Medieval Sex Workers

How did medieval cities manage and regulate sex work? Dr. Eleanor Janega is joined by Dr. Jamie Page to discuss the lives of sex workers, the operation of municipal brothels, and the legal and societal challenges these women faced. They uncover detailed case studies and the broader implications of sex work regulations across medieval Europe contrasting the experiences of sex workers in different regions and highlighting the unique practices in the Holy Roman Empire compared to England. Gone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega. Edited by Amy Haddow, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Matt Lewis?

  From long-lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places, to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Yarneger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

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• 2:59Eleanor Janega?

  Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanaga and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gob-smacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes to the Crusades. We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were and how we got here.

• 3:32Eleanor Janega?

  Before we get into today's episode of Gone Medieval, a word of warning. We're talking about sex workers today and the brothels that they worked in. It's all about concepts and people and not sex as such, but if you have little ears listening, you might want to give this episode a miss. Further, there's some sad stuff in this episode about infanticide, so if you're feeling a little bit fragile, this might not be the episode for you. Having said all of that, this episode is really, really fun. I promise.

• 4:07Eleanor Janega?

  The figure of the sex worker is one of those classic medieval tropes that comes up time and time again. Whether it's in medievalisms where we are shown fantastic and luxurious brothels alongside dragons and warring kings, or the saucy tavern wedge who's ready to serve up a lot more than just ale, we sort of expect sex workers to be around when we think about the medieval period. There's a good reason for that. They were. And as my previous conversations with people like the fabulous Kate Lister has shown, there is rather a lot of opining on sex work and sex workers in the Middle Ages. Who are they? Where can they live and

• 4:47Eleanor Janega?

  work? How will we organize our cities to accommodate them? When can they come to church? These are all questions that resurface time and time again. But when we talk about them, it's all just conceptual, really. There's a lot of thinking about the idea of sex work and sex workers, but we don't often get to hear from the women in question. And that's a shame. After all, it's sort of rude to gossip about people and not even let them have a say back. I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanaga, and today on Gone Medieval, I am delighted to welcome Dr. Jamie Page from the University of Graz, specifically to address this issue. Jamie is the author of the amazing book, Prostitution and Subjectivity in Late Medieval Germany, which specifically

• 5:32Eleanor Janega?

  looks at the experiences of the women who worked in the brothels that I'm always going on and on about. I may or may not be really, really overexcited about this one. So Jamie, welcome to Gone Medieval.

• 5:45Speaker 05

  Thank you so much.

• 5:46Eleanor Janega?

  I am absolutely delighted to have you on, which is no surprise. I'm a huge fan of your work, and indeed, we have worked together, which is why I really wanted to come and speak to you to get into more depth about ideas of medieval sex work. Because this is something I'm always kind of harping on, everyone about me, because I think it's really interesting. But there is so much to it as a concept, and one of the things that your work does so elegantly is it lets us find out more about the individuals themselves as opposed to just like the concept as an amorphous whole.

• 6:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, you're too kind. Thank you for that very nice introduction. You've really put your finger on it then. This is partly how I became interested in this topic because we know a lot relatively about medieval sex work in terms of how it was structured, the kind of organisation of what the church thought about it, et cetera. But the thing that has really been missing is some of the detail and especially from the perspectives of people involved. So I'm really thinking about sex workers themselves, women, and I can assume some men, although the evidence really is lacking for that, who did sex work, who worked in brothels, maybe also on the so-called black market privately, and what their lives were like, whether they believed in or reflected some of these discourses

• 7:05Speaker 05

  that we've heard so much about, about kind of whoredom, women's sin, all that kind of stuff. Whether they take that on and what their lives look like within this kind of context.

• 7:16Eleanor Janega?

  Absolutely. So you hit on something already that I think is kind of important to get upfront. And, you know, I've talked about this in the past, especially with Kate Lister. But just if we can do a very quick primer on what medieval sex work looks like. And I mean, that's a huge thing to say about 1,000 years of history.

• 7:32Speaker 05

  Of course, yeah.

• 7:33Eleanor Janega?

  But it's very, very different to the way that we treat it now.

• 7:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think it's a great question. I think we can assume that one constant all through the period is that sex work is going on kind of all over the place and at lots of different levels of society. So women, and again, I'm talking primarily about women, for them, it's a resource, especially poorer women, basically as a source of income, often next to other kind of traditionally low-paid jobs. So laundry, domestic service, that kind of thing. When we start to know the most about it is when we get urban sources. So when cities themselves are growing through the, from about the 12th century onwards. And we mostly know about it through initially attempts to, well, get rid of it.

• 8:15Eleanor Janega?

  Surprise.

