This volume builds on existing scholarship on representations of the breast, the iconography of the Madonna Lactans, allegories of abundance, nature, and charity, women mystics' food-centered practices of devotion, the ubiquitous practice of wet-nursing, and medical theories of conception. It is informed by studies on queer kinship in early modern Europe, notions of sacred eroticism in pre-tridentine Catholicism, feminist investigations of breastfeeding as a sexual practice, and by anthropological and historical scholarship on milk exchange and ritual kinship in ancient Mediterranean and medieval Islamic societies.
Proposing a variety of different methods and analytical frameworks within which to consider instances of lactation imagery, breastfeeding practices, and their textual references, this volume also offers tools to support further research on the topic.
Jutta Sperling is Associate Professor of History at Hampshire College, USA.
Jutta Gisela Sperling, Mohammed Hocine Benkheira, Barbara Orland, Rebecca Lynn Winer, Caroline Castiglione, Debra Blumenthal, Emilie L. Bergmann, Diana Bullen Presciutti, Rebecca Totaro, Alexandra Woolley, Julia L. Hairston, Patricia Simons, J. Vanessa Lyon.