ABSTRACT
The medieval phenomenon of a multi-ethnic and trilingual culture in much of the Iberian peninsula left its mark on discourses of the maternal. Although advice literature regarding wet-nursing in early modern Spain shares many characteristics with other didactic texts addressed to mothers in English and Italian, there are significant differences arising from the eight-centuries of transculturation among Christians, Muslims and Jews. Simon Palmer’s Cocina de palacio includes lists of rations provided for the royal amas de lactancia and the daunting diet of solid food that immediately replaced the nurse’s milk as soon as royal infants were weaned. Physical revulsion toward the female body pervades the fifteenth-century Valencian poem often cited as a precursor of the picaresque, Jaume Roig’s Espill o llibre de les dones. Juan de Valdes’s Dialogo de la lengua is an affirmation of his native Castilian as the language of empire.