• 8:16Speaker 05

  Surprise, surprise. So naturally, so it's the target of lots of legislation in cities, places like France, Italy, England. There comes a point, however, where the authorities in these places do a kind of calculation. They realise, you know, it's not going away. We've got to maybe accommodate it. And then we get sources that not just try to get rid of prostitution, but try to regulate it. And the real boon for historians is when we get the legalized brothel movement, which is something that comes in, especially on the continent, much less so in England, from around the 15th century, when cities actually set up brothels as a kind of public service. So there will be a town brothel in many places. The women there are kind

• 8:57Speaker 05

  of like municipal employees. The whole rationale is that they need these places, otherwise men will run wilds if they haven't got this kind of sexual outlet as they see it. That's what we know the most about these places. They have rules, they have regulations, we know how much it costs, that kind of thing. And there's a whole culture of brothels as well, as a kind of urban institution, something that offers hospitality, a bit like a kind of fancy tavern with extras, is how I sometimes think about it. So that's the kind of big picture of what it looks like in the Middle Ages.

• 9:29Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, absolutely. And I think here, an important thing to then talk about is that, you know, it's legal and very expressly legal. So that means that there is a right way and a wrong way to be doing it. So you can get in trouble if you're doing it the wrong way, or how people think it is incorrect, you know, so the wrong part of town, you know, on the wrong days, you know, all these things can be regulated. But I think that kind of also lures people sometimes into a false idea about what actual attitudes towards sex work are. So can you expand on that a little bit?

• 10:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, of course. So I think that there's a real risk with this. We look at this topic and we read, for example, sermons about sex work, or we read canon lawyers, theologians, and it's a very negative picture. You know, the women are sinful, they do this because they have fallen, et cetera, et cetera. There's a risk, if we look too much at that, we get a one-sided picture of the sex work. There is increasingly evidence, actually, that when we get closer to ordinary people, there was more room for tolerance and more understanding of the kind of circumstances that would see women. And again, I say women, I would love to find some evidence in male sex workers.

• 10:44Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, God, yes. Callers, right in.

• 10:47Speaker 05

  Holy Grail. But really, it's women's lives we're talking about. I think there's good evidence that actually people understand that this is part of life. And I've been lucky enough to work with a couple of cases from my area of expertise, which is really the German-speaking regions that show in quite clear details that this is the case, that people do this, and that it's not universally condemned like the way that it's done by churchmen.

• 11:15Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, absolutely. Because, you know, obviously, the church is going to do sensei certain things, but especially when it comes to sex. We know that people aren't listening, you know, because it is just one of these things where, yeah, there's an ideal world where you do every single thing that the church wants. And then there's the real world where people are just kind of trying to get by and people are people.

• 11:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, they're hearing sermons and they're picking up the messages. But actually, life is often a bit messier than that. And I'm not saying people ignore that fully, but I think people have more flexibility in the Middle Ages to accommodate these messages, but also some of the kind of messy aspects of life lived in kind of real terms.

• 11:55Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, absolutely. And I mean, I guess you can also forgive people for thinking, oh, well, you know, if the church says something in the Middle Ages, then everyone goes by it. Because the way that source survival works is that we get to hear from the church because, you know, they're writing rather a lot of things and then they keep those sources. You know, so we know a lot about them because they are all literate and common people often aren't. So this is one of the big issues with studying sex work, right? Is that we don't get to hear a lot from the people involved very often.

• 12:27Speaker 05

  Exactly, and it's not just a medieval thing by any means at all. It's a problem for today as well, that the voices of sex workers are massively underrepresented in the record, even when, you know, today, we have all the advantages we could want when it comes to recording and hearing marginalized voices. Discourse is dominated by the people who make the rules. And it's exaggerated, really, in the Middle Ages. We just don't have many sources at all through which we can hear these people's voices. And even then, when we do, there's all kinds of problems about, well, whose voice are we really hearing? It's a really interesting debate.

• 13:03Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, okay, so, well, let's just get into that then. You know, these case studies that you find, what is it that you're looking at in order to hear more from these people?

• 13:13Speaker 05

  Well, the problem with this topic is that you can't go at it directly. If you're looking for what sex workers in the Middle Ages said and did and thought, there's no, there's no diaries. There's no sense in which these people, partly because that, you know, many were likely to be illiterate, were able to record. So you need to go through another avenue. And as with so many aspects of, of kind of social history amongst non-elites, is legal judicial record. So you mentioned church court records, that's one great avenue. What we see, especially with towns and cities growing in the late Middle Ages, is urban courts become more productive of written documents, especially when the term inquisition gets a bad rep. But actually, inquisitional sources are brilliant for this kind of thing, because it's a kind

• 13:58Speaker 05

  of a rational mode of proof almost. An investigation is opened, the authorities come in, they interview people, they make a record of what they say, they compare what they've said to try and find a judgment, et cetera. There are a very small number of such cases from cities across Europe where those people are sex workers, or where we can assume that they might have been sex workers. And in sources like that, then we can get a sense of what life was like. Again, there are big problems. They don't just say what's on their mind. There's a court case happening in the background, they've got to respond to being interrogated and prompted with questions. And so if we read carefully into these sources... Bearing in mind these factors, you can get something close to a kind of mediated

• 14:43Speaker 05

  voice from sex work in the period.

