirect evidence for practice. As one consequence, Julia Hairston’s essay in particular seems to come later in the book than it should. Hairston’s piece, “The Economics of Milk and Blood in Alberti’s Libri della famiglia: Maternal vs. Wet-Nursing,” provides a historical overview of some of these prescriptive texts, overlapping with and supplementing material in the essays placed early in the book. Another implication of the overall ordering of the essays seems to be that representation logically “follows” practice—yet it might in fact have little to do with it, or spur changes in it, or run directly counter to it.

Most of the essays deal with nonmaternal breastfeeding and lactation. A strong cluster of essays examines wet nurses and practices and institutions that developed around the need to provide breast milk to infants whose mothers were dead, absent, or unable to nurse, or who were expected not to for reasons of social status. The collection begins with Mohammed Hocine Benkeira’s very thorough piece on milk kinship—the notion that children nursed by one mother are kin, regardless of their “blood” relationship to her or her husband—in medieval Islam, “‘The Milk of the Male’: Kinship, Maternity, and Breastfeeding in Medieval Islam.” Benkeira demonstrates how the concept of milk kinship evolved in commentaries in the Islamic Golden Age (corresponding to the early Middle Ages in Europe) toward an emphasis on the male as source of a nursing woman’s milk, thus revising pre-Islamic and Qur’anic notions of milk kinship to fall in line with blood kinship. By examining the cases considered by Muslim scholars, he also provides a picture of how medical theories about the production of milk evolved (a question also addressed in Barbara Orland’s essay on how changes in the medical theory of lactation provided a new lease on life for the notion of male lactation in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe). Rebecca Winer provides key insights about how mothers in medieval Barcelona contracted directly with wet nurses, dispelling the overgeneralized notion—derived from Christiane Klapisch-Zuber’s work on family history in Florence—that the hiring of wet nurses was an exclusively male affair.¹ Debra Blumenthal’s essay mines testimony by wet nurses in “age of majority” hearings in Valencia for information about the affective bonds and kinship structures forged by nursing practices.

The prevalence of the display of the breast and of lactation imagery in personification allegory suggests an association between the productive breast and the production of meaning itself.² Reframing the representation of the productive breast as nonmaternal, in the case of allegorical imagery (of Charity, for example), is an ingenious move that places meaning outside the closed (and, perhaps, seemingly prelinguistic) circle of mother and infant: an effect of displacement that chimes with poststructuralist theories of signification...