Introduction

Cicero was among the first in a long line of political commentators to warn against the degeneration of republican and, in a wider sense, societal values due to wet-nursing. He inspired Renaissance humanists, Protestant reformers, and Enlightenment philosophers alike in their polemics against non-maternal childcare. In terms of access to legal status and inheritance, mothers in ancient Rome as well as Renaissance Italy did not benefit from intellectuals' emphasis on exclusive maternal breastfeeding. While medieval religious discourse constructed the charitable breast as sign and object of desire in sync with Augustinian maledictions of male sexuality Renaissance medical writers saw the breast in analogy to the penis. The variety of topics and methods singles out Medieval and Renaissance Lactations as a collection of interdisciplinary scholarship on the practices, discourses, and images surrounding milk-exchange. Ancient, medieval, and Renaissance writers on breastfeeding express such mutually exclusive demands of patriarchal reproduction in the rhetorical form of what Hairston calls a "reverse occultatio".