• 14:46Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, I mean, absolutely, because if you've got someone who's on the stand, you know, all they can do is respond to the questions that they're being given by, you know, powerful men, elite men.

• 14:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, the way I've always thought about it is if you give a statement to the police now, for example, which, you know, is something I've done in the past, I won't go into details about exactly.

• 15:05Eleanor Janega?

  Okay, Jamie.

• 15:07Speaker 05

  But what happens is you are questioned by a police officer. Typically, you will say what you saw, et cetera, and then it's read back to you. And when this happened to me, I thought, that's not me. You know, they've stitched it into a lovely narrative in which, you know, I was sitting by my window at approximately 11:30 PM and I saw a Caucasian male at approximate height, et cetera. You know, it's kind of legalese. And that same thing applies to medieval sources. You've got to try and work with the conventions of the document to get at the person behind it.

• 15:40Eleanor Janega?

  So when we have these documents, right, you know, one of the big things that we end up finding out is when illegal things are happening, right? Because you sort of enter the historical record when you've come to the attention of authorities, right?

• 15:53Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 15:54Eleanor Janega?

  The great majority of sex workers, we're never going to go and find anything about them because they're just living their lives within a system that permits them, if it doesn't necessarily cheerlead them.

• 16:06Speaker 05

  Precisely.

• 16:06Eleanor Janega?

  But we find people when they're doing kind of illegal sex work, which is often, you know, kind of the informal kind. So, you know, where do we find out more about that?

• 16:19Speaker 05

  So it's a great question, and you've really hit the nail on the head with the problem here. One of the issues we have is that it's not until quite late in the Middle Ages that sex work actually does become specifically illegal. The authorities, they don't really care too much about it. And it's not until there's a kind of increasing religiosity of Tans on the continent that really looking for sex work becomes an issue for the authorities. So again, as historians, we've got to find other angles. Now, If you imagine the kind of life circumstances of anyone doing sex work in the Middle Ages, an era before reliable contraception, one of the big risks, of course, is for women is pregnancy. And there are a limited number of options of what you can do if you're doing this work and you

• 17:04Speaker 05

  become pregnant. So abortion and infanticide is a real theme for people doing sex work at this time. And those are legal issues of exactly the kind that you mentioned, which can get us a little bit closer. So for me, it's been productive to use that kind of lens to look for evidence within the archives of sex work being done.

• 17:25Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah. And I think that an important point to make here as well is that this isn't necessarily something that just happens within sex work. We see infanticide being a real issue across medieval Europe generally, because if you get pregnant in the wrong circumstances, kind of what do you do? Which is why the church often, from a medieval standpoint, is kind of like, pretty chill comparatively about like abortion in the first trimester. And then it gets like much more slippery after that. But it is certainly something that's on the cards, right? You know, because here are women who are in really difficult social circumstances. I mean, it's very difficult to raise a kid in a brothel, right? Like, that's, that's a hard thing to do.

• 18:10Speaker 05

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 18:11Eleanor Janega?

  And I mean, you know, or what if you're one of these women who this is sort of like your side hustle, you know, you're, you're a laundry woman.

• 18:18Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 18:19Eleanor Janega?

  And, you know, you pick up extra work on the side.

• 18:22Speaker 05

  Exactly. Yeah. So these are the kind of risks that women face. The other one, of course, is the whole reputation issue. How do you negotiate that in your community if you, through economic circumstances, maybe like you say, you do a bit of laundry, you do some domestic service, you do a bit of sex work on the side, how do you negotiate what your neighbors think of you? And again, we talked earlier on about this, you know, buying too much into the whole religious condemnation of it. That is a factor. And if you jump into any archive of insult and slander, the number one way in which women are abused verbally in this period is by calling them a whore. But.

• 19:02Speaker 05

  I still think people who do sex work are able to negotiate and can have a role in their communities where it's kind of understood what they do. And if they're skilled in the way they interact with their neighbors and others who know them, they can kind of make it through, as it were.

• 19:18Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think that this is such an important point, though, because it's always difficult when you're dealing with issues of sex in medieval documents. Because, yeah, you get people in court all the time, specifically for concepts of whoredom, but it's because the chick down the street and you got in a screaming match and each started calling each other a whore.

• 19:39Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 19:40Eleanor Janega?

  Their term, not ours, everybody. I'd like to point that out.

• 19:44Eleanor Janega?

  And, you know, they're in a screaming match. They get called before the court for slander and insults. And like, no one involved actually does any form of sex work. They just don't.

• 19:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, you never know. It's just, it's the most common form of abuse. It's like every single man is called thief, or I love some, but cases they've got the kind of antiquated, kind of posh, in the, oh, you knave, that kind of thing. And you scoundrel and all that kind of stuff. And, you know, these are, these are nasty terms of abuse at the time, but to us, they sound kind of cute, almost.

