The Virgin’s Milk

Among the most popular depictions of the Virgin Mary are paintings of her suckling the Christ Child. On occasion, she would offer her breast to the viewer, milk dripping, with her Son looking on. Some miracle-working icons – such as the famous Virgin of Saidnaya – “took on her flesh” and issued forth salvific oil. Whether as a pictorial motif or miraculous activity, the lactating Virgin Mary carried deep-seated spiritual meaning, which sometimes extended todepictions of breastfeeding Even or Christ’s wet-nurses. Although hosted by visual media­, her image was experienced as an unmediated (immediate presence). Her strong emotional, even erotic, address embodied by her virginal and lactating breast appealed to a diverse audience world-wide: early Christians of the Middle East, Catholics, Greek-Orthodox, Muslims, Ethiopians, Colonial Peruvian, South Asians, and Japanese Converts. Contemporary deco­lonial and feminist artists employ, refract, and reassemble her image as well. The current volume investigates the Nursing Virgin as a pictorial and religious phenomenon, paying attention to iconographic variations, the global circulation of her image, and the ongoing appeal of her inclusive address.

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
LIST OF FIGURES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introduction
VIBEKE OLSON

PART I : CONTEXTUALIZING THE NURSING VIRGIN

Chapter 1 Mapping Galaktotrophousa, Virgo lactans, Nursing Virgin: An Art-Historical Overview
MATI MEYER

Chapter 2 What Does the Nursing Virgin Want?
JUTTA SPERLING

PART II: (IN)IMITABLE PERFORMANCES: DISEMBODIED BREASTS. GENDERED FLUIDS, AND ALTERNATIVE LACTATIONS

Chapter 3 Gender-Fluid/Gendered Fluids: Musings on Breast, Wound, Lactation, and Bleeding in Devotional Art and Thought of the Later Middle Ages
VIBEKE OLSON

Chapter 4 Disembodied Breasts and Uncontrollable Lactation: Rethinking the Nursing Virgin Motif Through Janine Antoni’s to quench (2015) and Eve Dent & Zoe Gingell’s Breastcups (2009–11)
JENNY RINTOUL AND CLARE JOHNSON

Chapter 5 Artemisia Gentileschi and the Metaphoric Female Breast
MARY D. GARRARD

PART III : MILK AS BLOOD, MILK AS BREAD, MILK AS MILK

Chapter 6 Milk and (Im)pure Blood: The Racial Dimension of Maternal Milk (Quito in the Seventeenth Century)
CARMEN FERNÁNDEZ-SALVADOR

Chapter 7 Nursing Mothers: Between Spiritual and Mundane Nourishment in Twelfth-Century Sculpture
MAZI KUZI

PART IV: ICONOGRAPHIC VARIANCE AND GESTURAL DISPLACEMENTS

Chapter 8 Reassigning the Virgin’s Lactation in Byzantine Art
MATI MEYER

Chapter 9 The Virgo Lactans and Christ as Mother in Suor Plautilla Nelli’s Cenacolo
CHRYSTINE L. KEENER

Chapter 10 The Virgin, the Unicorn, and Some Potent Drops of Milk
CHRISTINE STEPHAN-KAISSIS

PART V: MIRACLES AT WORK: THE TRANSFORMATIONAL POWER OF IMAGES AND EFFLUVIA

Chapter 11 Noetic Milk of the Virgin: Theotokos Galaktotrophousa of Hilandar Monastery
FR. DR. NEBOSJA TUMARA

Chapter 12 Networks of Marian Liquids in and Around the Holy Land
MICHELE BACCI

Chapter 13 Nursing Saints at Cave Shrines
SARAH MADY

PART VI : ORIGINS, COPIES, HYBRIDS, AND GLOBAL CIRCUITS

Chapter 14 The Madonna del Latte in Trecento Italy
BETH WILLIAMSON

Chapter 15 Essence of Mary: Armenian Visual Metaphors for the Corporeality of the Mother of God
IOANNA RAPTI

Chapter 16 The Poetics of the Nursing Virgin and Female Identity in Mughal India
BRONWEN GULKIS

Chapter 17 The Global Circulation of a Nursing Virgin After Robert Campin: Japan, Peru, and Ethiopia
JUTTA SPERLING

BIBLIOGRAPHY