Perceptions of the body of the prostitute underwent important changes in the early modern period. The advent of syphilis, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations and especially the growth of the state transformed the prostitute from a member of society into an outright criminal. After hundreds of years of medieval toleration, prostitution became a criminal activity, prohibited and punished (albeit not very effectively) by the new state.
Despite these sweeping changes, early modern prostitution is less well known and less studied than either medieval or nineteenth-century equivalents. Lack of documents is almost certainly the reason. Criminalization drove prostitution underground and forced prostitutes to hide their identities.
Early modern cities may have teemed with whores, but we know neither their numbers nor their names because they easily evaded arrest. Courts were too few and police non-existent, so trials and arrest records – the foundations of the history of prostitution – are lacking. Historians have had to look elsewhere for sources and they have found them in the records of religious confraternities, convents, hospitals and workhouses where prostitutes were incarcerated so that they might be ‘saved’.
Religious institutions, whether Protestant or Catholic, played a leading role in the repression of prostitution so historians have been preoccupied with the attitudes and actions inspired by the great religious revival of the period. Scholars have also paid attention to a new kind of prostitute, the elite courtesan. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Rome and Venice, courtesans lived openly and led public lives. They were celebrated in paintings and poetry, images and texts which established models for the representation of prostition that survived well into the eighteenth century.
Texts, whether literary, pornographic or medical, constitute the major source during much of the early modern period, and the contributions of literary scholars have been fundamental to the field. But in the eighteenth century, different kinds of souces, such as arrest records, trials and interrogations, became available as states managed to put significant numbers of policemen on the street. Women’s lives became harder but the prostitute’s misery was the historian’s good fortune: after 1730, the nascent police forces of cities like London and Paris provide the sources of social history, and we can ascertain much more clearly the features of common prostitution.
This chapter adopts both literary and social historical approaches. But it emphasizes the emergence of the prostitute’s body as a distinct, even alien form. In 1500, the prostitute had no clear outlines or particular characteristics. She was a woman, therefore lusty and weak like all her sisters. She was a sinner too vulnerable to the blandishments of the flesh, but so were all women or even men.
Then rather late in the period around 1750, a new notion of the prostitute’s body emerged which emphasized not the similarity between women and prostitutes, but the chasm that separated them. In the late eighteenth century, the prostitute became a diseased and freakish ‘creature’ more like an animal than a woman and subject to special police and administrative procedures. But before this great change could occur another had to precede it: the passage in the sixteenth century from medieval to early modern concepts of prostitution.
Medieval toleration
In late medieval Europe, prostitutes were neither criminalized nor marginalized.1 Instead, they were tolerated and woven into the social fabric. The urban growth of the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries had created towns ruled by city fathers and populated by unmarried apprentices, journeymen and clerics. These single men posed a threat because without wives they lusted after the spouses and daughters of the ruling ‘fathers’. Prostitution made cohabitation possible; it provided an outlet for the young men’s sexual urges and medieval theology supplied a rationale.
Saint Augustine himself had endorsed prostitution as a means of preserving the honour of virgins and wives by providing an alternative source of satisfaction to young, unmarried men.2 Elites embraced the ‘Augustinian justification’ and established official, municipally sponsored brothels in the towns of southern France, and in Paris, Seville and London. As cities grew, so too, apparently, did tolerated prostitution: in Toulouse (1425), Frankfurt (1369), Munich (1433) and Strasbourg (1469) municipally owned brothels were in full operation by the late fifteenth century.3
In commercial cities like Florence and Seville, brothels occupied a kind of red light district, a series of streets, enclosed by a wall in Seville, where prostitution was authorized and often policed by a special court or fiscal authority.4 Life in the brothels was regulated by the city fathers or authorities. They determined who could go to the brothel (native bachelors), who could not (Jews, priests and married men) and when it was open (any time except Sundays and holy days). Prostitutes paid a special tax, as did pimps and brothel managers, known as brothel padres, Frauenwirte or abbesses, depending on the city. Business was good: in 1497 the Nuremberg Frauenwirt was one of the most highly taxed members of the community.
We have some information regarding the kind of women who ended up working in the prostibulum, or official brothels in the Rhone valley. Most were between 18 and 25 years of age and about a third came from outside the town. A substantial number had ‘drifted’ into prostitution after being the concubine or lover of a master artisan or priest. Many had been gang raped by the youth of the city who used rape as a means of ‘punishing’ women who engaged in illicit affairs.5 Surprisingly, prostitutes were neither scorned nor stigmatized.
In Germany, the official prostitutes were included among the town guilds and marched in civic processions. Authorized prostitutes attended mass and presented the city fathers with flowers on feast days and at municipal festivals. When an official prostitute retired, she was promised a place in the small but numerous asylums for repentant prostitutes established by pious Christians.6
The advent of criminalization
Then, between 1500 and 1550, toleration ended and a long era of criminalization began. First the brothels disappeared. In the 1530s in Germany and France, around 1550 in Florence and as late as 1620 in Seville, authorized city brothels closed their doors. At the same time, edicts and laws criminalizing prostitution were promulgated. Spain’s Philip IV prohibited brothels in his kingdom in 1623. In France, the great royal ordinance of 1560, the Edict of Blois, also banned prostitution. After 300 years, toleration and regulation ended and three centuries of prohibition and criminalization began. Why? The most obvious explanation is the appearance of syphilis. Before 1494, syphilis was unknown in Europe. However, it was widespread in the western hemisphere as conquistador and historian Bernardo dell Castillo (1492–1585) asserted in his writings.
The old notion that syphilis came from the New World appears to be true. Spanish physician Rodrigo Ruiz Diaz de Isla (1462–1542) claims to have seen syphilis as early as 1493 among the crew men who accompanied Columbus. From its first appearance in Spain, syphilis then journeyed to Italy with the Spanish troops sent in 1495 to assist the King of Naples. On 5 July 1495 at the Battle of Fornovo French mercenaries fell down sick in the field. The new disease was baptized the French or the Neapolitan disease depending on one’s perspective.
