Wetnurse Politics in Spenser’s View and Jones’ Arte and Science

Abstract

This essay places Edmund Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland (1596) into conversation with John Jones’ 1579 nursing manual Arte and Science in order to contextualize Spenser’s medical solution to Irish rebellion. For both, the Irish wetnurse, who controlled the political system of fosterage undermining England’s agenda in Ireland, is central to the corporate identity of a conjoined Anglo-Irish kingdom. A View’s relationship to Jones’ text reveals the vexed ontological landscape of England’s early imperial self-fashioning, which linked the re-engineering of the genetic nature of colonial bodies to the management of women’s reproductive labor.