Medieval and Renaissance Lactations

Images, Rhetorics, Practices

Jutta Gisela Sperling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409448600
• eBook ISBN: 9781317098102
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

The premise of this volume is that the ubiquity of lactation imagery in early modern visual culture and the discourse on breastfeeding in humanist, religious, medical, and literary writings is a distinct cultural phenomenon that deserves systematic study. Chapters by art historians, social and legal historians, historians of science, and literary scholars explore some of the ambiguities and contradictions surrounding the issue, and point to the need for further study, in particular in the realm of lactation imagery in the visual arts. This volume builds on existing scholarship on representations of the breast, the iconography of the Madonna Lactans, allegories of abundance, nature, and charity, women mystics' food-centered practices of devotion, the ubiquitous practice of wet-nursing, and medical theories of conception. It is informed by studies on queer kinship in early modern Europe, notions of sacred eroticism in pre-tridentine Catholicism, feminist investigations of breastfeeding as a sexual practice, and by anthropological and historical scholarship on milk exchange and ritual kinship in ancient Mediterranean and medieval Islamic societies. Proposing a variety of different methods and analytical frameworks within which to consider instances of lactation imagery, breastfeeding practices, and their textual references, this volume also offers tools to support further research on the topic.

Chapter 1 “The Milk of the Male”: Kinship, Maternity and Breastfeeding in Medieval Islam^{1, 2}

Mohammed Hocine Benkheira

DOI: 10.4324/9781315594743-2

¹ Translation of this text by Alexandra Woolley. ² As this text is not primarily addressed to Islamist scholars, I have simplified the Arabic transliteration of Arab names and removed references to primary sources. If the reader wishes to know more, I invite them to read my other publications (see note 4) in which the primary sources are detailed.

The doctrine of breastfeeding and the concept of kinship that derives from it constitute one of the most original maxims in Islamic law. Islam is the only Mediterranean culture in which milk kinship takes such an extended form.³ According to religious families and the different schools of law, milk kinship is constructed in exact symmetry to consanguineous kinship. This means that the same genealogical positions can be found on either side: there are milk mothers as well as mothers through blood ties, milk sisters, and consanguine sisters, and, most importantly, milk fathers, milk cousins, and so on. This extension of milk kinship is the consequence of two medieval innovations: First, the analogy of birth and breastfeeding as constitutive of kinship, and second, the idea that breast milk must be linked to the nurse’s husband, as he is the first cause of it: this is the premise of the legal theory of laban al-fahl [the milk of the male] as it was developed in the early Middle Ages.⁴ In this chapter, I argue that the Qur’ân itself, while referring to incest prohibitions due to milk kinship, does not mention the concept of laban al-fahl, which most likely developed among the jurists of the early second/eighth century. I also present in broader detail the extended Islamic theory of milk kinship and show how different legal scholars mapped patrilineal concepts of consanguinity onto an earlier, all-female notion of milk kinship.⁵

³ For a comparative anthropology on breastfeeding, see the recent works of Peter Parkes, mainly “Fosterage, kinship and legend: When milk was thicker than blood?” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 46 (2004): 587–615. As for the case of southeastern Europe, see, by the same author, “Milk kinship in Southeast Europe: Alternative social structures and foster relations in the Caucasus and the Balkans,” Social Anthropology, 9, 3 (2004): 341–58. ⁴ For more details and specific sources for what follows, see Mohammed Hocine Benkheira, “Donner le sein c’est comme donner le jour,” Studia Islamica, 92 (2001): 5–52; Mohammed Hocine Benkheira, Avner Giladi, Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen and Jacqueline Sublet, La famille en islam (Paris, forthcoming 2013). For extra-legal data, see Avner Giladi, Infants, parents and wet nurses (Leyden, 1999). Gertrud Stern, Marriage in Early Islam (London, 1939) can also be used as a reference, but with caution. ⁵ In this presentation, I will concentrate on the main Sunnî legal schools (Mâlikis, Hanafis, Shâfi’is, and Hanbalis) and the doctrine advocated by the Twelver Shi’ism (or Imâmis).

The Qur'ân: A Restricted Concept

The Qur’ân remains vague about breastfeeding. It is mentioned in passing in verse 2, 233, which underlines the need to breastfeed a child during the first two years of his life, and again in verse 4, 23, which contains the list of prohibited women and constitutes the Qur’ânic basis for matrimonial impediments in Islamic law. Here is, in the same order as in the verse, the list of prohibited women, which shows that the Qur’ân divides them into three forms of kinship: by birth, by breastfeeding, and by alliance.

1. Women prohibited by birth:
   Your mothers.
   Your daughters.
   Your sisters.
   Your paternal aunts.
   Your maternal aunts.
   Your brother’s daughters.
   Your sister’s daughters.