Thereafter syphilis spread north reaching Scandinavia by 1497 and into Scotland.7 From the outset physicians had no doubt that the disease was spread by sexual intercourse. ‘Through sexual contact,’ the Venetian physician Alexander Benedetto wrote, ‘an ailment which is new or at least unknown to previous doctors, called the French sickness, has worked its way from the west to this spot (Italy) as I write.’ The same physician also associated syphilis with prostitutes: the infected French troops, he observed, had wintered from January to May in Naples where they ‘made merry’, that is, consorted with whores.8
Superficially, venereal disease appears to explain the end of municipally regulated and tolerated prostitution, but a close look at the chronology of brothel closures suggests otherwise. The first wave of closings occurred almost 25 years after the appearance of syphilis, at a time when the disease had waned in intensity. The Augsburg brothel closed in 1523, the Basel brothel in 1534, Ulm in 1537 and Regensberg as late as 1553. In France, it was not until 1530 that the Montpellier prostibulum shut its doors. Moreover, some large commercial cities kept their official brothels and red light districts open. Seville and Florence had corralled prostitutes into particular streets where authorized (and unauthorized) brothels were located.
In Seville, the area called the Mancebia consisted of several streets in the oldest part of the city which operated off and on, with greater or lesser restrictions until well into the seventeenth century.9 In 1629, the Seville authorities did not close the official red light district but rather subjected it to closer regulation. In response to an outbreak of syphilis, a wall was built around the district to quarantine violence and restrict the movement of prostitutes. Venereal disease did not revolutionize prostitution; indeed its impact was surprisingly limited. There were two responses to venereal disease: prohibition or (as in the case of Seville) regulation. Both were deployed, but prohibition eventually won out thanks in large part to the religious revival of the sixteenth century, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations.10
The two reformations
From the start, Protestants condemned prostitution. Martin Luther (1483–1546) did so without equivocation. He referred to prostitutes as ‘murderers or worse poisoners’ and suggested that they be tortured and ‘broken on the wheel’.11 He regarded prostitutes as a threat to young men, a spur not a remedy for licentiousness, and the cause not the cure for adultery and fornication. Significantly, Luther rejected the Augustinian justification for
From the start, Protestants condemned prostitution. Martin Luther (1483–1546) did so without equivocation. He referred to prostitutes as ‘murderers or worse poisoners’ and suggested that they be tortured and ‘broken on the wheel’.11 He regarded prostitutes as a threat to young men, a spur not a remedy for licentiousness, and the cause not the cure for adultery and fornication. Significantly, Luther rejected the Augustinian justification for prostitution: ‘It is unchristian’, Luther wrote, ‘that public houses should be tolerated among Christians’ all of whom, Luther observed, ‘were baptized into chastity’. Marriage, Luther emphasized, was the only cure for lust, as Saint Paul himself had asserted. ‘I certainly know,’ Luther wrote, ‘ what some say about this... that it would be difficult to end it, that it is better to have such houses than to bring married women or maidens... to dishonor.’ But marriage – the earlier the better – was, Luther argued, the only Christian cure for lust.
As for prostitution, Luther advocated strict prohibition. He praised Fredrick the Elector who had banned camp followers from his armies and urged ‘the temporal and Christian government’ to do away with brothels and the prostitutes who filled them.12
Reformed communities in Germany and Switzerland did just that. While not unaware of the health risks posed by prostitutes, most city governments made it clear that religious and moral concerns were paramount, as happened in Augsburg. Contemporaries attributed the closing of the Augsburg municipal whorehouse in 1535 to the ‘promptings of the Lutheran preachers’.13 According to Lyndal Roper, an atmosphere of ‘intense popular piety and high expectation’ preceded the closing of the official brothel.14 Preachers and city fathers exhorted prostitutes to repent and provided clothing so that the women might begin a new life suitably attired.
Condemnation of the priests and monks who cavorted with prostitutes rang from the city’s pulpits but was soon followed by criticism of prostitutes themselves. Both prostitutes and priests were ordered to leave the city in 1536. Gradually prostitutes were ‘demonized’, depicted as she- devils who corrupted men and, contrary to the Augustinian view, undermined the Christian community. In 1537, a comprehensive, disciplinary law was enacted which prescribed sentencing before a special court for prostitutes and those who consorted with them. At least 110 individuals were convicted and another 58 were closely questioned.15
Sexual deviance, whether adultery, fornication or prostitution, was the target, and just about any woman was suspect. In Amsterdam, Calvinists seized control of the municipal government in 1578 and quickly rendered illegal almost all forms of sexuality outside marriage, including prostitution.16 A series of repressive measures followed which culminated in the creation of the Spinnhuis, a former beggars’ prison turned into a woman’s workhouse, or prison. There, female criminals of all sorts, including prostitutes, were incarcerated and subjected to a regimen of discipline and work. Protestant elites throughout Europe established workhouses where female prisoners, including prostitutes, could be incarcerated and exposed to the healing power of work. In England, the Bridewell prison was opened in London in 1553.
Catholics took a somewhat different approach. Catholic theology emphasized contrition and conversion, mainly within the confines of a special convent devoted to such ‘repentant’ women. Such institutions had been constructed in the fourteenth century, but by 1500 most were in decline or had vanished altogether. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, devout Catholic laywomen and reforming bishops created new institutions designed to support the contrition of the former prostitute and to rescue her from the clutches of sin if necessary. In France alone, two new religious orders, the sisters of the Refuge and the congregation of Notre Dame du Refuge, arose and gradually spread throughout France. Similar institutions appeared in Italy and Spain.17
Despite the regimen of mass and Catholic devotion, these convents were little different from the 'Spinnhuis' and Bridewell established by Dutch and English Protestants. Claims that the inmates were ‘repentant’ were unfounded. Few entered the Catholic ‘asylums’ of their own free will. Most were sent by secular courts which ‘sentenced’ women to the convents, often over the objections of the nuns in charge. Hard work, self-abnegation and strict obedience were required in the Catholic institutions just as they were in Protestant asylums. Confinement was the preferred remedy for prostitutes throughout Europe and discipline through work and prayer the cure prescribed by both confessions.
As these penal institutions show, Catholic and Protestant attitudes towards prostitution were surprisingly similar. Spanish theologians did argue, like their medieval forerunners, that prostitutes should be ‘saved’. But they also called for the abolition of prostitution and the closing of authorized brothels. Both Catholics and Protestants rejected the Augustinian justification for venal sex. In his 'Manuale di Confessori' (1578), priest Martin Navarro argued (like Luther) that men who went to brothels were made more intemperate, more likely to mistreat honest women and engage in fornication. Another theologian, Juan Mariana, condemned prostitution and regretted that Catholic tolerance of prostitutes made intolerant Protestants look more righteous.18 In Italy, Charles Borromeo called prostitutes ‘cankers’ and condemned them for creating ‘occasions to sin’.19 Reformed Catholics were only slightly less zealous than their Protestant counterparts when it came to prohibiting prostitution.