• 20:13Eleanor Janega?

  Bring back knave, you know. What can I say? Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the things that is really difficult is kind of sorting through these issues. And you have really broad terms, especially across sexuality, that can mean all sorts of things, like raptus, which we often translate as being raped, can also just mean like, taking someone from someone's house. And that can mean that like, you ran off with your boyfriend. You know, sodomy, which can mean that two people of the same sex are having sex, or it can mean, you know, that two married people are having a kind of sex that can't relate in procreation. So we always have to be so careful when we're sifting through these things, which makes it even more difficult to the sex workers, you know?

• 20:57Speaker 05

  I know, and even our ideas, you know, our concept of sex work, you know, wouldn't really have been recognized as such in the Middle Ages, although, as again, this is a point I'm really insisting on, I think people do have a sense that sex can be work at this time, and they recognize it as a survival strategy for poor, single women especially.

• 21:16Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, absolutely. You know, like, say you managed to run away from the farm. Congratulations. And, you know, you make it to the city and you need a job, but, you know, you've just been a peasant your whole life. And, you know, you can do all the normal peasant things, like run a farm and brew beer and do all these things. But yeah, that's maybe not going to get you by in London. So, yeah, you pick up odd jobs here and there, or, you know, you can go to one of the brothels and you can make a lot of money really quickly. I mean, this is one thing that a lot of the sources often talk about. And probably, you know, this is exaggerated, because we know that there's a whole gamut of people who are performing sex work. You know, there's people who are incredibly low paid, and they live in really difficult conditions. And we know there's chicks who are like raking it in as well.

• 22:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, there's a, there's a whole spectrum. I think you're right. And the tricky thing is, we know a miniscule percentage of what was going on. So hardly any of the evidence is truly representative. I think it's quite likely that at one end of the scale, yeah, people could probably do quite well financially. I mean, the, the real kind of classic case of this is if you go into Renaissance Italy, the figure of the courtesan appears, and, you know, these are women who are, you know, totally out open in public. They have big reputations in every, in every sense. And, you know, they're only making money, they're making a whole kind of living. On the other end of the scale, you know, it's, it's really a kind of a way just to survive. And, you know, brothels probably sit somewhere to the

• 22:48Speaker 05

  kind of middle, lower end of that, where you can make money, but socially, it's difficult to get back out of that kind of situation. Once you've been in the brothel, you're kind of stigmatized. And as we can go on and talk about, some of these places are not nice, not easy to exist and work in. Financial exploitation is pretty much the rule.

• 23:07Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah. Okay. So let's get into it, right? Because there's the city brothels, which are a whole institution in and of themselves. So can you tell us a little bit about how they worked?

• 23:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, absolutely. So the the basic idea is that they're underpinned by this sense that sex is everywhere in the city, sex workers exist. If we follow our theologians, Augustine, for example, then by far the best course of action is not to get rid of it entirely, but to try and accommodate it, partly because men, it's thought, need this. They need kind of sexual outlets. So we're going to have a brothel. It's a public institution. It is usually a house or several houses. Some cities have multiple properties, which is bought by the authorities and then farmed out to an individual or some individuals, brothel keepers effectively. So it's a farming system. They are basically responsible for running these

• 24:02Speaker 05

  places, sometimes to make a profit, and we know that some brothels did make a profit, but basically to provide the public service that they're there for, to fill them with women who are healthy, able to do the work, and to make them kind of appealing as well. There's no good having a brothel if it's nasty, cold, dark and dirty. It needs to look nice. It needs to be kind of luxurious. There's many reasons, there's many lists to take issue with Game of Thrones, but if you think back to that image, the little finger brothel, it's not totally off the mark as to what these things might have looked like. They've got to be appealing, so they'd have a stove, you know, big whoop. The women might be dressed in kind of fancy clothing. Some of them might be kind of dressed up a bit like a kind of court, as in like the princely court. So there's a kind of fantasy

• 24:48Speaker 05

  aspect. And again, this is something that, you know, still characterizes brothels. There's one near me where I work in Graz, which is kind of Roman themed, so there's a kind of fantasy element. So as part of the whole package, that's a kind of factor which has never really gone away. What happens then? Well, clients come into the brothel, they pay a nominal amount, and it's the prices are deliberately kept affordable. The whole idea is that men who are unmarried, so journeymen, apprentices, should have access to these places. So the price of visiting the brothel is something like the equivalent of a meal or two, something you should be able to spend your wages on. Once you've done that as a client, you would find yourself in effectively a bar, they're a bit like a kind

• 25:33Speaker 05

  of tavern. You would be able to interact with the women who are there, who work and live themselves in the brothel. And some places differed in the way they operated. You'd have in some places access to a whole night with a woman. Other places you would have, you'd go to a room, have sex, and then that's it all paid for and you'd go off again. They'd be eating, drinking, fighting probably. It's like a tavern in every sense. And the money would generally be paid into a kind of central chest. The women are not allowed to keep it initially. From that, however, they're then paid a wage by the brothel keeper, which in theory allows them to subsist, basically. But they also, they live in these places so that, you know, they're not coming into work. They are there.

