ABSTRACT
The Catalan versions of "La dida del rei" collected in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries include a remarkable array of variants. The ballad of "La nourrice du roi" gives voice, literally, to the ambivalent view of the nurse as both a vital member of the household and a servant, albeit better paid and better fed than any other female domestic worker. Cid groups the variants by language, noting several variants that are pertinent to the moral and social questions of hiring wet nurses. The twentieth-century versions of "La nodriza del rey" from Leon imply the cause of the child's immolation is not the negligence of a hired caregiver but the wrongdoing of the child's incestuous father. Documents from medieval France and Castile show the privileges granted to royal and aristocratic wet nurses. Feminist historians' rediscovery of the extent of the practice of wet-nursing in France, England, and Italy had an important impact on late twentieth-century historiography of motherhood.
