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Medieval and Renaissance Lactations: Images, Rhetorics, Practices book cover

1st Edition

Medieval and Renaissance Lactations Images, Rhetorics, Practices

Edited By Jutta Gisela Sperling Copyright 2013
336 Pages
by Routledge

336 Pages
by Routledge

336 Pages
by Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
The premise of this volume is that the ubiquity of lactation imagery in early modern visual culture and the discourse on breastfeeding in humanist, religious, medical, and literary writings is a distinct cultural phenomenon that deserves systematic study. Chapters by art historians, social and legal historians, historians of science, and literary scholars explore some of the ambiguities and... Read more
Introduction, Jutta Gisela Sperling; Chapter 1 “The Milk of the Male”: Kinship, Maternity and Breastfeeding in Medieval Islam,, Mohammed Hocine Benkheira; Chapter 2 Why Could Early Modern Men Lactate? Gender Identity and Metabolic Narrations in Humoral Medicine, Barbara Orland; Chapter 3 The Mother and the Dida, Nanny: Female Employers and Wet Nurses in Fourteenth-Century Barcelona, Rebecca Lynn Winer; Chapter 4 Peasants at the Palace: Wet Nurses and Aristocratic Mothers in Early Modern Rome, Caroline Castiglione; Chapter 5 “With My Daughter’s Milk”: Wet Nurses and the Rhetoric of Lactation in Valencian Court Records, Debra Blumenthal; Chapter 6 Popular Balladry and the Terrible Wet Nurse: “La nodriza del rey”, Emilie L. Bergmann; Chapter 7 Picturing Institutional Wet-Nursing in Medicean Siena, Diana Bullen Presciutti; Chapter 8 Mother London and the Madonna Lactans in England’s Plague Epic, Rebecca Totaro; Chapter 9 Nicolas Poussin’s Allegories of Charity in The Plague at Ashdod and The Gathering of the Manna and Their Influence on Late Seventeenth-Century French Art, Alexandra Woolley; Chapter 10 The Economics of Milk and Blood in Alberti’s Libri della famiglia: Maternal versus Wet-Nursing, Julia L. Hairston; Chapter 11 The Social and Religious Context of Iconographic Oddity: Breastfeeding in Ghirlandaio’s Birth of the Baptist, Patricia Simons; Chapter 12 Wet Nurses, Midwives, and the Virgin Mary in Tintoretto’s Birth of Saint John the Baptist (1563), Jutta Gisela Sperling; Chapter 13 Full of Grace: Lactation, Expression and “Colorito” Painting in Some Early Works by Rubens, J. Vanessa Lyon;

Biography

Jutta Sperling is Associate Professor of History at Hampshire College, USA.

'...a systematic study of the visual and written representations of lactation during the late Middle Ages and early modern period, focusing on the politics of milk sharing rather than only on breastfeeding itself. This innovative approach not only addresses the unique status of wet nurses within Islamic law, but also attends to the ways in which men could become privileged figures in relation to the provision of milk.’ Professor Lianne McTavish, University of Alberta

'The essays are grounded in vigorous historical readings of their sources and offer a useful survey of nonmaternal breastfeeding in early modern Europe ...' Renaissance Quarterly

'Moving the discussion of breastfeeding beyond the history of maternity, this collection makes an important contribution to the study of gendered relations of care.' Renaissance & Reformation

'... these essays provide an excellent overview of lactation in medieval and early modem European and Islamic societies.' Comitatus

'Sperling's collection of essays transitions into art history, providing visual representations of milk kinship and the role of wet nurses, as well as their at times ambiguous pictorial representation as Charity.' Sixteenth Century Journal

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