Chapter Four
MATERNAL NURSING AND WET NURSES:
FEEDING AND CARING FOR INFANTS
Most women have compassion for their children and nurse
them.
—Jacob Mulin, Shut MaharilIn medieval Jewish society, as in all premodern societies, infancy was fraught
with danger. Disease and malnutrition resulted in a high rate of infant mor-
tality; many children did not survive the first year of their lives.^1 This chapter
will focus on the care given children during infancy, and especially on breast-
feeding, a practice crucial for children’s survival.^2
At the outset, a word about the sources is in order. The available sources pro-
vide only brief glimpses of the way infants were fed, bathed, and clothed. As a
result of our lack of information, it is impossible to document many aspects of
their care. Furthermore, Jewish sources are very limited in comparison with
those available on medieval Christian society. In thirteenth-century Christian
sources, we find descriptions of appropriate methods of caring for infants.
Encyclopedists such as Bartholemæus Anglicus described how wet nurses and
parents were to attend to their offspring.^3 Another source, used extensively in
studying the lives of Christians in medieval Europe, is art—illuminations and
sculptures that depict child care.^4 By contrast, few such descriptions and de-
pictions have survived from medieval Ashkenaz, and most of our knowledge is
gleaned from details mentioned in passing in various texts.^5
There is one exception: The discussion of breast-feeding practices in me-
dieval Ashkenaz had many halakhic implications. This chapter will use the in-
formation provided in halakhic sources on breast-feeding and wet-nursing
practices to present the social context in which infants and young children
were cared for. As a result of this wealth of sources, this chapter (unlike others
in this book), is based primarily on halakhic material and is framed around a
number of important halakhic issues. As we shall see, although these sources
are abundant, their legal nature imposes its own limitations.
The theme of breast-feeding, although more pronounced in the Jewish ha-
lakhic sources, is also prominent in medieval sources that discuss Christian
children. Since children who were not breast-fed had almost no chance of sur-
vival during the Middle Ages, feeding an infant was the most central issue per-