SEX WORKING IN EARLY MODERN TIMES
(THE RENAISSANCE TO THE ENLIGHTENMENT)
Prostitution in the 16th Century
The shift from the Medieval feudal state to the nation state in the high Renaissance period and the rise of mercantilism was followed by the increasing repression of the ordinary woman in European society.
In a decidedly masculine society based on wealth, power and influence in the ranks of the rising middle classes women were relegated to the domestic sphere.
Gone were the days of sexual equality in the enterprising Medieval cottage industries, to be replaced by a gendered hierarchy in which the hard-nose world of international trade controlled by bourgeois male merchants dominated both the economies of the everyday person, as well as state.
In the new stricter patriarchy of the Renaissance, with its revival of classical learning, women generally were as deprived of access to learning as they were in gaining access to the world of business.
It was as if Europe in the Renaissance, through its influence of Ancient Greek literature, arts and science, emulated the heavy-handed repression of women that was a particular feature of Grecian society.
And, just as Classical Greek patriarchy witnessed the rise to prominence of high-class courtesans, so the Renaissance too had its courtesans, who, as though in reaction to the general oppression of women, were the most independent, learned and wealthiest females of their day.
Fittingly, the greatest and most renown of them, the cortegiane, flourished in the northern Italian cities of Florence, Milan and, most especially, Venice, the very centres of European mercantilism and learning.
Although coming to prominence in the 15th century, they continued to dominate the sex trade throughout most of the 16th century.
The best of them commanded a king"s ransom for a whole night"s service, but they were also selective in their clientele, for as Veronica Franco, a highly intelligent young woman and one of the most learned of the Venetian cortegianes, once remarked: "All those who claim to be able to gain my love are strenuous in studious discipline."
And she added, somewhat wistfully: "If my fortune allowed it I would spend all my time quietly in the academies of virtuous men."
Prostitution in the affluent and festive atmosphere of the 16th century northern Italian cities was not confined to the cortegiane, for with the confinement of most women to the home and hearth the demand for sexual service, especially by numerous visiting merchants and traders from other parts of Europe, was so great that the city fathers imported hundreds of whores from elsewhere and placed them in specially designed brothels run by state-hired madams, who took all the proceeds, paid themselves and their girls set salaries and sent the rest to the municipal coffers.
At the lowest end of the sex trade were the puttana, or independent streetwalkers.
The state did its best to restrict their movements by forbidding them to operate in inns, taverns or outside church-yards on the Sabbath; they were also forbidden to service Moors, Turks or Jews.
They may not have had the high status of the cortegiane, or the brothel workers" protection of the state, but with so many men loose on the streets they often attained a personal income that was well above most of their customers.
Violence, however, was commonplace in the crowded cities, and much of this was directed at the sex workers, whom many men resented for the small fortunes they made.
The custom of the sfregia, or slashing the face, was a nasty practice usually reserved for whores.
Others were pack-raped, especially by roving youth gangs considering prostitutes fair game.
Even the cortegianes were subjected to violence, especially from dissatisfied customers, and most of them hired bodyguards hidden from view not far from their boudoir doors.
Prostitution, of course, flourished elsewhere in 16th century Europe, but it generally lacked the romance and flair of the northern Italian sex trade, and nowhere else was it as lucrative for the sex worker.
In Spain, where the European influx of a new deadly venereal disease, syphilis, first struck, brothels were viewed suspiciously as distribution centres of the infection.
But, unlike the rest of Europe, where houses of prostitution were forcibly closed in a futile attempt to arrest the disease, the only brothel in Seville, a city that was a syphilitic hotbed due to its persistent spread by soldiers and sailors returning from the Americas, was not closed.
Rather, the city fathers sought to contain the disease in 1570 by regulating the brothel and making it a requirement that its inmates receive constant medical surveillance.
In England the most active centre of prostitution for four centuries had been the stewes of Southwark, which had been under the rent control of the Bishopric of Winchester since the land on which the brothels stood was granted to the Church by King Henry II in 1161.
Henry VIII, however, defied this ancient ordinance during one of his many fits of outrage towards the Church by attempting to close the stewes in 1535 on the grounds that they disseminated diseases.