The case of Rome is instructive. In the summer of 1566, Pope Pius V initiated a campaign to clean up the holy city including (famously) painting fig leaves on nude images.20 Prostitutes were included in the purification effort: Pius ordered prostitutes to leave the city and some complied, a few being robbed and killed for their goods on the highways.21 Others’ attempts at expulsion followed as a part of general campaigns to rid the holy city of the most visible forms of vice. In 1592, Pope Clement VIII issued yet another decree threatening the prostitutes with exile but only if they failed to move to a particular quarter.22 The inhabitants objected so the prostitutes were relegated to the Campo Marzia, a newer neighbourhood further from the centre of the city. Thereafter the corralling of prostitutes into particular streets or quarters ‘like Jews’ became the preferred solution. Gradually, containment replaced prohibition.
Unable to eliminate prostitution, Catholic and Protestant authorities alike settled for quarantining it, that is, limiting the sex trade to special ‘reserved’ quarters. Even in Calvinist Amsterdam, the city fathers quietly abandoned prohibition in the course of the seventeenth century and settled by the early eighteenth century for limiting the city’s brothels to certain streets.23 In Catholic Seville, the authorities did the same. Considering the quiet but pervasive reassertion of tolerance in the early eighteenth century, recent historians have argued that we should not overestimate the commitment of early modern Europeans to the criminalization and condemnation of prostitution.24 Protestant and Catholic moralists did continue to denounce prostitution, but the authorities of both confessions quietly adopted a more flexible stance. Even in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, prosecution of prostitutes was very selective, a fact exemplified by the appearance of a new kind of whore, the courtesan.
The rise of the courtesan
The high-priced, cultivated and exclusive prostitute was born in Rome where the expression ‘courtesan’ first surfaced at the papal court.25 There clerics attached to the Holy See could not marry so they sought out venal women to accompany them on their social rounds. Being educated, these men preferred prostitutes who could carry on conversation and act appropriately. Because they frequented the papal court, these women became known as ‘courtesans’. Hierarchical distinctions among prostitutes were new: the medieval prostibulum had provided only one class of service and all prostitutes were considered equal.
With the rise of new urban elites, a class of men (clerics and bureaucrats) emerged that did not want to share their women with rowdy soldiers. They wanted a whore who reflected their own status and personified their superiority over the common rabble. Just how many refined courtesans actually existed is hard to know. The term came to be used loosely and was applied to just about any venal woman.26 Still, we know the names of a few women who were superior to common prostitutes in wealth and learning. Imperia, Tullia D’Aragona and Veronica Franco enjoyed genuine renown thanks to the praise lavished upon them by men of letters.
Writers socialized with courtesans; Franco was herself a poet.27 Artists too praised the courtesan and painted her portrait. Usually the courtesan was not named but presented as Flora or Bella or the Danae. Art historians long assumed that these portraits depicted prostitutes, but the identity of the beauties on these canvases is impossible to determine.28 In any event, the images were astonishing in their beauty. Not a single pox mark or blemish appeared on these white complexions, testimony yet again to Europeans’ ability to ignore venereal disease when it suited them.
The women portrayed by Italian artists were rich, wearing jewels, silks and garments embroidered with gold and silver. Courtesans were imagined to be wealthy and the notion was not without some foundation. Drawing on an array of documents including tax records, notarial documents and personal papers, Tessa Storey has found that about 40 per cent of the prostitutes in the Campo Marzia district of Rome were ‘comfortable’, while an additional 10 per cent owned property. Storey has also studied the courtesans’ homes and jewelry and concludes that the Roman authorities had reason to issue in 1564 a sumptuary law, forbidding courtesans from wearing silks, gold and jewels: they did indeed possess such luxuries.29
Not all courtesans were rich, but all ‘honest’ courtesans were free from criminal prosecution.30 The Roman authorities called ‘honest courtesans’ those prostitutes who had registered with the Corte Savella and paid a tax. These women could live wherever they wished, own property and ply their trade without fear of interference or imprisonment.31 ‘Dishonest’ prostitutes were women who hid their prostitution and sought to evade the authorities. The freedom enjoyed by ‘honest’ courtesans sometimes perturbed the authorities who tried to devise ways of controlling them. Between 1594 and 1606 a special police force known as the Birri was created to arrest women found in carriages, theatres and gardens, a clear attempt to monitor and control ‘honest’ courtesans.32 The measure had little success, though, and courtesans continued to blur the boundaries between honest and dishonest women.
The prostitute’s voice
During the Renaissance, courtesans challenged other boundaries by erupting into print. In 1536, Pietro Aretino (1492–1556) published the Ragionamenti, the first work of this period in which a prostitute speaks, and it set the tone for many prostitute texts to come, as Ian Moulton has discussed in chapter 11. Inspired by classical models, the Ragionamenti takes the form of a dialogue between Nana, a seasoned prostitute, and her inexperienced daughter, Pippa. Occasionally Pippa’s godmother, the procuress Antonia, joins the conversation, which turns on the lubricity of women and the tricks of the courtesan’s trade.
Significantly, Nana aims to entertain with broad humour and farce. But Nana’s babble is not pointless: she is a critical observer who exposes the lust of nuns and the hypocrisy of ‘honest’ wives. Part of her humour is satire aimed at social institutions and religious prejudices; but she is also a trickster, a clever, independent woman who deceives men and takes their money. The Ragionamenti had imitators in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
First came Lorenzo Veniero’s 'La puttana errante' (The Wandering Whore) in the 1530s and later Ferrante Pallavicino’s 'La retorica delle puttanne' (The Rhetoric of Whores) in 1642. Like the Ragionamenti, both texts were humorous, establishing the burlesque as the register in which whores spoke. Both texts were, like their model, also dialogues. Many more were to follow including two French classics: 'L’Ecole des filles' (The School of Venus) and Nicolas Chorier’s 'Alyosiae' (Dialogues of Luisa Sigea).33 These French texts like their Italian models featured sexually explicit conversations between an experienced wife/mother and her less knowledgeable girl/daughter. The French texts departed from the Italian model in that the women are ladies rather than prostitutes, but they are just as lusty as Nana and Pippa. Apparently, seventeenth-century readers found the notion of honest women talking about sex completely credible.34 The old stereotype of women as sexually insatiable, whatever their status, still held. As Lotte C. van der Pol observes, in the seventeenth century ‘the image of the whore was in fact an extension of the contemporary image of women in general’.35 Every woman, van der Pol continues, ‘was regarded as a whore at heart and therefore a potential prostitute’, or possibly a raunchy conversationalist.
