Maternal milk is the first food practice that serves to control the female body, enabling certain women but not others from nursing infants. In this presentation, Dr. Colbert Cairns shares her research from a sabbatical in the fall of 2019. While in Spain, she conducted primary research in hospital archives regarding the use of wet-nurses and their orphan charges in the Archivo de la Diputación Provincial de Sevilla (Seville, Spain). Establishing a primary residence in Seville, Spain, allowed Dr. Colbert Cairns to visit and study first-hand some of the important artistic representations of the lactating virgin in the Museum of Bellas Artes, within the Cathedral of Seville and in the Archbishop’s Palace. These paintings comprise a key aspect of the research — they reflect the widespread and popular appeal this topic had for an early modern Iberian audience. In addition, this discussion will focus on two of these paintings found within Seville’s Cathedral: Virgen de los Remedios (anonymous 1400) and The Purification of the Virgen (1555) by Pedro de la Campaña.    

Emily Colbert Cairns is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island. She specializes in gender, converso and crypto-Jewish identity in the early modern period and has published with eHumanista, Chasqui, Cervantes Journal and Hispanófila. She is the co-editor of Confined Women: The Walls of Female Space in Early Modern Spain (Hispanic Issues Online 2020) and she is the author of Esther in Early Modern Iberia and the Sephardic Diaspora: Queen of the Conversas (Palgrave 2017).