Thus, the lucrative arrangement between the whores of Southwark and the Papal office ceased, but the lands passed into the hands of the new Anglican Bishop of Winchester.
On 13th April 1546, though, old Henry, now well advanced with his own syphilitic illness, eventually got rid of the bankside stewes of Southwark with a royal proclamation forcing the closure of all houses of prostitution within his realm, bringing to an end the "toleration of such dissolute and miserable persons as have been suffered to dwell in common open places called the stews without punishment or correction (for) their abominable and detestable sin."
In the final analysis then it wasn"t his own decaying flesh that prompted King Henry"s hand, but a nod to God, from whom he now drew comfort in the belief that the Lord Almighty had changed sides in favour of his new English Church.
Impact of the Reformation
Martin Luther made prostitution the focus in his attack upon the Papal Church in 1517, for he considered its association with the clergy a prime example of corruption:
A man may have had vile commerce with 600 harlots and seduced countless matrons and virgins, and kept many mistresses, yet nothing of this would be an impediment and prevent his becoming a bishop or a cardinal or a pope.
He included his vitriolic assault on prostitution in his sermons to the laity:
Is it not a terrible thing that we Christians should maintain public brothels?
Should not the spiritual and temporal powers combine to find some means of meeting these difficulties without such heathen practice?
As soon as his breakaway church gained control in Germany Luther followed up by passing legislation that outlawed sex work.
The closure of brothels commenced in Augsburg in 1532, then Ulm in 1537, and so on, one by one municipal councils followed by forcing the closure of houses of prostitution in city after city until finally Germany"s largest centre, Nuremberg, shut down its brothels in 1562.
The Calvinist Church in Switzerland, Holland and Scandinavian countries, not only drove sex workers from cities, but passed the death sentence on any who persisted in sleeping with them.
Two adulterers were executed in Geneva in 1560 for disobeying laws against fornication and adultery.
The English Puritans demonstrated the extent of their hostility towards prostitution when they had a free hand in the American colonies of New England by forcing adulterers to wear in public a scarlet A on their clothing so that they may suffer abuse and ostracism from their community.
Throughout the Commonwealth period in England sex workers were hounded out of business, although the sex trade continued to flourish clandestinely in the new coffee houses, tarnishing these with a tawdry reputation for centuries to come.
The non-Puritan English clergy, however, continued its long-time fiscal relationship with the whorehouses, as this rhyme of 1656 reminds us:
Lousy cowls come smoking from the stewes
To raise the lewd rent their lord accrues.
The Catholic Counter-Reformation, in response to Protestantism in the north, introduced its own persecution of prostitutes in an effort to clean up the old established Church.
Pope Pius V ordered all prostitutes out of Rome by 23rd July 1566, significantly on the feast day of Mary Magdalene, but when 25,000 people -- sex workers and those dependent on their trade -- packed to move out he was forced to rescind his edict on 17th August and allow the population to return to the holy city.
France, in particular, carried out a vicious campaign of terror against its whores.
Branding recalcitrants with red-hot irons was a favourite punishment.
In Toulouse one woman suffered the following penalty:
A woman condemned of prostitution is taken to the town hall; the executioner ties her hands, puts on her a sugar-loaf bonnet trimmed with feathers, with a label on the back on which could be read full details of her guilt.
Then she is taken near the bridge to a rock in the middle of the river and put into an iron cage and dipped three times and then she is left for some time in such a way. A spectacle that attracts the curiosity of nearly all the inhabitants.
That done the woman is then taken to prison where she is condemned to spend the rest of her life in hard labour.
At least one Christian gentleman, the humanist Lorenzo Valla, thought to defend sex workers by writing that "prostitutes are more useful than nuns".
The Far East and New Worlds
The early 16th century was a period when European seafarers were reaching the shores of ancient India and China and newly discovered America with its highly civilised nations of Mexico and Peru.
In contrast to Europe in India prostitutes were well regarded, since Hindu scriptures "sung the praises of public women as the very type and embodiment of perfect womanhood."
Although in general women in India were treated no better than women in European society, sex, or kama, was seen as a pleasurable pastime and not restricted to procreation as in Christianity.