• 26:17Speaker 05

  And then the real worst case scenarios, they're basically imprisoned. It's hard to actually physically get out of these places.

• 26:34Matt Lewis?

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• 30:09Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, because you have found some documents very specifically talking about that, right? Where, I mean, one of the things that is supposed to happen in an idealized world with these brothels is that you can kind of pick it up and put it down. It's a job like, not necessarily like any other, but it is a job. And when you're done, you can go get married and leave it all behind you in theory.

• 30:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 30:32Eleanor Janega?

  But in practice,

• 30:33Speaker 05

  In theory, yeah.

• 30:34Eleanor Janega?

  You've found some sources that show that it's very difficult to get out.

• 30:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I think you're exactly right. So what my work has been based on, going back to an earlier point, is trying to find sources that give us a sense of the everyday. We've got the top-down picture that I've just kind of sketched out. What does it look like from the perspective of people who live and work in these places? So one particular case that I've worked on extensively for, ooh, 10, 15 years now, on and off, gives us a kind of microhistorical insider perspective of one particular brothel in the city of Nerdlingen, which is in the southwest of Germany, on the Romantic Road, if you find yourself for touristic purposes down that way. So it's a lovely place. Actually, what I would say to your listeners is, pause for a second, go on Google Maps,

• 31:26Speaker 05

  look up Nerdlingen, and then zoom out and put the satellite feature on. You will see the city sits in a meteorite crater. It's a very interesting place

• 31:34Eleanor Janega?

  Wow.

• 31:34Speaker 05

  for all kinds of reasons.

• 31:35Eleanor Janega?

  Okay.

• 31:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. If you sit in the middle of the city and look outwards, you will see kind of distant mountains, and those are the rim of the old meteorite crater.

• 31:43Eleanor Janega?

  All right.

• 31:44Speaker 05

  That, I think, 90-odd million years ago impacted. Anyway, much more interestingly about Nerdlingen, this is the site of, in the late 15th century, so 1471, 72 is what we're talking about, of this Absolutely spectacular. I mean, also grim, brutal, awful case, but spectacular for its insights into what brothels were like in the Middle Ages. The circumstances basically are these, that the city council somehow, we don't know exactly how, but somehow gets word that one of the women in the brothel, and her name was Else, Else von Eichstedt, which is a town quite nearby, who'd started off working as a kitchen

• 32:25Speaker 05

  maid, had at some point been forced to start seeing clients in the brothel, and as a result of that, she had become pregnant. So it's going the way of what we talked about earlier. What happens then, and I'll explain how we know this, but the story that then unfolds is that she tells one of the brothel keepers, there are two in Nerdlingen, may have been a husband and wife, and the wife's name is Barbara. Else goes to Barbara and says, I haven't had my period, I'm a bit worried, what should I do? Barbara takes her aside and says, don't you worry, I'm going to make you a drink that will fix the problem. And she's ambiguous in the way that she uses this language. She goes away and we get a

• 33:07Speaker 05

  report of what went into this drink, and the ingredients are, quite innocently, kind of cloves and wine, it sounds initially quite nice, kind of thing you might buy at a Christmas market, but then also pennyroyal and Queen Anne's lace, which we know through testing as our effective abortifacient, so something that could induce a miscarriage. So Else describes this happening, when she later was to testify about all these events, and she also describes how some of the other women began to notice what was going on and warned her, do not take this mixture, do not drink what the brothel keeper is making up for you, if you're concerned that you're pregnant. When the time comes to take it, as Else herself described, she said that she refused, didn't want to take it, but

• 33:50Speaker 05

  Barbara then took a stick, a staff, and stood over her and forced her to. With the results that you might expect, she immediately began to suffer cramps, as she described it, and then within a couple of hours was basically bedridden, and soon after that, miscarried a child, which she and some of the other women Described as being about twenty weeks old, a male child. So, so really, it's a, it's a distressing case. What we then get is lots of further descriptions about what happened afterwards, especially the attempts of the brothel keepers to try and hush this up because this is a crime at this point. You can't do this.

• 34:27Eleanor Janega?

  Twenty weeks, that's a, that is, the church is not happy about that one. You know, like you get twelve weeks, let's get out of jail free, but twenty, yeah, yeah.

