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

This collection of thirteen essays addresses lactation imagery, in conjunction with the practices and discourses surrounding milk-exchange in medieval and early modern Europe and the wider Mediterranean. Jutta Gisela Sperling's Introduction provides brief descriptions for each of the essays, along with an historical overview of the topic from ancient Greek understandings of motherhood and breastfeeding, to the emergence of images such as the Madonna Lactans, and medieval discourses around charity and the transfer of maternal love. The individual contributions progress roughly chronologically from the Middle Ages and through the early decades of the seventeenth century, covering material from the medieval Islamic world and Spain, with the majority of the essays centring on the art production and discourses of the Italian Renaissance.

The collection covers topics such the narrative, allegorical, and metaphorical content of breastfeeding and breastfeeding imagery, discourses on lactation and the anxieties surrounding wet-nursing, the physiology of milk-production and its representations, gender identity in the early modern period, and the social and cultural effects of nursing. The sources examined include treatises, legal texts, archival documents, popular carnival songs, ballads, and poems, as well as works of art by artists such as Domenico Ghirlandaio, Tintoretto, Nicolas Poussin, Domenico di Bartolo, and Peter Paul Rubens.

The interdisciplinary scholarship of this volume is the direct result of the diverse specialties of the contributors, who, as literary scholars, art historians, social and legal historians, and historians of science, engage with a variety of methods and analytical frameworks in their respective studies. Their contributions, in turn, reveal the study of lactation to be an interdisciplinary area of inquiry that still requires and invites further research. The footnotes for each of the essays and the bibliography at the end are extensive, including both primary and secondary sources related to the topic, with titles in English, German, Italian, and Spanish, among other languages.