Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century English Literature by Rachel Trubowitz (review)

“The breast replaces the pen as the authorial implement of choice” for the seventeenth-century English nation, argues Rachel Trubowitz in Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century English Literature (26), citing the breast as the origin of the new modern nation and its components: the new spiritual mother, the reformed English subject, the Stuart political debate over the nation’s name, and the reformed nation. Trubowitz presents the reader with a diverse array of literary, extra-literary, and visual texts to support this argument. Literary works include Macbeth and popular querelle des femmes texts (ch. 2); political writings of James I, Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, and John Milton (ch. 3); Paradise Lost and Mary Cary’s and Anna Trapnel’s prophesies (ch. 4); and Samson Agonistes (ch. 5). The extra-literary include domestic guidebooks by Robert Cleaver and John Dod, William Gouge, Robert Pricke, and Elizabeth Clinton. Finally, visual culture takes a prominent place in Trubowitz’s book, including Renaissance portraits of the lactating Virgin Mary, such as Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Madonna del Latte (ca . 1330s), and frontispieces of English print culture, such as Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1612) and Richard Braithwaite’s The English Gentleman and English Gentlewoman (1641). This impressive, yet admittedly “ambitious scope,” successfully demonstrates the pervasiveness of the nurturing mother in seventeenth-century debates regarding the English nation (33).

For Trubowitz, the emergent English modern nation of the seventeenth century signals a different relationship among English subjects. Rather than being defined by rank, class, or bloodline, the modern English subject is defined in abstract, spiritual (“reformed”) terms. The modern nation is a reformed nation but is also Janus-faced and paradoxical, consisting of warring parties and ideologies: it is both royalist and reformist, dynastic and post-dynastic. And yet, the maternal breast is central to all. This modern nation, Trubowitz insists, begins at home where mothers were charged with the spiritual nurture of children. As Trubowitz shows in chapter 1, seventeenth-century England’s preoccupation with maternal breastfeeding, as opposed to wet-nursing, figured as a reformed interest among the emerging middle-class, one that would promote social bonds over bloodlines. What is so compelling about Trubowitz’s argument is that the language of maternal nurture was not just reserved for one particular type of English subject; rather reformists, proponents of an emerging middle-class, and royalist aristocrats all took up the rhetoric of the maternal breast. This is the primary argument of chapter 3, “Nursing Fathers and National Identity.” For instance, Trubowitz identifies James I’s political discourse surrounding the proposed unification between Scotland and England as a nurturing one that names both the Scottish and English as James’s children, figuring the king himself as the metaphorical mother. Likewise, Oliver Cromwell plays the nursing mother in his speeches aimed at solidifying the New Model Army and evokes “the language of nurturing motherhood to activate new affective forms of social attachment capable of overriding the bonds of blood and natural kinship that determined rank, status, title, and other customary forms of social distinction and stature in ‘the Kingdome old’” (126). Trubowitz is at her best when she highlights the ubiquitous nature of reformed motherhood and the nursing mother in both anti-Stuart and pro-Stuart rhetoric. What Trubowitz so convincingly proves is that social order nursed at the mother’s breast. The healthy futurity of England depended on the mother’s breast.

Chapter 1, “Nursing Mothers and National Identity,” offers a sweeping examination of the visual and textual culture of the lactating breast and traces how reformist seventeenth-century domestic guidebooks by Dod and Cleaver, Gouge, and Clinton promote breastfeeding as a holy, spiritual necessity, which they argue should replace wet-nursing. The guidebooks present the Virgin Mary’s holy breast as just one maternal breast among a typological, “scriptural line of exemplary, natural nursing mothers” which includes Jochobed...