• 34:35Speaker 05

  Exactly. It fits every definition of abortion and infanticide, which they would need to prosecute and convey someone. So what happens next is that there's a kind of attempt to cover it up by the brothel keeper. They beat Else savagely, as it's described, with a stick, the rod mentioned earlier, with a bull whip as well. They try and intimidate her physically. She is defiant. She refuses, as she describes it, to go along with it. And they reach a point where the brothel keepers, Barbara and who may have been her husband, his name is Leonhart, come to her. And they say, right, we will, we'll offer you a bargain. You can leave the brothel and we will cancel all the debt that you owe to us and you can leave the town if you promise never to tell anyone what has happened.

• 35:20Speaker 05

  And she says, okay, fine, we're going to do this, but tells everyone else working with her, all of her colleagues, so to speak, of the brothel about what's going to happen. And then right at the end, you get this just kind of incredible scene in which, as it's described, all the women are sitting down to dinner. And Barbara tells Else, off you go to the kitchen, get some milk, so every other woman. Else leaves the room and then secretly climbs over the fence of the brothel and leaves town. Once that's happened, Barbara comes back in and says loudly, oh, where could Else have gone? We need to have a look for her. She could have escaped, et cetera, et cetera. The women do this, but they, of course, they know what's happened. They've been let into the plan.

• 36:04Speaker 05

  And there's a kind of big fake search for her, but she's gone. She's out of town. Which is kind of where that part of the record ends.

• 36:12Eleanor Janega?

  This is so interesting on any number of levels, right? Because we have this classic hallmark of this cases. The reason we're hearing about these women at all is some terrible things have happened, right? But it's about, you know, abortion that gets this in here. And the other thing that gets it in is this question of unfree labor. And that comes up a lot, especially in late medieval discussions of sex work. Because one of the big ways that women kind of fall into it, it's not necessarily that they're like, oh yeah, well, here's a good job for me and I'm going to do this. Like, I mean, we have tons and tons of records about this and from Prague, for example,

• 36:55Eleanor Janega?

  quite nearby, where people move into town and, you know, your landlady says, oh yeah, you can get this room and I'll give it to you on credit. And you know what? You can just work it off. You can work off this debt that you're going to owe me. And then the girls say, oh yeah, sure, that sounds great. And then they find out later the work in question is sex work. So there's like a lot of trapping people through debt, but that is legal in a way. And then you can just say, oh yeah, well, you're in debt. And then that's how you say you can't leave, right? It's by saying you can't leave because you owe me a debt, not you can't leave because you're a sex worker and this is a brothel and you belong here now. There's all these ways of entrapping people.

• 37:38Speaker 05

  Exactly. And it's such a familiar trap in the context of sex work and by no means just in the Middle Ages. I mean, as I said, that's any sociologist of sex work looking at today and it's a common pattern. And it's exactly what's going on in Nördlingen and by extension through some of what the women say when this all comes to trial elsewhere in Germany and anywhere where there's a kind of brothel system, we can kind of assume that this is a risk. So I've told the whole story about about the abortion. That's actually only one part of this, this incredible kind of package of sources. Because what happens as well is once the council's discovered what's going on and else has been interrogated and told this story that I have been related, what they

• 38:21Speaker 05

  also do is they have a second parallel investigation when what they do is unprecedented. They get all the women working in Nördlingen at that time and they have them testify about what has happened in the brothel, what the working conditions are like. How they've been abused in various ways. The reason for this actually is quite pragmatic at heart. The brothel is supposed to be a public institution. It's supposed to work in a kind of orderly fashion. And if you can have a situation where someone is being forced into aborting a child, committing a crime, then of course, that's a, that's a big problem for the authorities. It totally turns on its head, this idea that it's all for the greater good. It's all, you know, the kind of lesser evil argument. So what we get alongside this abortion investigation is a kind of catalogue through the voices,

• 39:05Speaker 05

  through the perspectives of these women of what's going on in this brothel and by extension, probably other ones. And it's exactly that picture that you've touched on of financial exploitation of trapping people in the brothel. The, the first thing that happens to most of these women when they arrive in a brothel is they immediately have all their possessions confiscated. So this is me quoting effectively what the women say. There's one in particular, one woman who, she's the kind of spokesperson of the whole brothel. Her name is Anna, Anna von Ulm, which is about 50 miles away from, from Nördlingen. And she really steps forward in the trial and grabs this whole thing by the collar and gives a really full, you can sense kind of angry account of what life is like. And so it's financial exploitation.

• 39:47Speaker 05

  The first thing that happens, the women come in the door, everything they own is confiscated. So all their clothes, anything they've got now belongs to the brothel keeper and they have to work to buy it back. Everything they buy, all the food and drink is given to them at massively inflated prices and they have to work to get it back. Of course, the, the way the trap works, they're, they're never going to make enough money. And the result is they are, well, I think you could call it debt bondage, if not modern slavery is what we'd say if it was happening, which it is today. So the, the model is pragmatically, it's supposed to be a kind of neat solution, but actually the way it actually works is to, is to trap women into what is seen as a sinful lifestyle.

• 40:25Eleanor Janega?