The verse first specifies relatives by descent such as mothers and daughters. Why the plural? As the Qur’ân is directed to the community of all male Muslims, it imagines all those men’s mothers individually. Yet, the exegesis drew a different conclusion: in the eyes of later commentators, the plural terms of “mothers” and “daughters” in this verse are classificatory. The term “mother” could designate one’s birth mother as also one’s grand-mother and all her predecessors, just as the term “daughter” includes one’s grand-daughters and great grand-daughters. Then there are one’s collateral relatives: first the sisters—a term that includes blood sisters and half-sisters; then the aunts, a term which can also include great-aunts; and finally, the daughters of one’s brother or sister, i.e., one’s nieces on both sides.

2. Women prohibited as a result of breastfeeding:
   Your nurses (literally “your mothers that gave you the breast”).
   Your sisters through breastfeeding.

This is the fragment that directly concerns us: relatives through breastfeeding are limited to one’s nurse and milk sister. Nurses are designated by the expression “your mothers that gave you the breast,” maternity being defined here through breastfeeding. The term “sister” is more ambiguous, by contrast. Does it refer only to the nurse’s birth-daughters? Or does it refer to all girls to whom she gave the breast? In the latter case, does it refer to all of the nurse’s foster daughters or only to those who were breastfed during the same period as Ego [the breastfeeding child]? In any case, the Qur’ân does not mention “daughters through breastfeeding,” or “aunts through breastfeeding,” or even “nieces through breastfeeding.” If the Qur’ân truly subscribed to the distinction between the two forms of kinship (by breastfeeding and by birth), the mention of mothers would have been followed by the mention of daughters, while sisters would have been added in the third position. But the Qur’ân does not mention daughters through breastfeeding, because such a notion did not belong to the cultural and historical context of its time. Furthermore, as it does not condition the sister’s status, we can assume that all of the nurse’s daughters, whether by milk or blood, were sisters to all the boys she breastfed.

3. Women prohibited as a result of alliance:
   The mothers of your wives.
   The daughters of your wives (rabâ’ib).
   The wives of your sons, born from your loins.⁶

⁶ “The wives of your fathers” must be added to this list (4, 22) for it to be complete.

Looking more closely at the prohibition of the wives of the father (4, 22), we can observe that this third category only concerns relatives by birth, that is, ascendants and descendants of the wife, as well as the wives of ascendants and descendants. These two cases are instructive by way of comparison. While verse 4, 22 refers to “the daughters of your wives,” there is no mention of “the daughters fed by your wives’ milk.” Also, it lists “your sons born from your loins,” a category normally used to distinguish a father’s natural from his adopted children, so why does is not refer to “your sons by breastfeeding?”

This reading of verse 4, 22, which stresses the absence of milk relatives, corresponds roughly to the argumentation of those legal scholars who objected to the theory of laban al-fahl. Moreover, we cannot accept the thesis developed by jurists after the third/ninth century, which claims that the Qur’ân subscribes to a notion of milk kinship that is strictly analogous to consanguineous kinship. One can find an additional argument against this analogy by comparing verses 4, 23 and 4, 22. The latter verse contains the impediment to marry one’s father’s wife, either after his death or her separation from the father. The controversial tone adopted by the Qur’ân in this respect suggests that such a union was part of Arab customs.⁷ By contrast, the incest taboos deriving from milk kinship in verse 4, 23 are formulated without any polemic. This probably means that they did not constitute a novelty in central Arabia. We must thus conclude that the analogy between filiation by marriage and by breastfeeding was already known to the Arabs before the advent of Islam, and that the Qur’ân did not introduce any changes on this matter. Otherwise, we would have to explain why the Qur’ân did not adopt the same polemical tone in prohibiting marriage with one’s father’s wife. In my view, the analogy between filiation by blood and by breastfeeding cannot be presupposed by the Qur’ân, because such a novelty would have had to be formulated very clearly. Given the emergence of a heated debate surrounding these issues at the end of the first/seventh century, we can assume that if the analogy was of Qur’ânic origin, it would have provoked a serious opposition already at the time it was written. Moreover, as the Qur’ân in other instances adopts a dialogical rhetoric concerning the notions it aimed to abolish, it would not have failed to carry a trace of this debate. Hence, we can conclude that the absence of such a trace is further evidence that the Qur’ân did not introduce changes to the concept of milk kinship in Arabia during the seventh century CE but that it was content to endorse contemporary notions.

⁷ Verse 4, 22 is controversial because it refers to the custom of marrying one’s father’s wife after his death, which leads us to believe that this was a concrete practice.

