ABSTRACT
This chapter examines ancient sources written in the first three centuries of the Common Era that discuss the onset of lactation in the early days following childbirth. These sources fall into two broad categories: medical and philosophical texts and early Christian stories. Ancient physicians and philosophers stressed the neat separation of blood from milk in the economy of female bodily fluids: when one flowed, the other did not. This meant that the early days after birth, when a mother’s vagina bleeds (the lochial bleeding) and her breasts produce the early milk (now known as colostrum), were considered anomalous; the thick first milk was a dangerous substance, unfit for consumption by the infant. These medical and philosophical sources can be read together with two well-known Christian stories about young mothers: the story of Mary, the mother of Jesus, in the Protoevangelium of James, and that of Felicity in the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity. Lactation is depicted in both stories in graphic, physical detail. Mary in the Protoevangelium does not bleed after birth but produces abundant milk, thus skipping the dangerous liminal stage when a woman’s body both bleeds and produces milk. Felicity, for her part, visibly leaks milk, perhaps for the first time, in the arena where she is about to die fighting wild beasts. I argue that both categories of texts, medical and early Christian, reflect societal concerns about the leaking maternal body in the days after childbirth.