Mockery came naturally to the prostitute and many of the texts which incorporate her voice are satirical and political. In France, the uprising known as the Fronde produced a flood of pamphlets both pro- and anti-monarchy. Among these could be found pamphlets in which courtesans bemoaned the lack of business brought on by the civil war and even provided a satirical commentary on Mazarin and the royal forces.36 In Restoration London, pamphlets signed by ‘Companies of whores’ and ‘The Poor-Whores’ pretended to be ‘petitions’ written by prostitutes and addressed to the authorities. These texts voiced both anti-Catholic and seemingly anti-monarchical sentiments.37 The political viewpoint of these pseudo-prostitute tracts is not always easy to define, but its sources were Renaissance tracts like 'The Wandering Whore' and the ‘carnivalesque’ traditions of male drinking and whoring.38
In France, the ‘cabaret poetry’ of Théophile de Viau (1590–1626) and the other Parnasse satirique poets (so called because their verse was collected in the book of the same name) celebrated wine, women and an unfettered sexual life.39 Unlike their English counterparts, the cabaret poets had no overtly political aims. Rather they used the figure of the prostitute, or more often the bawd, to mock the pastoral poetry of their day and to satirize its odes to an idealized female beauty.40 The aged procuress with sagging breasts and wart-encrusted skin reminded the reader that all beauty was transitory and deceptive. Religion too was a sham. In this poetry, monks and priests patronize the procuress and she is only too happy to masquerade as the prude if it allows her to seduce girls more easily. The whore exists mainly to make visible the hypocrisy and duplicity of ‘good’ society.
The Earl of Rochester (1647–80) employs the prostitute in his verse in a similar fashion. In the poem ‘A Ramble in Saint James’s Park’ Rochester compares prostitutes and honest women and insinuates that there is little difference between the two.41 In neither English nor French texts is the prostitute celebrated; rather she is mocked and used to debase those who associated with her.
Another kind of prostitute is depicted in 'Die Ertzbetrügerin und Landstörtzerin Courasche' (The Deceitful and Vagbond Courasche, sometimes translated inaccurately as 'The Life of Courage: The Notorious Thief, Whore and Vagabond') written by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (1621–76) around 1670.42 Courasche is crafty like the picara (vagabond) of the sixteenth-century Spanish novels. She is also voluble like Aretino’s Nana, for she tells her own story, and she is old and diseased like the French bawds portrayed by the cabaret poets. She differs however from her predecessors in that the Thirty Years Wars and its horrors are the background to her story and her milieu is the army.
Usually overlooked by historians, the camp follower may have been the most common form of prostitute in early modern Europe. She is certainly the most typical, for the great armies of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries brought her into being. Camp followers participated in the activity that sustained these huge, polyglot armies: plunder.43 They also acted as sutlers, washerwomen and ‘wives’, providing food, clothing and, of course, sex. Whatever their numbers, the camp followers were certainly the most feared and reviled of prostitutes, for they frequented dangerous elements – soldiers and deserters – and travelled with a floating population of vagrants, beggars and thieves that terrified early modern Europeans.
The emergence of national armies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did little to diminish the association between prostitutes, military men and criminality. As part of a general military reform, Louis XIV’s ministers increased the powers of the local commandant empowering him to arrest prostitutes and remand them to the appropriate municipal authorities.44 The military police swept through barracks and fortresses arresting prostitutes and handing them over to the municipal authorities for sentencing. Women captured by the military police regularly constituted a significant portion of the prostitutes sentenced in citadels like Metz, or cities like Paris. The tendency of soldiers to function as pimps and bullies did little to endear them to city dwellers, or to improve the army prostitute’s reputation.
As always, her companions were deserters, vagrants and thieves, a rootless and therefore dangerous population that bothered townsmen and police alike. The association of these itinerants with prostitutes was of long standing and it produced some of the earliest laws against prostitution.45 One of the first French ordinances criminalizing prostitutes, promulgated by Louis IX in 1254, expelled vagrants and prostitutes from Paris as well as deserters, pickpockets and beggars. Prostitutes continued to be confused with other criminal elements: in 1777, the Parisian police chief still asked his policemen to monitor ‘prostitutes and vagabonds’ as well as unemployed domestics, deserters, artisans without masters and libertines, a sign of the city’s greater complexity and urbanization. But still prostitutes were regarded as a threat to public security and a source of crime and disorder.
Policing prostitution
The maintenance of order by the burgeoning state was the primary motive (far outweighing religion or disease) for the criminalization of prostitution in early modern Europe.46 If policies towards prostitution looked similar in different parts of Europe, it was because all areas of Europe experienced the extension of state power. The new states sought to secure public tranquillity (and quell popular complaint) by organizing armed bands of men, that is, police. In the sixteenth century, southern cities like Florence, Rome and Seville created special authorities to maintain order in their red light districts and siphon off some of the profits generated by the sex trade.
The Roman Birri and the Florentine Onesta policed taverns, collected taxes and occasionally adjudicated disputes in the brothel quarters, but their duties were much more circumscribed than those of a modern police force. Only in 1667 would Louis XIV begin the process of building a true police force by creating the office of surintendant de police (police chief) in Paris. This officer
answered directly to the king and presided over everything from printing to prostitution. All forms of ‘disorder’, whether theft, vagrancy, infractions of guild rules, filthy streets or dirty books, came under his purview.
It took almost a century for the Parisian police to become a large, significant force in the prosecution of prostitution. In 1750, there were 720 policemen who patrolled the city streets; in 1789 there were almost 1,500, or one policeman for every 193 inhabitants.47 By 1720, these functionaries possessed the means to incarcerate prostitutes quickly and with little interference from the courts. Patrolmen and police inspectors apprehended women and brought them before a police commissioner who remanded them to the St Martin prison. There they waited until the second Friday of each month when the police chief judged hundreds of individuals, including a large number of women, for a variety of crimes including prostitution.
The women were usually sentenced to the Salpetrière prison for periods of up to three years. The whole process, while perfectly legal, was arbitrary, autocratic and without hope of appeal. In London, a different system – but with many of the same effects – existed. For much of the 1700s, no law criminalized prostitution. To be sure, in 1650 the Puritan Parliament had passed an ordinance making all kinds of sexual behaviour outside marriage including fornication, adultery and sodomy punishable by whipping, exile and even death. But the law proved impossible to enforce and was generally ignored.
