ABSTRACT
Leon Battista Alberti's Libri della famiglia has long been considered one of the foundational texts of modern family ideology. The need to guarantee language competence through origin may also be the result of the custom of employing slaves as wet nurses. Again, Alberti's source Aulus Gellius warns against "corrupting the nobility of body and mind of a newly born human being" by nourishing it with another's milk. Milk's supposed origin in blood helps explain some of the concerns associated with choosing the proper wet nurse. One decidedly unambiguous ancient source on nursing, however, is Aulus Gellius's Noctes Atticae, the very same and only text cited by Alberti. The bibliography on nursing in the medieval period maintains its characteristic plurality of sources in fields as diverse as medicine, homiletics, morals, and domestic management. Francesco Barbaro's De re uxoria represents an important step in the return to maternal nursing of fifteenth-century Italian humanist texts.
