I just watched Hannah Gadsby's new stand-up special, "Douglas", and was unexpectedly delighted by the appearance of a whole bit about Bernard of Clairvaux and lactation in medieval artwork!

Which is the kind of reaction that says a lot about a person, I know.

These are the 2 pieces of art that Gadsby discusses most. On the left, a 15thc. engraving by Master I.A.M. of Zwolle; on the right, a 17th c. painting by Alonzo Cano.

Yes, both of them show the Virgin Mary spraying breast milk onto the face of St Bernard of Clairvaux.

B. had a vision in which Mary breastfed him. Gadsby says this = e.g. of how low the bar is for men's sanctity: a wet dream made B. a saint. W/out wanting to de-eroticise these images (or the funniness of Gadsby's joke), allow me to be A Historian & say: boobs are more complex!

Boobs aren't just about sex, after all: they're a source of food. As far back as the 2nd century, writers like Clement of Alexandria wrote about Christ as God's breast from whom all souls suckled. Bernard & other 12th-century Cistercian monks were drawn to this imagery. Why?

There's the simple visual parallel: breast milk flows like blood from the wound in Christ's side. But also many medieval medical theories thought breast milk = processed blood. So Christ redeeming a soul w/ his blood = a nursing mother whose milk is made from her own blood.

Bernard also, as Caroline Walker Bynum has pointed out, had a Lot of Theological Thoughts about breasts. This may seem odd to us, but this is clearly not simply a guy trying to find excuses to think about boobs.

(Bynum, "Jesus as Mother", 115: https://books.google.com/books?id=SRN0q7zfyiYC&pg=PA132&lpg=PA132#v=onepage&q&f=false)

And it wasn't just Bernard! Margaretha Ebner claimed to have breastfed Christ, St Clare of Assisi to have breastfed *from* Christ while 14th-c. poet Werner the Swiss claimed (perhaps shockingly to modern sensibilities) that Jesus enjoyed breastfeeding

https://books.google.com/books?id=yB45VtoCC5cC&lpg=PA212

So for medieval Christians, breasts = food/nurture & love, & had salvific connotations when assoc. w/ Jesus or Mary. See how here Christ & Mary are shown interceding for a group of praying figures? Christ points to his wound; Mary holds up a breast. It’s an equivalency.

Boobs, in other words, have a history! And it's not *just* about the bow-chicka-wow.

(Lastly, if any of my students watched this and did *not* sit up during this bit and say “That’s the penis tree nun that Dr. Seale talked about!”, I have failed in my work. Failed.)