Consequently, prostitutes who were bound over for trial – when they actually were detained – were indicted for disorderly behaviour or some other lesser charge. The lack of statutes specifically outlawing prostitution and the fragmentation of judicial authority made the policing of prostitution in London haphazard at best. In the early eighteenth century, a group of London moralists took matters into their own hands forming the Society for the Reformation of Manners. The members identified prostitutes through a network of spies and then had warrants signed by justices of the peace.
Eventually the prostitute was served with a warrant and locked up in a bridewell. At its most active in 1722, the London Society had 7,451 prostitutes bound over for trial according to its own publications. But the Society’s influence was relatively short-lived: by 1738, it could boast of only 545 prosecutions.48
With the Society gone, prosecution of prostitution fell to the parish watch or patrol. In 1735, a series of laws known as the Watch Acts sought to reform and make more efficient the night watch. Concern with public order rather than with vice prompted the issuing of these acts. Watchmen were enjoined to arrest ‘all Nightwalkers, Malefactors, Rogues, Vagabonds and all disorderly persons whom they shall find disturbing the public peace’.49 While the number of the men varied from parish to parish, most parishes had relatively large police forces. St James, Westminster, employed 65 watchmen, six beadles and two inspectors, the whole being augmented by eight sergeants and 32 additional watch in the months from October to March.
Each watchman was assigned a fixed beat and was expected to apprehend and escort assorted miscreants, including night walkers or prostitutes, to the parish guard house. There, the drunks, thieves and prostitutes would wait to be bound over for trial in the morning. Only a fraction of those locked in the watch house ever made it to trial. Watchmen enjoyed considerable discretion and could release prisoners at will. Compromise and accommodation – not law – determined which prostitutes went to trial and which went free, and there is evidence that many female first offenders were warned and released.
How effective were these nascent police forces? Many, perhaps most, London watchmen simply turned a blind eye to the soliciting on their beat. Nor was enforcement consistent or regular. Prostitution was controlled primarily through occasional ‘sweeps’ or mass arrests. In December 1789, for example, a sweep of the Strand resulted in 50 arrests, more than occurred in Westminster during the whole year of 1785.50 Parisian authorities too launched occasional sweeps against prostitutes. Police commissioners would carry out these sweeps in their assigned quarters and arrest dozens of prostitutes. Persecution intensified after 1760. According to a data sample constructed by Bénabou, 2,068 women in total were arrested in the years 1765, 1766 and 1770, or approximately 688 a year; this was at least six times the number arrested in the early seventeenth century.51 It is impossible to know what percentage of the working prostitutes these figures represent, but it is clear that these bursts of persecution failed to eradicate prostitution (and probably did not intend to do so).
Street-walkers disappeared from the streets temporarily, but soon returned or were replaced by others. Sweeps were not an effective means of eliminating prostitution; they only erased its most visible manifestation – street solicitation – temporarily. Nevertheless, the new police actions created difficulties and hardships for prostitutes. As the number of policemen increased, so too did the instances of bribery and extortion. In Amsterdam, several spectacular trials in the first half of the eighteenth century revealed that authorities regularly extorted money from client and prostitute alike.52 In Paris, police corruption was so extensive that the royal government brought several police inspectors to trial between 1716 and 1720.53 Testimony revealed that Parisians of all sorts were held for ransom, blackmailed, and terrorized by the police, but prostitutes were most likely to be victimized. The women had to pay policemen for ‘protection’ from arrest or, that failing, release from the Salpetrière prison.
Bullies and souteneurs (pimps) probably multiplied because now more than ever before the prostitute needed someone to subdue angry clients and intimidate neighbours who might complain to the police. The police of early modern Europe were not entirely effective, but they certainly made the lives of prostitutes much harder. Whatever else they did, the new police forces created written records, specifically arrest records that allow us to put a face on the average prostitute. These documents are far from a perfect source. The arrest process itself was arbitrary: watchmen apprehended women who were drunk or out after curfew and processed them as if they were prostitutes. But it is all this growing documentation, the Paris police records, the London watch books and the Amsterdam Confessions, that allow us to create a profile of the early modern prostitute.
Youth was her most striking characteristic. Whether she was an inhabitant of Amsterdam, London or Paris, the prostitute was aged between 18 and 29 years (just like today’s prostitutes); on average she was 25. Children did not tend to figure among the apprehended. 200 professions from seamstresses to peddlers to simple day labourers. Surprisingly, the typical prostitute was not a domestic servant, for servants constituted less than 10 per cent of the Parisian prostitutes whose details were recorded.57 In Amsterdam, the proportion was similar. Domestic servants, van der Pol reasons, received room and board which relieved them of the need to house and feed themselves. Unlike seamstresses and street vendors, domestic servants were not desperate to pay for food and shelter.58 No particular occupation made women likely to take up prostitution; just about all the occupations exercised by women appear in the arrest lists. Other factors may have contributed to a woman’s ‘fall’.
Thanks to a law which forced Amsterdam’s brides to register their marriages, Lotte van der Pol is able to contrast the city’s prostitutes with honest women of the same age. She found that the prostitutes were more likely than the brides to be migrants and much more likely to have been orphaned of one or both parents. The prostitutes were also mainly self-supporting, wage earners.59 Clearly economic vulnerability caused by loss of family, low wages and temporary employment pushed women into prostitution.
Working conditions varied considerably in the world of venal sex. Some prostitutes worked ‘outdoors’; that is, they solicited publicly on the street, from windows, and in public gardens and promenades. In London, Amsterdam and Paris, specific streets and public thoroughfares were haunted by prostitutes. These ‘strolls’ as they would be known coincided with major axes in the city where traffic was heavy, like the rues St Denis and St Martin in Paris, or along Piccadilly and the Strand in London. Prostitutes also clustered around places of amusement like Drury Lane or the Palais Royal.
Operas and theatres attracted prostitutes who solicited clients right outside the house. In the course of the eighteenth century, the Paris opera burned down and was relocated several times; each time, the prostitutes followed. While street solicitation grew, brothels probably declined or changed in size and organization. Bars and taverns remained places of prostitution; most had rooms upstairs that could be used for the satisfaction of clients.
The traditional, residential brothel was overshadowed by the multiplication of rooming houses which tolerated, and indeed benefited from prostitution. The rooming house provided shelter and some protection from the police in return for exceptionally high rent, sometimes charged by the day. In London, the parish authorities did nothing to prohibit the houses and there were complaints. In 1751, public outcry led to the Disorderly Houses Act which provided rewards to individuals who would denounce owners of bawdy houses and rooming houses where prostitutes clustered.60 But the denunciations and fines levied on the owners had little effect. As soon as they were cited, brothel and rooming house owners would simply disappear so evading arrest.
