(1/3)

Hello, I'm a Medievalist. I specialize in the 11th-13th Cs in England and France. I do notice that a lot of the sources referenced in your source are in Dutch or German, which I am unfortunately unable to read or reference.

I have searched through my known sources for social history, from several different angles, including women's history, gender studies, and social and political history, and I have not seen any reference to this practice even mentioned. Nor do I recall ever reading it in the large amount of primary source material I have read over the years. Unfortunately the nature of writing answers on Reddit for such a topic means that I don't have infinite time to scour back through the thousands of pages of primary source material I have access to, but I can verify that at least looking through related topics did not yield any confirmation that this was a commonplace practice, or even a practice at all. I'm sorry that this may seem a rather unscientific answer, but it is a lot easier to say "this happened because it's discussed about here and here" than it is to prove that "this is never mentioned in anything scholarly that I have ever read" because I can't provide page numbers for something that is not there.

In fact, our knowledge of Medieval childrearing is rather scant in sources. Medieval people did not leave behind a great deal of prescriptive literature regarding childrearing or parenting. Much of this comes down to the fact that most people raising children were not educated. It took a great deal of time, effort, and materials to produce written works, so producing written works on parenting for a class of people very unlikely to have practical use for them would have been considered a waste. The educated class capable of reading such things would have been clerics and aristocrats. Clerics, for more obvious reasons, did not have children (at least not officially) so theoretically did not need parenting texts, and aristocrats often hired on lower-class women to raise young children, often women who already had children.

In fact, the earlier Medieval texts we do have regarding prescriptive childcare, which are both from the 13th C, are more about the duties and hiring of domestic servants for the rearing of children than the actual techniques. Nicholas Orme discusses the development of prescriptive childcare writings in From Childhood to Chivalry: The Education of the English Kings and Aristocracy 1066-1530:

By the thirteenth century there were books, not yet wholly devoted to the bringing up of young children but offering advice on the matter among their other concerns. Aristotle himself, a chief classical author studied in medieval universities alluded to babies and their care in the seventh book of the Politics. Their diet should be based on milky food, not wine which leads to disease. Crying and screaming should be tolerated, since they strengthen the body, and not impeded as Plato recommended in the Laws. Older children should be allowed to move freely, kept amused and accustomed to the cold from their earliest years to harden them for war. Giles of Rome repeated these precepts in about the 1270s, but he misunderstood Aristotle's opinion on crying and quoted him as saying that it should be discouraged because it weakened the spirits. The fullest account of baby-care which circulated in medieval England was that of Bartholomew Glanville in his encyclopaedia. Bartholomew gives a whole chapter to the care of the infant and another to the duties of the nurse, both evidently reflecting what was done as well as advising what ought to be. The nurse bathes the baby, and should do so frequently. She anoints it with oil of myrtles or roses. She feeds it first from the breast and later with food, chewed in her mouth and pushed with her fingers into the mouth of the baby. She swaths the child in sheets and cloths, with the limbs stretched out and tied with cradle bonds, lest they should grow deformed. She dances the child up and down and rocks it in the cradle. She talks to it and lisps her words in baby-talk. She lulls the child with cradle-songs and, says Bartholomew, should put it to sleep in a dark place lest its eyes be dazzled with bright lights. Sleep is important for children because it concentrates their warmth in their inner parts and helps them to digest. Walter of Bibbesworth adds to this some observations on children as they grow older. They start to crawl as soon as they can use their feet. Directly this happens they cover themselves with dirt, and a boy or girl should be assigned to follow them round and see that they do not stumble or fall. A dribbling mouth should be wiped with a cloth, called in English a "slavering clout". When a child stretches out its hand in the morning for bread, it should be given a lump or a slice. At dinner time it is good to open an egg, taking off the shell and the white and giving the child the yolk, or to cut up an apple and give it the flesh after paring the core and peel. Later on it should be encouraged to dress itself and learn how to do up its buttons. Neither Bartholomew nor Walter had much space to give to nursery life, but they both perceived its interest and importance, and recorded many little details for which we are grateful now. For this they have an honourable place in the history of childcare.

I include the entirety of this lengthy description because it highlights the relative normalcy of Medieval child-rearing, despite the marked differences. While we now have things like food processors and commercially-produced baby food, medieval people still had practical solutions to childrearing that are underpinned in concerns that are not entirely unfamiliar. Furthermore, I will point out that Aristotle's point about letting children cry to build up their strength is perfectly in-line with modern concepts of "cry it out" parenting most recognizable with training children to sleep through the night unaccompanied. It was mistranslated by Giles of Rome, according to Orme, but one mistranslation does not mean that Medieval scholars simply stopped reading the original. This directly refutes the notion of "genital parenting" being a common method of calming tantrums.

And we do know that aristocratic medieval children became close to their nurses. Some of the most well-known examples are the wet-nurses of three of the sons of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Ralph Turner wrote a biographical essay on Agatha, wetnurse to King John, that is available on his Academia[dot]edu page called "Agatha, Clerical 'Wife' and Wet Nurse to King John of England, Longtime Companion to Godfrey de Lucy, Bishop of Winchester'. Here, Turner states that Agatha may have been one of the first women granted an estate for services to the crown, as she was granted an estate from Eleanor of Aquitaine's dower in 1199, at the beginning of John's reign. Richard I's wet nurse, Hodierna, also received yearly pensions that were being paid long into John's reign, after Richard's death. Turner speculates that a later Bishop of Cirencester, who claimed to be Richard's "milk brother", had his clerical education funded by such a pension, or other gifts of the crown. Indeed, these women were so heavily valued not only by their charges, but by the families of those charges because it was believed that the wet nurse transferred her good physical, personal, and spiritual qualities through her milk. We also see this as a common theme in medieval theology surrounding motherhood, common examples being the Virgin Mary, her mother Saint Anne, and her cousin Saint Elizabeth, who nursed Jesus, Mary, and John the Baptist, respectively.