The Food of One's Own Blood: Educating Christian Bodies in Renaissance Spain

Abstract

Dissertation Advisor: Prof. Amy M. Hollywood Joshua Abramson Cohen The Food of One’s Own Blood: Educating Christian Bodies in Renaissance Spain Abstract This dissertation traces the repetition of a certain scene of instruction across Renaissance Spanish writing—the scene of suckling, in a word. While modern readers might balk at the notion of suckling as a mode of education, Renaissance writers assumed that the Christian infant’s daily meals enacted a kind of moral formation. Still, the suckling scene badly fit into humanist visions of education. The back-and-forth represented did not involve a highly learned master and his hungry disciple, but a woman, nearly always an unlearned woman, and a barely willing assemblage of flesh; the pedagogical media used were not written words, let alone written words handed down in a line from antiquity, but bodies. The infant’s bodily instruction (as certain writers tried to classify it) seemed to unfold outside every rule. And yet, as lowly and messy as such a scene appeared to be, prominent humanists insisted that a person’s intense intimacy with the woman who suckled him—his regular eating and absorbing of her body—made him into who he was. In this sense, my readings are oriented toward a different, frequently overlooked, original scene in the fashioning of Renaissance selves: not grammatical training, but the hard-to-categorize bodily mingling that occupied the interval between birth and school. The relationships generated by suckling are difficult to historicize, not only because they are hard to name, but because they tend to seem timeless. The Christian force of the pedagogy in question is not always easy to draw out either. Across my chapters, I argue that Renaissance scenes of bodily instruction expected, demanded even, to be read as fraught with the background of the Eucharist. At their most explicit, such scenes were grounded in the ancient pedagogical (and pagan) rule that the newborn must be fed on the food of his own blood—on the food of his mother’s menstrual blood, which had furnished his own body at conception; which he had eaten in the womb; and which incarnated as milk uniquely fitted to him after birth. At the same time, the self-continuity staked in infant pedagogy was experienced as a worldly blurred mirroring of the continuity promised by the eating and drinking of Jesus’ body and blood, in which the communicant was taught to receive and taste who he was. Assuming the perspective of Christian thought, I thus argue that by studying ordinary scenes of suckling—in which a wet nurse is paid to stand in for the Christian’s first mother—scholars of religion in Renaissance Spain can begin to make visible the transformation of bodily blood from a given into a problem. Language about "Christian blood" will be deeply familiar to scholars of Inquisitorial society. And yet, in light of the doctrine of limpieza de sangre, morally charged uses of the word “blood” have only ever been taken as biological metaphors for lineage. By shifting from ideas about sexual reproduction to scenes of instruction, and from the history of mentalities to the history of practices, my argument newly problematizes blood as the stuff of Christian selfhood. From there, I suggest, we can discern a particularly historical set of concerns not just for the vulnerability of infants to being altered by and through the presences of outside bodies, but for the alterability of Christian blood—including the blood currently taking the shape of one’s body—generally. The introduction situates the dissertation’s interventions within the study of bodily practices as it has been understood by scholars of religion, especially aligning my readings with newly emerging questions about the role of intimacy in generating religious forms of subjectivity. (There, by way of several of Augustine’s expositions of the Psalms, I also explain the theological resemblance ongoingly generated between the meal of ordinary women’s flesh and the meal of Christ’s body and blood.) Chapter 1, “Joining Mirrors,” reads the Salamancan bishop Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo’s De arte, disciplina, et modo alendi et erudiendi filios, pueros et iuvenes (On the Art, the Practice, and the Technique of Feeding and Cultivating Sons, Children, and Adolescents) (1453) alongside Antonio de Nebrija’s De liberis educandis (On Educating Children) (1509); Chapter 2, “Raw in Christ,” reads Juan Luis Vives’s The Education of a Christian Woman (De institutione feminae Christianae) (1524) alongside Erasmus’s “The New Mother” (Puerpera) (1526); Chapter 3, “Tastes Not of God,” turns to the Salamancan Franciscan and humanist Juan de Pineda’s Diálogos familiares de la agricultura cristiana (The Intimate Dialogues of Christian Agriculture, roughly) (1589). In my conclusion, I turn back to my reading of Pineda’s diálogos familiares, asking what Renaissance scenes of bodily instruction might have to teach us about the varied theological reuses of the word raza—race, perhaps—across sixteenth-century Spanish thought.