In some ways, this perfect image denigrated real women, who could never hope to live up to this lofty ideal. But breastfeeding was nevertheless widely eulogised, particularly by theologians and medical writers.

Bartholomaeus Anglicus, a 13th-century scholastic, wrote that a mother “conceives her children voluptuously, having carried them in her womb where they are nourished by her blood, she bears them in pain, she loves them and kisses them: because of her love, her nursing is the best, and the nursing helps to sustain her motherly love”.

He was echoing the dominant view among medieval (male) thinkers that infants should best be breastfed by their biological mothers, rather than wet nurses or even milk substitutes being used.

Moreover, he saw love and affection at the heart of this physical bond. Bartholomaeus talks about how the mother’s blood nourished the child during pregnancy and that breast milk was the logical next stage. He was following the medieval belief that breast milk was effectively a transformation of blood which would continue to sustain the infant once out of the womb.

Some medical beliefs were idiosyncratic and seem problematic to us: colostrum, the substance which is produced by new mothers right after birth – now recognised as essential for the well-being of the infant – was deemed poisonous. Medics suggested a range of ways to dispose of it, including hiring old women or orphans who could suck it off the breast of the new mother.

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Contraceptive effect

Many medical beliefs, drawing on ancient and Arabic thinkers, were less bizarre. It was widely believed that breastfeeding had a contraceptive effect. A 15th-century physician from Padua, Michele Savaronola, even went so far as to recommend that new mothers should breastfeed in order to protect their bodies from having to deal with another pregnancy too soon. It was a rare moment of concern for nursing mothers, whose well-being was not usually the motivation so much as that of the infants.

Part of the concern also came from the widespread belief that breast milk also had the potential to pass on certain characteristics to the child. This was rooted in medieval ideas about complexions. Medieval people believed that the complexion – that is, the appearance, temperament and character – of the mother subsisted in, and could be transferred through, the milk. Interestingly, these claims seem to have originated in the work of moral philosophers, rather than medical texts per se.

There was a pastoral dimension, too. Breast milk was believed to be imbued with the love of a mother for her child. The 14th-century saint Catherine of Siena was apparently her mother’s 24th child. She was the only one to be breastfed by her own mother, and her hagiographer tells us that this accounted for her very special bond with her mother.

But this is the history of nursing mothers, not just male intellectuals who wrote about what they should do. And we know a surprising amount about the practices of breastfeeding, and how breastfeeding women across the social spectrum felt. Miracle stories (which were compiled in order to demonstrate that a particular dead person deserved to be canonised as a saint) provide wonderful insights into the travails and joys of parents who prayed to saints for cures for their infants.

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Miraculous recovery

Breastfeeding until the age of two was typical – interestingly, this is in line with modern medical advice from the World Health Organisation, and certainly at odds with modern social norms. The little boy Roger, who was rescued from the moat of Conwy Castle, was a two-year-old toddler.

Another miracle story tells of a little girl who was “suckling at the breast and crawling”. She apparently crawled towards a river and fell in. Her parents prayed to Count Simon for her miraculous recovery, and she was resuscitated. Her parents were thrilled, but even more so when they set their little girl down after giving her a cuddle and “she then walked for the first time”. The parents’ pride in the moment at which their little girl learned to walk is palpable. And she was still being breastfed.

There is also clear evidence that medieval infants were fed on demand rather than according to a strict routine – a debate that persists to this day. In another story, we hear of a mother who went to find her child to nurse him when she heard him crying: his wails were her cue to breastfeed. We learn, too, that many infants were nursed in their parents’ beds. Sadly, some of this evidence comes from legal cases after infants were accidentally smothered by their parents in the night.

A story with a happier ending from medieval Italy tells of a mother who fell asleep while breastfeeding two of her children simultaneously in her bed, crushing one. He was apparently miraculously resuscitated after entreaties to Nicholas of Tolentino (who was later canonised). Many modern mothers will surely identify with the sheer sense of exhaustion at the heart of this story.

Most importantly, though, medieval breastfeeding is not simply the history of exclusive mother-baby bonds. Medieval nursing was about wider family and wider community. The story of little Roger in Conwy is typical. He was spotted in the moat by a passer-by, rescued by members of the community, joyfully held by both his parents, and celebrated by a large number of friends. This was not just a story of a devoted mother and baby, but one involving a whole network of people who cared about Roger.

In another miracle tale, a woman was unable to bond with her baby. It was the priest’s partner who helped her to feed the child, placing the infant on her lap and standing beside her. Milk sharing was also not uncommon: one woman named Johanna recalled in a later legal case how she had breastfed a baby, Katherine, when her mother could not. Medieval breastfeeding embedded mothers and children in wider networks of support.