It should be noted that the spontaneous concept of milk kinship, expressed by the faithful in cases they submitted to the Muftis—including today’s—is very often restricted with respect to the Qur’ânic tradition. Let us quote a contemporary case: “I was breastfed by my paternal uncle’s wife at the same time as his first daughter. After this daughter, she had two other daughters. Does the law allow me to marry one of these two [later] daughters or is it forbidden for me to marry [all] three girls?”⁸ The question relies on the premise that for marriage to be forbidden, there must have been co-lactation, that is, both babies would have had to be breastfed by the same wet nurse during the same period of time, and consequently with the same milk. This means that the doctrine of laban al-fahl is not unambiguous and constitutes a novelty.

⁸ Hasanayn Muhammad Makhlûf, Fatâwâ shar’iyya (2 vols, Cairo, 1965), vol. 2, 65.

The study of the Qur’ân leads to an important result: There is no mention of “milk daughters.” The concept of the “milk father” is, likewise, unknown to the Qur’ân, which is why it is not surprising that the formula of laban al-fahl is missing as well. Furthermore, the Qur’ân seems to ignore the analogy between kinship by birth and kinship by breastfeeding. While the first case mentions one’s mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts, and nieces, the second case only lists nurses and their daughters as sisters of the breastfed child. Hence we can suggest that according to the Qur’ân, milk kinship is limited to the nurse and her children—without being able to determine whether this included her offspring by blood as well as by milk.⁹ As the Qur’ân does not offer any further information on the subject of the nurse’s daughters, we can assume that the Qur’ânic concept of milk kinship was unambiguous in the eyes of those to whom it was addressed. If we accept these premises, we can suggest that the classical Islamic doctrine on milk kinship was established at a later date, after the emergence of the so-called Qur’ânic vulgate, which broke with earlier doctrines under intervention from the Ulemas [Islamic legal scholars]. While imposing a new theory, they were forced to present it as an extension of the Qur’ânic viewpoint, by taking recourse to a coherent and unified Sunna.¹⁰ In order to distinguish the Qur’ânic concept from the legal one, we will name the first view maternal and the second one paternal.

¹⁰ The patriarchal perspective is based exclusively on the prophetic tradition, which constitutes the Sunna and is the object of numerous controversies. As it is materially distinct from the Qur’ânic corpus, its supporters had to present it as an explanation of the Qur’ân in order to secure it a place in the then emerging institutional system of Islam. ⁹ We know that Muhammad himself had milk brothers and a milk sister. These siblings were the consanguineous children of his wet nurses.

During the third/ninth century, a genuine revolution in the field of milk kinship took place: originally supported by the Qur’ân, the transmission of milk bonds via the “maternal channel” was abandoned by the Ulemas, who substituted it with a theory based on bilinearity, which nonetheless privileged the paternal line. We must not be mistaken: The fiction of the “milk of the male” does not just establish bilinearity but, further, emphasizes the supremacy of the masculine over the feminine. Even though breast milk is secreted from the female body, the male is viewed as the primary cause of its production, and it is for this reason that he is related to the nursling. Since the late second/eighth century, at the beginning of the Abbasid Dynasty, this revolution was essentially completed. The ancient concept was abolished, and the new one had spread as the “true” doctrine. The collections of Hadith (Bukhârî, Muslim, etc.), which would later become canonical, were about to play an important part in this process.¹¹ They retained nothing or nearly nothing of the Qur’ânic notion of milk kinship. However, in his book on abrogated Qur’ânic verses, Harawî (d. 224/838) does not mention breastfeeding.¹² It would only be addressed a century la...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 “The Milk of the Male”: Kinship, Maternity and Breastfeeding in Medieval Islam’
• 2 Why Could Early Modern Men Lactate? Gender Identity and Metabolic Narrations in Humoral Medicine
• 3 The Mother and the Dida [Nanny]: Female Employers and Wet Nurses in Fourteenth-Century Barcelona
• 4 Peasants at the Palace: Wet Nurses and Aristocratic Mothers in Early Modern Rome
• 5 “With My Daughter’s Milk”: Wet Nurses and the Rhetoric of Lactation in Valencian Court Records
• 6 Popular Balladry and the Terrible Wet Nurse: “La nodriza del rey”
• 7 Picturing Institutional Wet-Nursing in Medicean Siena
• 8 Mother London and the Madonna Lactans in England’s Plague Epic
• 9 Nicolas Poussin’s Allegories of Charity in The Plague at Ashdod and The Gathering of the Manna and Their Influence on Late Seventeenth-Century French Art
• 10 The Economics of Milk and Blood in Alberti’s Libri della famiglia: Maternal versus Wet-Nursing
• 11 The Social and Religious Context of Iconographic Oddity: Breastfeeding in Ghirlandaio’s Birth of the Baptist
• 12 Wet Nurses, Midwives, and the Virgin Mary in Tintoretto’s Birth of Saint John the Baptist (1563)
• 13 Full of Grace: Lactation, Expression and “Colorito” Painting in Some Early Works by Rubens
• Bibliography
• Index