Furthermore, in the doctrine of karma with its cycle of reincarnation towards a holy state, sex was considered a sacred act.
Temple prostitutes, or devadasi, belonged to an ancient and time-honoured profession, since they were married to a god and sold sex to adherents as a divine duty and one means of acquiring proceeds for the upkeep of the temple.
So entrenched was sacred sex work that it resisted attempts by the British Raj to terminate it for most of the colonial period -- the last sacred prostitute was forced out of business in a Tamil temple in the state of Travancore in 1931.
As for secular prostitution, this paralleled the caste system in India, with high-class courtesans -- rajavesyas and brahmavesyas -- for men of the upper castes, and streetwalkers and cheap brothel workers, or takyaies, for lower caste men.
Prostitution in China dates back at least to its earliest reference in 650 BC when Emperor Kwan Chung established a red light district for merchants.
In one sense sex work in China reflected ancient beliefs of sexual egalitarianism in Taoism, which considered sexual intercourse a natural means of blending the elements of the feminine yin and masculine yang in the copulating couple.
The later Confucian ideals that relegated woman to an inferior social role had little effect on the concepts surrounding commercial sex, which continued to flourish openly and acceptably through to the 16th century.
Red light districts -- wa-tzu -- were popular centres of a romantic culture that attracted painters and poets dedicating their works to famous courtesans known as "jade girls".
In the T"ang Dynasty (600-900 AD) the city of Hangchow was a centre for sex work, with its so-called "prostitute shops" where patrons could eat and drink there and then sleep with a woman of their choice.
By the Sung Dynasty (960-1280 AD) wa-tzu existed in nearly every city across China, and during the Ming period (1368-1644 AD) brothels were graded according to class and purpose, special brothels existing for the military and the civil service, and floating brothels known as "flower boats" came to prominence in most harbours and inland waterways.
Sex work was received with mixed attitudes in the New World.
Although the Aztecs frowned upon women who turned to sex work to survive and forced them to wear distinctive dress, authorities found them useful to satisfy the sex urges of adolescents in the military schools to avoid the young men from wandering into nearby towns and pestering local girls.
Ancient Mexican whores painted their teeth red -- red being a sexual signal -- and chewed chicle, with the clicking sound they made drawing attention from male passers-by associating stained teeth and chewing gum with the sex trade.
Whilst ancient Indian civilisations on the north coast of Peru were sexually permissive with every kind of known erotic practice a popular subject for their ceramic arts, the highland Incas were much more prudish and coitus was the only acceptable sexual act since it was practical for procreation.
Prostitutes were confined to living on the outskirts of towns and villages and were called pampairuna or "open-field women", meaning they were available for "ploughing" by any man.
In the Incas" highly organised welfare state, any woman who was forced to survive in the sex trade was not held responsible; rather, local officials were blamed for not doing their duty of feeding the poor and deprived and were punished accordingly.
Britain in the Restoration
Once the political power of Puritan morality ethics had waned it was business as usual.
Brothels once more flourished in every reputable English town.
One satirist in 1614 described two types of bordellos that could be found across England prior to the rise of Puritanism but could also apply to the sex trade of the Restoration period.
In the cheapest bawd were found "old Hackney women"
A crew of whores far worse than crocodiles,
Killing with feign"d Tears and forg"d Smiles.
The upper class gent, on the other hand, made his weekly visits to a well-to-do maison, where
Their choysest beauties him they bring
Into a private room, which round aboute
Is hung with pictures...good Bacchus grape
Flowers in abundance...provocative to stirr up appetite
To Brutish luste and sensuall delight.
The luxurious bordellos for aristocratic gentlemen of King Charles II"s reign were lavish multistory townhouses with the finest décor of rich brocade curtaining and plush velvet lounges.
The boudoirs were stunningly salubrious with the largest four-posted beds made piled high with the softest down mattresses and rooms filled with exotic eastern aromas, while outside them were private gardens where a client may satisfy romantic fantasies of courtship with his chosen whore.
The bordello workers were among the most beautiful and elegant women in the kingdom, able to play at least one musical instrument competently and richly attired from the madam"s stupendous wardrobe, dressed, powdered and perfumed by a bevy of black servant girls, and presenting a vision intending to send male senses reeling.