Disapproving preachers

Milk sharing is obviously a different phenomenon to that of wet-nursing, which, as a contractual form of labour, was commonplace. Preachers and physicians disapproved strongly of wet-nursing, urging mothers to breastfeed their own children – and yet they offered advice on how best to choose a wet nurse for one’s child. The 13th-century intellectual Aldebrandin of Siena told parents that they should ensure any prospective wet nurse was of good character, partly to ensure that the baby would receive good care.

Bernard of Gordon, a medical professor in Montpellier, advised that parents should avoid cowardly, greedy, stupid, melancholic or drunken wet nurses, because they would neglect their charges. But this was also because the milk itself would apparently be affected by the nurse’s character. Some believed that the milk itself was altered by the emotional state of the lactating woman and could become more or less nourishing. The belief that the milk might also pass on aspects of the complexion and disposition of the carer made choosing a wet nurse a fraught decision.

Wet nurses were most sought after by families of high social status: this was, after all, an expensive way to nourish one’s child. Importantly, since breastfeeding was believed to delay conception, wet nurses were particularly popular among wealthy families seeking to safeguard their lineage with as many pregnancies as possible.

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A number of preachers voiced their opposition to this practice. Among them was Jacques Despars, who claimed that mothers who employed wet nurses did so because they vainly wished to preserve the appearance of their breasts, and were too self-indulgent to look after their newborns.

But infants from a whole range of backgrounds might be fed in this way. After all, maternal mortality was extremely high, and babies that survived still needed to be fed. Examples of wet nurses appear in the records in surprising places: an ecclesiastical visitation record of Hereford in the 14th century mentions in passing the involvement of a wet nurse who was feeding a couple of peasant babies in the community.

Babies from the foundling hospitals across Europe were effectively farmed out to wet nurses in the countryside. Visitation records survive from the orphanage officials in Florence and Siena and detail the checks that were carried out to ensure that infants were not being neglected.

Many of these relationships between wet nurses and their charges may have been merely contractual, but there is substantial evidence about the feelings of those involved. Wet nurses would either have lost their own babies or were obliged to shortchange them. This was acutely painful, and a case from the Canterbury consistory court tells of a woman who refused to wet-nurse a neighbour’s child because “she loved her son just as much as Ellen loved hers, and consequently she could not allow her son to perish on account of Ellen’s”.

Some wet nurses developed close emotional relationships with the children they fed. Testamentary evidence from southern France tells of people leaving substantial sums of money to the women who had wet-nursed them decades previously in recognition of their bond.

The 11th-century life of St Kenelm describes the reaction of the saint’s wet nurse to the assassination of her young charge. “Woe is me,” she said. “My sweet son, alas for my milk-bearing, and my sweet nourishment.”

Inhumane solution

There was, however, a more sinister side to wet nursing. In southern European cities, slavery was rife in the later Middle Ages. Slaves were largely female and domestic – and they were often used as wet nurses. It was an appalling solution; and one used again in the most inhumane circumstances in the later context of plantation slavery.

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Slaves were imported largely via the Black Sea, and the phenomenon was increasingly racialised over the course of the 14th and 15th centuries. We have little surviving evidence to tell us how this felt for enslaved wet nurses, although a number of surviving cases where enslaved mothers litigated to try to protect their offspring remind us of the importance of their own relationships.

Their suffering must never be underestimated. These women had most likely been impregnated by their masters, restricted from nourishing their own children, and forced to nurse other mothers’ infants.

And the enslavers tied themselves in knots. Enslaved wet nurses were convenient. But in an era when people believed that breast milk might also pass on maternal characteristics, the growth of racist attitudes meant that there was a real tension between the robust nourishment these people wished to provide to their children, and a growing fear of the kinds of traits that the babies might then inherit.

This came into particularly sharp focus in the Iberian peninsula, where different religious communities coexisted. When Christian households used Muslim wet nurses, there was widespread unease about the implications for the babies. And yet households benefited from the convenience.

Networks of love

The story of medieval breastfeeding is rich in emotion and the personalities and relationships of families of the past. It is also the tale of the acute suffering of many wet nurses and their own children. And it is one that sets in relief many modern assumptions about what breastfeeding looks like.

In the Middle Ages, this was rarely about an exclusive and intimate scene between mother and child: many fathers were involved and wider networks of community and friends were part of the dynamic. There was a sense that breastfeeding lay at the heart of caregiving as an expression of deep love rather than just biology.

This idea is expressed most powerfully in a wonderful story about a Bolognese man who found an infant abandoned at the gate of a hospital where he and his wife worked. They took the baby home, undid the swaddles in which it was wrapped, and found the tiny body emaciated and covered in ulcers. The woman was far too old to nurse the child. The couple prayed and prayed, and the woman’s breasts miraculously filled with milk. The child flourished under their care.

Hannah Skoda is a fellow at St John’s College, University of Oxford, and a regular contributor to our ‘History Behind the Headlines’ podcast.

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