ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the following sixteenth-century Salesian folktale: A Jew offered to buy milk from a Christian wet nurse who instead sold him the milk of a sow. It considers cautionary tales about wet nurses that link non-maternal breast milk and social instability find culturally resonant articulation in early modern didactic literature about the English home, especially that literature printed during the historical frame. One key medical/moral concern was that breast-milk physically transmitted the moral and bodily character of the nurse to her charge, ideally complementing, but more often compromising or even eradicating the familial identity the child had inherited from its parents. The fraught relations between “others,” nursing mothers, and wet nurses, as reflected in the guidebook literature, can be discerned in many of the period’s travel narratives, such as those of Samuel Purchas. Samuel Purchas’s examples demonstrate the fuzzy boundary between the “breasts” of Jewish men and wet nurses–note that the poor Jew “became nurse himself”, not mother.
