Breastfeeding in the Middle Ages

Women nowadays face quite a problematic contradiction or tension. On the one hand, when you have a baby, you are told you absolutely must breastfeed, breast is best, and there is this huge pressure to breastfeed. On the other hand, we live in a society that is even now pretty prudish and squeamish about seeing people breastfeeding in public. I was interested in whether this tension might be there in the Middle Ages as well and what it felt like for women breastfeeding.

There are also gorgeous stories of breastfeeding itself producing a sense of motherhood. There is a wonderful miracle story from the collection of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino about an elderly couple who were Franciscan tertiaries. They find an abandoned baby, discover it is emaciated and covered in sores, and they are desperate to look after this tiny, tiny baby.

They pray to Saint Nicholas of Tolentino to help them, and this very old woman suddenly finds that she is beginning to lactate, and she is able to feed this baby. She and her husband, an old man, become the parents of this child. They are not biological parents; they become parents by virtue of the saint's actions and by virtue of her being endowed with this miraculous milk.

There are some wonderful accounts of Mary transposed into a fictionalized court of heaven, defending humankind against the devil, who has come to claim his due. In one of these stories, called L'Advocacie Nostre Dame (“The Advocacy of Our Lady”), she is standing there in the court of heaven, and she argues the case for humanity in front of God, the judge, and she is not winning. In the end, in a fit of impatience, she rips open her dress and bares her breasts at God, who is sitting enthroned in this court, and says, “You are my son, and I am your mother, and these are the breasts which I fed you with, so you will do as I say.” At which point God says, “Yes, mother,” and she gets her own way. We have these extraordinary stories of a Mary who is anything but submissive and obedient and who mobilizes the fact that she breastfed God in order to get him to do what she wants. She is a very interesting model for women in this period.

If we look at Lippo Memmi’s image of the Virgin Mary breastfeeding the baby Jesus, we can see her looking down at him with a very gentle, loving look on her face. We can see Jesus gazing outwards toward the viewer, reminding them that he is a baby, but he is also the Godhead. One comes away, nevertheless, with a very strong sense of the emotion and affection involved in breastfeeding, and that certainly seems to have carried over into "real-life" experiences of breastfeeding.

I have been looking at miracle collections as a really wonderful set of sources and insights into what it felt like for real mothers breastfeeding their babies. Again and again in these collections, we get a sense of the sheer love and emotion involved in these relationships. I think quite often people are tempted to assume that in the past people perhaps did not have quite as intense ties with their children. Sometimes, people are even tempted to assume that, because infant mortality was so high, people did not allow themselves to experience close ties with their children. Of course, that is a rather horrible way of thinking about things, but it is also very clearly untrue. We repeatedly find stories of mothers absolutely devoted to their children, that devotion being manifested in these episodes of breastfeeding.

It is very striking that in many of these treatises, women are emphatically enjoined to breast-feed their own children and told that using a wet nurse is a terrible thing to do; you should feed your own child. Not to do so is an expression of vanity, that women are just doing it because they want to continue to look amazing. Yet, these treatises then go on to say that if you must use a wet nurse, this is how you should select somebody. Aldebrandin of Sienna is an interesting author of a treatise precisely about this sort of thing. They give advice about choosing wet nurses because of a belief that certain characteristics of the mother, or of the person who is feeding the child, might pass on to the child through the breast milk. For that reason, they are very emphatic, not just that you need to pick a wet nurse who seems strong and whose own children seem strong (because that indicates that the milk is very nourishing and so on), but you also want to pick a wet nurse of good character, who looks the way you want them to look and who holds the kinds of values you want them to hold.

Other things that were taught were actually surprisingly resonant with current medical thinking nowadays. For example, the World Health Organization now tells women that they should breast-feed up to the age of two. We generally get told up to the age of one, but the official guidance is up to the age of two, and that is exactly what they were doing in the Middle Ages, too.

We have many of these collections, and they tell of people from peasants to noblewomen who seek out saints, or the remains of saints, in order to work miracles. In many cases, nothing to do with children – to cure illnesses or to bring about some betterment in people’s circumstances – but there are many, many miracles which do involve children and many which do involve infants.

Infant mortality is obviously so high in this period that many people desperately pray to saints for anything they might do to help them in their hour of need, and sometimes this then resulted in a wonderful story which would be noted down. From the later 13th and into the 14th centuries, the process of becoming a saint became more institutionalized, and at that stage people would conduct full-on investigations into the miracles which had been accomplished by a particular saint. These kinds of investigations give us detailed accounts of the women who would come to these shrines seeking a cure for their children.

What is really interesting about this story is that the father is present; there is a stranger present who spotted the body in the moat; all the townspeople are present in concentric circles. There is a whole community involved in bringing this child back from the cusp of death.

That is partly because miracle stories are about a wider community, but it is also because people were thinking about these things in a wider sense – that there is a huge group of people involved in bringing up a child. There is one very interesting miracle story where a mother sounds probably as though she is suffering from postpartum depression, though I am a little skeptical about our ability to post-diagnose these accounts. Anyway, she is very miserable; she is unable to feed her child; and she is really desperate. In the story, we are told about how the priest’s wife – interesting phenomenon in itself – comes, places the child on her breast, shows her how to do it and the child starts suckling. Around this trio of the mother, the priest’s wife and the baby, we have the father, various siblings, an aunt, a grandmother and then a wider community, too. So there is a sense that many, many more people are involved in these kinds of episodes. It is a relationship which is wider and more expansive.

Joan was such an interesting figure equally because she does not fit into any of the straightforward categories that we might have for thinking about men or women in this period. Joan was, of course, never a mother herself. She played a great deal on the fact that she was a virgin. She could describe herself as the Pucelle, as the maid, and she presented herself as a military commander; she very emphatically chose to dress a particular way.

Of course, those who are opposed to Joan equally shoehorn her into all kinds of other categories that she does not really fit into. That sense that we have a whole series of texts desperate to categorize and to make her into something, but that actually, as historians, we can get the most purchase by listening to Joan herself and listening to the ways in which she refuses all these labels, is really rather inspiring.

Editor’s note: This article has been faithfully transcribed from the original interview filmed with the author, and carefully edited and proofread. Edit date: 2025