The most elaborate bordello in London was the Holland"s Leaguer, in which the gayest richest young cocks of English high society gathered every night to gamble at the gaming tables, drink the vintage wine supplied by the house and surround themselves with partly clad girls barely beyond puberty.
At the other end of the scale were the utterly utilitarian tawdry little brothels along the waterfront or located in the roughest neighbourhood, although food and cheap wine were always on hand.
The whores in these dilapidated establishments were usually well into their middle age and many had previously worked in up-market venues but had been ejected onto the street after they turned 30.
King Charles set the tone for open licentious behaviour that characterised English society in the late 17th century.
He kept several mistresses, whom he housed in separate apartments to avoid internal bickering.
The best known of his mistresses was the one-time stage performer, Nell Gwyn (1650-87), a cheeky strumpet who rose quickly from the gutter to the stage and then into the king"s bed.
She seized the opportunity to become a royal whore upon her first meeting with the king.
Her great rival for Charles" affection was the French noblewoman, Louise de Keroualle, a pious haughty woman who always greeted Nell with disdain whenever there was a chance passing.
On one occasion as Nell was riding in the royal coach to the king"s chambers it was attacked by an angry mob furious that their monarch should take a French Papist into his bed.
As the coach was about to be upended, Nell stuck her head out the window and yelled: "Take a care, good people, "tis Nellie the Protestant whore on board!"
The crowd stopped in their tracks and after a long silent pause gave a hearty cheer and bid the coachman to hurry his precious cargo to their waiting king.
France and the Three Louis
As the Counter-Reformation subsided France too relaxed its morality crusade and returned to a period of licentiousness with its libertine Kings Louis XIII, XIV and XV in succession leading the way.
Although the two earlier kings made little effort to hide their extramarital affairs, neither seemed to have had the string of mistresses to match their English counterpart.
Louis XIV"s best known mistress was Madame de Montespan, who eventually left court life for the convent of St Joseph in Paris, finally becoming its mother superior.
But the fifteenth Louis outdid them all.
Whilst his predecessors took mistresses from the aristocracy, Louis XV appears to have had a craving for lower class women, which might have caused an outrage even in the loose living period of the 18th century but for the fact that it had become pretty well a national sport among the French aristocracy to seduce young women from the bourgeoisie or even lower.
The permissive attitudes of the 18th century are evident in the statistics on illegitimate births.
At the beginning of the century 3% of births in the French port city of Nantes were the result of extramarital or premarital sexual liaisons, whereas by the end of the century the figure was more like 10%.
Whatsmore, more than half Nantes unmarried mothers between 1726-36 were maidservants who blamed their employers for their pregnancies.
After 1750 only 9% of illegitimate children belonged to household servant women, due to the fact that by mid-century licentiousness had spread from aristocratic circles to the lower classes.
The two most prominent royal mistresses of Louis XV were Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, better known as Madame de Pompadour (1721-64), and the equally famous Comtesse du Barry (1743-93).
Pompadour met King Louis at a masked ball and her beauty and intelligence enchanted him right from the start.
Of humble bourgeois origin, she was ambitious, in a hurry to gain an aristocratic title, and realised that this was achieved fastest through the king.
She refused to sleep with him until he made her his chief royal mistress, which he granted and bestowed upon her the title of marquise in keeping with her new position.
Pompadour retained the position until her death, not only keeping the royal bed warm, but also becoming one of the king"s chief advisors and recognised across France as the patron of the arts.
Du Barry succeeded her as the premier royal whore.
Born Jeanne Becu, the bastard daughter of a woman innkeeper, the future Comtesse du Barry was sent to a nunnery as a child when her mother married, but in her teenage years she ran away to Paris, where she was taken in by the notorious procuress, Madame Gourdan, for whom she worked in one of her brothels.
As Gourdan"s top whore she met the Comte Jean du Barry, a regular visitor to Parisian bordellos, who immediately sensed in young Jeanne prospects of gaining the king"s favour by presenting her at court as his brother"s wife.
Louis was bedazzled by her radiant beauty and bright wit on their first meeting, and, groomed by du Barry, she soon succeeded the recently deceased Pompadour as the royal favourite.