  But they do kind of get some justice, these women, at the end of it, in terms of what happens to the brothel owners though, yes?

• 40:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, there's a kind of happy ending to this one. A happy ending in a, the context of all kinds of other groom stuff. What basically happens is we get to the end of the investigation and it's pretty clear that the court views these women with a lot of credibility because the brothel keeper, Leonhard, is more or less immediately dismissed from his post. So he gets off quite lightly, actually. He's just sacked and then dismissed from the town. So off you go, not allowed to work here anymore. Babava, his potential wife, partner, doesn't have it quite as easy. She is convicted of causing an abortion. There's a record in the town archive in the so-called blood book, which is a record of all the capital corporal punishments, which states that she was

• 41:18Speaker 05

  branded probably on the cheeks and then banished across the Rhine. So she's expelled from the time, not allowed to return on pain of death, probably. And then we have some indication that there's a new set of rules brought in shortly afterwards. We have a new rule book for the brothel brought in in 1472, which has a lot of what was discussed by the women is represented in this new rule book. So the women are not, for example, allowed to be kept physically in the brothel. They're supposed to be able to come and go, to leave the sinful life as it's put as they want to. There's attempts to address some of the other abuses that they described. They talk about being given terrible food. They talk about violence, being routine, all that kind of stuff. So we've got this new regime. Whether that had any kind of long-term impact, I think

• 42:03Speaker 05

  is probably doubtful. I suspect it probably returned to a kind of unpleasant status quo quite quickly. But they did at least live to see the hated oppressors dismissed and garbed off in this immediate set of events.

• 42:18Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, I think that, you know, the one good thing about reading that case is I was like, well, at least those people got in trouble. You really, and I think it's so wonderful, actually, to hear from Anna when you look at these sources, because, you know, she's so eloquent and able to talk about what their situation is. And she comes across very clearly. And, you know, I'm jealous of the source, because, you know, a lot of the sources that I'm working with in Prague with sex workers, I don't get to hear from them directly. I get to hear men talk about them, right? And there's this one that I just kind of like want to throw out kind of in.

• 42:57Eleanor Janega?

  Contrast to Nörlingin, I guess, is the way because there is a particular brothel in Prague in the 14th century called Obora. And Obora is kind of up near the castle, kind of, ooh, fancy, you know, you know, kind of a thing. And, and I found out that it existed because there are churchmen complaining about it. There's this guy, Master Ulrich, and his deal is that he thinks that there shouldn't be a brothel there. So he's constantly going in and attempting to run the women out. And I, I would imagine through, through violence, there's, there's probably some like violent coercion going on there. And he complains to the church that every time he does this, so it's like, okay, I guess

• 43:40Eleanor Janega?

  this is Ulrich's hobby, right? He gets bored, he attempts to break up a brothel. The women then go to the town council and say, he's in there again. And the town council is like, Ulrich, get out of the brothel. Right? Like, you need, you need to go. So it's really interesting because he says that it's these women who are doing it. And it's like they're, we don't, we don't hear from like a brothel keeper in particular. And he doesn't say that there's a madam, which you know, there, there might be, you know, madams come up a lot in all of these things. And the thing is, they love to get mad at a madam. What we see from the case of Nörlingin is that they come down very heavily on Barbara. And I mean, quite right too, you know, she's the one who caused the abortion and all of these things.

• 44:23Eleanor Janega?

  But there is kind of a way of looking at women in particular, you know, as panders. We, we get that term a lot. Yeah. Where it's like, oh, this is really bad. You know, it's a woman who, you know, she's not doing it herself, but she's kind of promoting this lifestyle. So you would think that if there was a madam involved, Master Ulrich would be like, oh, and there's this terrible madam. But no, it, it seems like there's these women who are doing this work and they're like, I live here. This is my, and, and they're, they're trying to get back into the brothel. And the priest's complaint is that they do this really successfully and they advocate for themselves. And I'm like, I just, I'm so desperate. Hear more from these women and I can't, you know, I can't find anything yet.

• 45:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, but it seems like some kind of corporate organization amongst them. You'd, I think, you know, is there, is there, there's no sense of a spokeswoman or someone?

• 45:09Eleanor Janega?

  No, it's just always the women, quote unquote. And so, you know, someday, you know, I will, I will, I will at some point get far enough through, you know, the proxy archives that I will, that I will find one of these women. I'm determined.

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• 47:00Eleanor Janega?

  It is interesting, right? Because you have, on the one hand, some women who seem as though they're quite in control of things. And on the other, you have these really terrible conditions. So there's this huge spectrum in terms of brothel work. And it's one that we don't get to hear tons a lot about. But, yeah, okay, we've got all of these sources. We've got all of like this incredible stuff that we hear. But you and I are talking about cities in the Holy Roman Empire.

• 47:27Speaker 05

  Uh huh.

• 47:28Eleanor Janega?

