Sexual Histories 9 th Lecture Prostitution Introduction Prostitution

Sexual Histories, 9 th Lecture Prostitution

Introduction • Prostitution as work or sex? • Gendered meanings of prostitution Prague, Knihovna Národního muzea v Praze, IV. B. 24, f. 78 v (‘Monks in the bath’), 1490 -1510.

1. Medieval tolerance St Augustine, 354 -430 CE. ‘If you do away with harlots the world will be convulsed with lust’.

St Thomas Aquinas, 1225 -1274. Prostitution in towns is like a sewer in a palace. It might not smell very good, but without it the whole palace would reek of excrement.

The degrees of lechery, from least serious (1) to worst (5) 1. fornication (sex between unmarried persons) 2. adultery (extra-marital sex) 3. incest (sex between family members or spiritual kindred) 4. rape (sex with a women against her consent; and/or abduction) 5. vice against nature (non-procreative sex; e. g. masturbation, oral, anal, use of contraceptives, same-sex acts)

Renaissance Florence. Late marriage for males (early 30 s). Long period of bachelorhood. Popularity of male same-sex relationships.

Dijon, France. Problem of male subculture – bachelors engaging in gang rape. Brothels set up to avert the ‘greater evils’ of rape or sodomy

A monk and a woman punished in the stocks for a sexual misdemeanour. According to research by P. J. P. Goldberg, 45 per cent of the clients of medieval prostitutes in York were members of the clergy

Locations of medieval brothels and streetwalkers. Grape Lane (‘Grope Lane’), York

Grope Lane, Shrewsbury

Institutionalization A medieval bath house, from a 15 th century French manuscript

2. Medieval Condemnation • ‘Common woman’ or ‘public woman’: a woman held ‘in common’ by more than one man; woman as a common piece of sexual property. • The boundaries between a prostitute (in the sense of a woman who took money for sex) and a sexually promiscuous woman were blurred. Either could be termed a ‘whore’. • Parallels with pigs, lepers, sewers

A prostitute with prospective client; note woman’s purse Romance of Alexander, circa 1344 (Flemish), Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS 264

3. Sixteenth-century change • Protestant reformation • closure of brothels • Criticism of Catholic clerics as sexual hypocrites Death and the courtesan. German woodcut, c. 1522 -50.

Conclusion • the topic of Prostitution reveals inconsistencies in premodern thinking on male and female sexuality • Reformation affected attitudes to male sexuality more than to female sexuality