In Paris, too, rooming houses tended to multiply but more traditional brothels did not vanish. On the contrary, they operated with almost complete impunity because the police used madams and bawds as informers. Police chief Berryer de Ravenoville (1747–58) employed hundreds of spies and informers among whom were the most famous madams of the day. But ‘tolerance’ did not preclude bursts of persecution.
The police descended in the middle of the night on brothels and arrested every prostitute in the house and packed them off to the St Martin jail. These measures (like the police sweeps of the streets) were designed not to eliminate prostitution but rather to quell public outcry and terrify prostitutes and madams into submission to the police.
One might ask if the general populace supported these punitive measures. Popular attitudes are hard to discern and are often contradictory. On the one hand, crowds did not defend prostitutes when the police arrested them, as crowds often did when it was a question of beggars. Neighbours’ complaints usually occasioned police action against a The youngest prostitute questioned by John Fielding in 1758 was 16; none younger can be found in the Paris or Amsterdam data.54 Nor was the average prostitute a country girl gone astray in the big city. Usually she was a migrant: 75 per cent of the Paris prostitutes arrested in Bénabou’s sample were born outside Paris.55 But she was not a peasant girl:migrants to both Paris and Amsterdam came from medium-sized towns where, most likely, they had already engaged in prostitution.56 The early modern prostitute was also unmarried. Aged between 21 and 25, most prostitutes had yet to be married and hoped to find a spouse in the big city. What they found was economic hardship: no longer under parental authority, they had yet to establish a new family economy.
These young women were therefore unusually vulnerable to economic crises and unemployment. Prostitution provided a solution at least for a while but eventually these same women probably married, for they disappear from the police records. Marriage brought some economic stability and no further need to sell sex.
The prostitutes worked in an array of trades either before or during their time as prostitutes. The Parisian women sent before the police chief claimed to have exercised over brothel. Honest artisans and hard-working day labourers and their wives did not hesitate to complain about the drunken clients and noisy youth who insulted their wives and created mayhem in their apartment buildings. On the other hand, months, even years, often passed before the neighbours complained, indicating long periods of not just toleration but of peaceful cohabitation.
Most Europeans were willing to coexist with the brothel upstairs provided no pimps or drunken clients harassed them or caused scandal in the house. Otherwise, they would overcome their fear of reprisals and report the whores. With the advent of the police, however, the power of the general populace to determine who should be punished and who tolerated greatly declined. Henceforth, the authorities, not the labouring poor, determined which women got arrested and which went free.
From criminalization to regulation
Elite attitudes towards prostitution did not change in the early eighteenth century. Bernard Mandeville’s Modest Defense of Public Stews (1735) notwithstanding, early eighteenth-century English and French subjects tended to regard prostitution as harshly as their forerunners. Sophie Carter demonstrates that Hogarth’s 'A Harlot’s Progress', printed in 1732, portrays the prostitute in the traditional manner as duplicitous, dangerous and doomed.61 The Abbé Prévost’s 'Manon Lescaut' published around 1730 also recapitulates familiar themes. Though technically innovative, the story of 'Manon' and the 'Chevalier des Grieux 'is an old one: the tale of a promising young man laid low by a scheming and greedy whore. In both cases, the notion of the prostitute as predator still prevailed.
But around 1750, this changed: the prostitute became a biological threat, and not just to a few clients but to society as a whole. The century’s foremost venereologist, Jean Astruc (1684–1766), believed that while syphilis was less deadly than in the past, it was almost certainly more widespread.62 According to one social commentator, France contained no less than 200,000 syphilitics.63 Syphilis many believed was poisoning the artisan class and destroying the army. English physician William Buchan (1725–1805) observed that ‘what was formerly called the gentleman’s disease is now equally common among the lowest ranks of society’.64 For these impoverished, the London Lock Hospital was founded in 1748 to provide treatment for venereal disease free of charge. The French worried that syphilis was undermining the French population because it killed babies and rendered adults infertile. The future of France, not just a rake’s health, was now at risk.
Like venereal disease, prostitution was also increasing or so moralists proclaimed. Sebastien Mercier estimated the number of prostitutes in Paris at 30,000 while other authors spoke of 40,000, or even 50,000, out of a population of about 650,000.65 In 1756, one observer went so far as to conclude that 100,000 Frenchwomen were ‘more or less public and engaged in prostitution’.66 In 1797, Patrick Colquhoun claimed that 50,000 women sold their bodies on the streets suggesting that 10 per cent of London’s female population engaged in prostitution.67 Such estimates were exaggerations reflecting an author’s anxiety or personal agenda more than reality.68 What prompted such extravagant estimates was probably the visibility of prostitution, manifested in the growth of street solicitation. Now stationed along boulevards, near theatres and popular amusements, in public parks and gardens, prostitutes appeared to be everywhere.
For Mercier, street-walkers ‘gathered in the busiest places where the neighbours and passers-by could witness their indecencies and hear their licentious talk’.69 Along public streets, prostitutes ‘hunted’ and ‘attacked’ men. They were not women as in the past but rather créatures (creatures), fauves (wild beasts), rapaces (rapacious animals). Thus, gradually the notion that prostitutes were fundamentally different from other women grew. The belief promoted by eighteenth-century domesticity that women were inherently asexual made the old notion of the lusty woman unthinkable.
In England, the contradiction between prostitute and feminine asexuality was resolved by making prostitutes victims. Bawds and libertines tricked women into prostitution and a life that was fundamentally alien to them. The Magdalene hospital, established in London in 1767, provided a remedy, a place where hapless prostitutes could be ‘redeemed’ and their modesty restored.70 The effect of these changes was to separate prostitutes from ordinary women, indeed from the general population. Prostitutes now required their own police, special dispensaries and hospitals, as well as separate quarters and houses were they could be isolated and hidden from the healthy, upright population.