To make her position official King Louis formally had her married to du Barry"s younger brother.
Madame du Barry ruled over the royal concubinage until the king"s death in 1774, and after that she continued to live in the luxurious mansion given her by her royal paramour where she surrounded herself in aristocratic splendour.
Eventually, Madame du Barry paid for her meteoric rise in fortune and class by falling foul of the mob in the Revolution when on 8th December 1793 she was guillotined.
Out of the Closet
There are some vague references to male prostitution in Ancient Greece and Rome and in 14th century Venice, but by and large almost nothing is known of this side of the sex trade until the establishment of the so-called molly clubs of the 18th century.
The "mollies" met late at night in selected taverns of London"s quieter back streets.
Male whores -- both transvestites and more virile young homosexual men -- met and serviced older upper bourgeois and noble gents in these clubs probably for many years before 1709, when the first in a series of raids upon molly clubs during the 18th century took place.
The police found, among other items, dolls dressed as babies and midwifery equipment used in fake births.
London society was shocked by what appeared to be a parody of motherhood, not to mention the apparent blasphemy of mock christenings.
Prominent upper class gents found in the club were quickly and quietly ushered away, but the other unfortunate participants -- mostly the sex workers and lesser clients -- were dragged in their feminine finery through London streets to the pillories watched by a jeering crowd of by-standers readily armed with rotten fruit, dung and compost to pelt at the utterly humiliated "mollies".
The incident is assumed today by many historians to be an early development of what would become the gay culture of 19th and 20th century western society.
The Rise of the Condom
Another important development of the Early Modern period that had a major impact on sex life and prostitution is the invention and popular spread of the condom as a major means of contraception.
Credit for its invention goes to a Padua University Professor of Anatomy, Gabriel Fallopius, after whom the fallopian tube has been named.
Fallopius" penis sheath was made of linen, which he first described in his work De Morbo Gallico, published posthumously in 1564.
He designed it chiefly for prophylactic purposes rather than as a contraceptive, and it wasn"t until a French publication, L"Escole des Filles, in 1655, before a suggestion was made that the condom would serve as a useful contraceptive.
For centuries before the 16th century women, especially whores, applied various means of preventing pregnancy, such as plugging the vagina, using a woolen sponge and rubbing the inside of the vaginal cavity with herbs thought to kill off the sperm.
As early as 1550 BC Hebrew women used tampons soaked in acacia and honey.
The Ancient Greeks rubbed frankincense mixed with olive oil in the vagina as both a contraceptive and an abortion agent.
None of these were as effective as a contraceptive or a prophylactic, however, until Fallopius" condom.
It did not become popular, though, until the 18th century, when Casanova described using a sheep gut condom tied at the top end with a pink ribbon, which was superior to the earlier linen sheath.
The modern rubber condom did not come into usage until after Charles Goodyear"s invention of vulcanisation in 1839.
Roberta Perkins
© Copyright Roberta Perkins, Sydney, NSW Australia, 2000.
References
Burford, E. J. Bawds and Lodgings: A History of the London Bankside Brothels, c100-1675 Peter Owen, London, 1976.
Cleugh, J. Love Locked Out Spring, London, 1970.
De Reincourt, A. Sex and Power in History Delta, New York, 1974.
Henriques, F. Prostitution and Society, Vol. 1: Primitive Classical and Oriental & Vol. 2: Europe and the New World Grove, New York, 1962 / MacGibbon & Kee, London, 1963.
Perkins, R. Working Girls: Prostitutes, Their Life and Social Control Australian Institute of Criminology, Canberra, 1991.
Perry, M. E. "Deviant Insiders: Legalized Prostitution and a Consciousness of Women in Early Modern Seville" Comparative Studies in Society and History 27:1:138ff January 1985.
Roberts, N. Whores in History: Prostitution in Western Society Harper Collins, London 1993.
Scott, G. R. Ladies of Vice Tallis, London, 1968.
Simons, G. L. A Place of Pleasure: History of the Brothel Harwood-Smarth, Lewes, 1975.
Tannahill, R. Sex in History Abacus, London, 1981.