The Animal Nurse in Late Medieval Narrative and its Relation to Genre

This article examines the motif of the epic hero being raised by an animal foster parent in late medieval texts. This long-established commonplace, most famously exemplified by the Roman she-wolf, was a familiar theme in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when ancient history was much in vogue, and miniatures depicting Romulus and Remus abounded. Although animal suckling, particularly by goats, was a common medieval practice, the literary figure of the animal foster parent only gained a firm foothold in vernacular medieval texts in the late Middle Ages, when it became the topos of numerous epic-style narratives. After having established the success of this motif by examining several examples from the canon of gestes tardives, this essay goes on to study the fourteenth-century epic text Tristan de Nanteuil, in which two child figures, Tristan and his half-brother Doon, are wrenched from their parents and raised by strangers. This text establishes both a parallel, and a competition, between human and animal foster parents. By way of a conclusion, the essay focuses on the deliberate sidelining of the animal foster parent-theme in the late romances. Acclaimed, debated and ultimately rejected, the animal foster parent in late medieval literature seems to have been a generic marker of epic, rather than romance literature.