However, late eighteenth-century moralists never dreamed of eradicating prostitution. They might criticize the existing police force, arguing, as many did, that it failed to arrest prostitutes and allowed them to exist in return for bribes. In France, they decried the ineffectiveness of convents and hospitals and looked for new, non-religious solutions proposed by doctors, writers and policemen rather than theologians. But throughout Europe, reorganization not prohibition was the goal. In 1770, novelist Restif de la Bretonne suggested in his essay 'Le Pornographe ou les idées d’un honnête homme sur un projet de règlement pour les prostituées' that the trade be tolerated and regulated so as to assure good hygiene, universal access and the continued increase of the population.71
Less prescriptive but equally utopian was the period’s most famous prostitution novel, John Cleland’s 'Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure', known today as 'Fanny Hill'. Written in 1748, on the cusp of the changes in attitudes towards prostitution, Fanny Hill reveals both old notions about mercenary sex and new hopes for an orderly and healthy prostitution. The brothel of Mrs Brown is disorderly, vicious, and the bawd herself greedy and abusive. Her body, described at length by Cleland, is that of the Renaissance prostitute, lusty and insatiable, flabby and exhausted from repeated intercourse. Fanny flees to Mrs Cole’s brothel where rationality prevails and ungovernable lust is banned. Mrs Cole, like her girls, is clean, neat and honest. Prostitution here is sanitized and controlled; it is in every aspect ‘healthy’.72 Cleland’s vision of a ‘healthy’ prostitution is not without similarity to the regulatory projects adopted in Europe during the nineteenth century.
By 1780, the prostitute’s body had been defined as diseased and different from the ‘normal’ female body. Before, prostitutes were just women who had fallen prey to the universal call of the flesh. Prostitutes might be dangerous and crafty but they were not a species apart. Now prostitutes were freaks, utterly different from ordinary women (or men for that matter) and subject to a host of special regulations and police procedures. The early modern period prepared the way for the nineteenth-century notion of the prostitute that emphasized her body as a ‘social evil’, a biological threat to humankind.
Notes
1 On the measures and laws which protected prostitutes and included them in the city see Jacques Rossiaud, Amours vénales la prostitution en Occident XIIe-XVIe siècle, Paris: Flammarion, 2010, pp. 279–88.
2 James A. Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, pp. 436–548.
3 Jacques Rossiaud, Medieval Prostitution, trans. Lydia Cochrane, Chicago: University of Chicago
4 Francisco Vásquez Garcia and Andrés Moreno Mengibar, Poder y prostitución en Sevilla, Seville:
Universidad de Sevilla, 1995, pp. 1–61; Richard Trexler, ‘La prostitution florentine, au XVIème siècle’, Annales: Economies, Sociétés Civilisations 36, 1981, pp. 983–1015.
5 Rossiaud, Medieval Prostitution, pp. 10–33.
6 The appearance of unofficial prostitutes, plying their trade outside the official brothel and in defiance of the authorities, indicated that official prostitution was in trouble. In many cities, the official brothel closed for lack of business; Rossiaud, Medieval Prostitution, pp. 65–70.
7 This discussion of syphilis is based upon Claude Quétel, History of Syphilis, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. See also chapter 25, this volume.
8 Alexander Benedetto cited in Quétel, History of Syphilis, p. 36.
9 See Vásquez Garcia and Moreno Mengibar, Poder y prostitución, pp. 1–61; Trexler, ‘La prostitution florentine’.
10 Calls for stricter morality were heard before the two Reformations. In the Rhone valley and Burgundy, preachers in the 1490s harped upon society’s corruption and condemned licentiousness, including prostitution. In Italy, Florentine friar Girolamo Savanarola (1452–98) condemned vice and railed against the frequenting of prostitutes; see Rossiaud, Medieval Prostitution,
pp. 33–53.
11 Martin Luther, ‘Table Talk’ cited in Susan G. Karant-Nunn and Merry E Wiesner-Hanks (eds), Luther on Women: A Sourcebook, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 157.
12 Luther cited in Karant-Nunn and Weisner, Luther on Women, pp. 156–58.
13 Lyndal Roper, ‘Discipline and Respectability: Prostitution in Reformation Augsburg’, History Workshop Journal 19, 1985, pp. 3–28 (4).
14 Roper, ‘Discipline and Respectability’, p. 10.
15 Roper, ‘Discipline and Respectability’, p. 21.
16 Lotte C. van der Pol, ‘The Whore, the Bawd and the Artist: The Reality and Imagery of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Prostitution’, Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 2, 2010, pp. 1–12(2).
17 On the new prostitutes’ asylums in Italy see Sherrill Cohen, The Evolution of Women’s Asylums from 1500, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, which includes several chapters on Florence’s Convertite and Malarmite convents. For Spanish examples, see Mary Elizabeth Perry, Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Spain, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
18 John Brackett, ‘The Florentine Onesta and the Control of Prostitution, 1403–1680’, The Sixteenth Century Journal 24, 1993, pp. 273–300.
19 Charles Borromeo cited in Tessa Storey, Carnal Commerce in Counter-Reformation Rome, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 4.
20 Storey, Carnal Commerce, p. 71.
21 Storey, Carnal Commerce, p. 76.
22 Storey, Carnal Commerce, pp. 7–8.
23 Lotte C. van der Pol, The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam, trans. Liz Waters, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 112–15.
24 Storey, Carnal Commerce, pp. 234–52.
25 See Paul Larivaille, La vie quotidienne des courtisanes en Italie au temps de la Renaissance, Paris: Hachette, 1975, pp. 28–30.
26 The label ‘courtesan’ also became degraded with time. In France, for example, ‘courtesan’ was used indiscriminately to refer to all women who sold sex. Even in Rome, the expression became ‘devalued’ after 1560 and was applied to all prostitutes of any standing or wealth; see Storey, Carnal Commerce, p. 122.
27 Margaret Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
28 Carol M. Schuler, ‘The Courtesan in Art: Historical Fact or Modern Fantasy?’, Women’s Studies 19, 1991, pp. 209–22.
29 Tessa Storey, ‘Clothing Courtesans: Fabrics, Signals and Experiences’ in Catherine Richardson (ed.), Clothing Culture, 1350–1650, London: Ashgate, 2004, pp. 95–108.
30 Elizabeth S. Cohen reminds us not to ‘romanticize’ the courtesan whose numbers were probably quite small; see Elizabeth S. Cohen, ‘“Courtesans” and “Whores”: Words and Behavior in Roman Streets’, Women’s Studies 19, 1991, pp. 201–8.
32 Storey, Carnal Commerce, pp. 97, 111.
33 On these classics of French pornography see Joan DeJean, The Reinvention of Obscenity: Sex, Lies and Tabloids in Early Modern France, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
34 See Sarah Toulalan, Imagining Sex: Pornography and Bodies in Seventeenth-Century England, Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 275.
