From the Wet Nurse’s Milk to the Alimenta of the Nursing Father: Fragile Bonds in Imperial Rome
Bretin-Chabrol, Marine
From the Wet Nurse’s Milk to the Alimenta of the Nursing Father: Fragile Bonds in Imperial Rome - 2015.
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In Ancient Rome, there were two types of nursing bonds that could be created around a child: the bond to a wet nurse who breastfed the child on behalf of someone else, and the bond between an abandoned child and its nursing parents. These two bonds placed the child and these nursing figures in vulnerable positions that were partly identified by the doctors and jurists of the imperial period: the physical and moral vulnerability of the infant, and the vulnerability of the nursing parents that did not possess the legitimate title of paterfamilias. But the specificity of the role of the wet nurse, whose body and emotions were called upon and controlled by the child’s parents, put this woman (unlike her spouse, who may also have been an agent in caring for the child) in a position that was at once more prestigious and more vulnerable, in physical, emotional and economic terms.
From the Wet Nurse’s Milk to the Alimenta of the Nursing Father: Fragile Bonds in Imperial Rome - 2015.
4
In Ancient Rome, there were two types of nursing bonds that could be created around a child: the bond to a wet nurse who breastfed the child on behalf of someone else, and the bond between an abandoned child and its nursing parents. These two bonds placed the child and these nursing figures in vulnerable positions that were partly identified by the doctors and jurists of the imperial period: the physical and moral vulnerability of the infant, and the vulnerability of the nursing parents that did not possess the legitimate title of paterfamilias. But the specificity of the role of the wet nurse, whose body and emotions were called upon and controlled by the child’s parents, put this woman (unlike her spouse, who may also have been an agent in caring for the child) in a position that was at once more prestigious and more vulnerable, in physical, emotional and economic terms.
Réseaux sociaux