More than food. Animals, men and supernatural lactation in Occidental late Middle Ages

Résumé En

During the Middle Ages in Western Europe, lactation and the transmission of milk were seen as a means to understand relational beings — humans, animals, and gods. Milk had the power to transmit not only nutrition, but also filiation, character, and virtue. Milk created kinship. Resemblance were thought to extend from animal wetnurses to their charges. Women who breastfed animals often appeared as proof of their gender’s animality. From the twelfth century, complex constructions of cross-species and cross-gender relationships are found in Christian iconography and preaching literature. In the following centuries, the conception of our relationship with animals shifts, as animals were not until then ontologically distinct from humans. This chapter argues that milk was depicted as binding its producers and consumers into a kinship relation from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century, milk’s power of transmission might have disappeared, being replaced by a humanist (speciecist) paradigm.