35 van der Pol, The Burgher and the Whore, p. 76.
36 See, for example, Pierre Variquet, La capture de deux courtisanes italiennes habillées en hommes, faite par le corps de garde de la porte Saint-Honoré, qui portaient des intelligences secrètes au cardinal Mazarin ... avec la lettre d’un partisan, Paris: P. Variquet, 1649.
37 See James Grantham Turner, Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 181–96; Tim Harris, ‘The Bawdy House Riots of 1668’, The Historical Journal 29, 1986, pp. 537–56.
38 On the whore petitions, see Melissa M. Mowry, The Bawdy Politic in Stuart England, 1660–1714, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004, pp. 105–27. This argument is made by Turner, Libertines and Radicals, pp. 197–252.
39 See Claire Guadiana, The Cabaret Poetry of Théophile de Viau, Tubingen: Nar, 1981.
40 Bawds also predominated in Spanish picaresque novels like Fernando de Rojas’ La Celestina:Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, Burgos: n.p., 1499.
41 John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ‘A Ramble in Saint James’s Park’, Representative Poetry Online [http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/ramble-st-jamess-park] (accessed 25 April 2012).
42 Johann Grimmelshausen, Die Ertzbetrügerin and Landstörtzerin Courasche, roughly translated as The Life of Courage: The Notorious Thief, Whore and Vagabond, trans. Mike Mitchell, New York: Daedulus Books, 2001 [1669].
43 See John Lynn, Women, Armies and Warfare in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
44 G. Bardin, Dictionnaire de l’armée de terre, Paris: Librairie militaire, 1865, p. 417. On Louis XIV’s reform of the army see John Lynn, Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army 1610–1715, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
45 Rossiaud, Amours vénales, p. 294.
46 Vásquez Garcia and Moreno Mengibar, Poder y prostitución en Sevilla, p. 33.
47 Alan Williams, The Police of Paris, Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1980, p. 67.
48 Tony Henderson, Disorderly Women in Eighteenth-Century London: Prostitution and Control in the Metropolis, 1730–1830, London: Longman, 1999, p. 89.
49 ‘An Act for the Better Regulating the Nightly Watch … ’ (1737) cited in Henderson, Disorderly Women, p. 90.
50 Henderson, Disorderly Women, p. 126.
51 Erica-Marie Bénabou, La prostitution et la police des moeurs aux XVIIIe siècle, Paris: Perrin, 1987, pp. 267–68.
52 van der Pol, The Burgher and the Whore, pp.116–40.
53 Robert Cheype, Recherches sur le procès des inspecteurs de police 1716–1720, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1975.
54 Henderson, Disorderly Women, p. 23; van der Pol, The Burgher and the Whore, p. 142; Bénabou, La prostitution, p. 268.
55 Bénabou, La prostitution, p. 268. London data comes from a later period, 1814–26, and concerns only Southwark. Native-born Londoners constituted the single largest group among the women detailed but overall 60 per cent of the detainees were migrants mainly from Ireland and the West Counties; see Henderson, Disorderly Women, p. 19.
56 van der Pol, The Burgher and the Whore, pp. 143–44. Data on the origins of London prostitutes comes from a much later period, approximately 1825. Consequently it has not been offered here as a comparison; see Henderson, Disorderly Women,pp.18–22.
57 The figure was much higher (40 per cent in Montpellier) for prostitutes arrested in the French provinces; see Colin Jones, ‘Prostitution and the ruling class in eighteenth-century Montpellier’, History Workshop Journal 6, 1978, pp. 7–28. See also Geneviève Hébert, ‘Les femmes de mauvaise vie dans la communauté (Montpellier, 1713–42)’, Histoire Sociale 72, 2003, pp. 492–512.
58 van der Pol, The Burgher and the Whore, pp. 146–47.
59 van der Pol, The Burgher and the Whore, pp. 145–47.
60 Henderson, Disorderly Women, pp. 148–49.
61 Sophie Carter, Purchasing Power: Representing Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century English Popular Print Culture, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004, pp. 7–50.
62 Astruc quoted in Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution, Vol. 1, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, p. 197. See also part XIII on ‘Sexual disease’ in this volume.
63 Dr Jean Stanislas Mittié cited in Bénabou, La prostitution, p. 416.
64 William Buchan cited in Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution, p. 198.
65 Sebastien Mercier cited in Bénabou, La prostitution, pp. 446–47.
66 Ange Goudemar cited in Bénabou, La prostitution, p. 447.
67 Patrick Colquoun cited in Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution, p. 70.
68 Such exaggerated estimations of the number of prostitutes were an old phenomenon and one that has not entirely disappeared. See Elizabeth S. Cohen’s remarks on estimating the number of prostitutes in Rome in ‘“Courtesans” and “Whores”’, p. 202.
69 Mercier cited in Bénabou, La prostitution, p.448.
70 On the Magdalene hospital and its literature see Donna T. Andrew, Philanthropy and Police: London Charity in the Eighteenth Century, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989; Sarah Lloyd, ‘Pleasure’s Golden Bait: Prostitution, Poverty and the Magdalene Hospital in Eighteenth-Century London’, History Workshop Journal 41, 1996, pp. 48–70; Mary Peace, ‘Asylum, Reformatory or Penitentiary? Secular Sentiments vs Proto-Evangelical Religion in The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House (1760)’ in Ann Lewis and Markman Ellis (eds), Prostitution and Eighteenth-Century Culture, London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012, pp. 141–56; Jennie Batchelor, ‘Mothers and Others: Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth-Century Prostitution Narratives’ in Lewis and Ellis, Prostitution and Eighteenth-Century Culture, pp. 157–69.
71 On prostitution and depopulation see Bénabou, La prostitution, pp. 417–30.
72 Andrew Elfenbein, ‘The Management of Desire in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure’ in Patsy Fowler and Alan Jackson (eds), Launching ‘Fanny Hill’: Essays on the Novel and its Influences, New York: AMS Press, 2003, pp. 27–48, p. 28. This reading of Fanny Hill was suggested by Lena Olsson, ‘Idealized and Realistic: Portrayals of Prostitution in John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure’ in Patsy S. Fowler and Alan Jackson (eds), Launching ‘Fanny Hill’: Essays on the Novel and its Influences, New York: AMS Press, 2003, pp. 81–101.
By Kathryn Norberg in "The Routledge History of Sex and the Body 1500 to the Present",edited by Sarah Toulalan and Kate Fisher, Routledge,UK,2013, excerpts pp.393-408. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.