  Right? And we don't necessarily get the same kind of system or the same way of looking at sex work everywhere in Europe, do we? Right? Like, it's not the same, for example, in England.

• 47:39Speaker 05

  That's something I wish I knew more about. We don't get the kind of brothel movement in England in the way that we do in European cities. There are a couple of exceptions, kind of incongruously. I think Sandwich in Kent has got a kind of municipal brothel.

• 47:53Eleanor Janega?

  All right, Sandwich.

• 47:54Speaker 05

  Yeah. And I think there are some, there are some port towns in East Anglia as well. And I guess the logic there is maybe these are places where you have a lot of foreign men coming in and they expect to find conditions that they know from home. And if they don't find those conditions, then there's, again, a kind of public risk to women. There's also, of course, there's the kind of the famous brothels in Southwark, which are, I think ultimately belong to the Bishop of Southwark, don't they? Or Archbishop of Southwark.

• 48:21Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, and Winchester as well. He rents a lot of them out.

• 48:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 48:24Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah.

• 48:24Speaker 05

  Exactly. So we've got, we've got those brilliant rules, which, again, are, have a lot of similarities with what you see on the continent. But we don't get that kind of widespread municipal brothel movement that we see in German cities, in some French cities, Iberia as well. And I think Italian cities also have this feature as well. And I, it's something I wish I knew more about or understood better.

• 48:44Eleanor Janega?

  Why do we think England is so weird? Huge question, you know? Whole show, whole show. Why is England weird? You know, like, I mean, what, what is it about England that it doesn't kind of adopt the same continental standards about these sort of things?

• 48:58Speaker 05

  My best guess really is that the kind of cities that you and I are looking at are, they're basically city-states almost. They are. They're highly independent. They have a lot of power to make their own policy and decide things like, what do we do about sex workers? For us in England, cities are not anything like as free to operate this more kind of heavy royal and seigneurial power in the background, which prevents that. Would be my best guess, but I'm not totally sure.

• 49:23Eleanor Janega?

  Ah, it's always, you know, the debate, the imperial royal debate, Jamie. Just like, this is why the Holy Roman Empire is so interesting. I can't help it, you know, I simply.

• 49:33Speaker 05

  Everyone should do more Holy Roman Empire history is the.

• 49:36Eleanor Janega?

  That's right.

• 49:37Speaker 05

  What we're getting from this.

• 49:38Eleanor Janega?

  That's right. All right. Okay. You have a situation where there's all of these brothels and, you know, maybe we don't get to hear from them as much as we would like, but, you know, you and I are both like, oh, that's an interesting brothel. Check out my brothel, you know, because we're cool, right?

• 49:54Speaker 05

  But then. Eleanor, we are not cool. I hate to break it to you, but.

• 49:58Eleanor Janega?

  Jamie, let me have this.

• 49:59Speaker 05

  Well, you may be, you may be. I'm not, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna claim that.

• 50:02Eleanor Janega?

  Okay, we have this big crackdown, right? Kind of from the 16th century onwards, suddenly, what is this municipal institution? And at the very least, suddenly gets cracked down on. I think that's a safe thing to say, right?

• 50:20Speaker 05

  I'd call it that as well.

• 50:22Eleanor Janega?

  So, I mean, I generally tell people that why this tends to happen is a result of the Reformation, right? You have this big kind of, I always say it's a spiritual arms race, right? Where like the Protestants are like, we're really holy. And the Catholics are like, nah, no, you're not. And then everyone goes, well, if you're so holy, then why is there a brothel? And then, yeah, and then you kind of like have to shut down all of them. And like, that's certainly in there, right?

• 50:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, spiritual arms race, I'm gonna use that. That I think is probably still the best explanation. What you can see is there's an increasing religiosity of town government towards the end of the Middle Ages. So we're talking about the late 15th century, when city governments become increasingly confident in their ability to govern, but also aware that they are the ones who are responsible for shaping the godly community. And this kind of moral compromise that has allowed the brothel to exist just becomes increasingly difficult to uphold in that kind of atmosphere. And stories like that of nerdling can only make it more difficult. How can you claim to be acting for the common good if this kind of stuff is happening in your public institutions would be one way to attack them.

• 51:31Speaker 05

  And then when, as we get towards the reformation, as you say, we actually get targeted campaigns from preachers who will come into a town and whip up public sentiment by pointing to the brothel as an instance of the kind of corruption, what's going on. Even then, however, there are very persistent brothels or resistant, rather, with lots of towns where long into the 16th century, there is still a public brothel and it does take some time for the movement to go away. And of course, it doesn't mean that prostitution vanishes. It still continues as just unofficial, illegal, black market, whatever you want to call it after that point.

• 52:05Eleanor Janega?

  I mean, yeah, absolutely. You've already mentioned, for example, that, but meanwhile in Venice, right? And during this period, like actually the courtesans sort of take off and they're just making more money now. Now they're very, very fancy indeed, right? So there are always exceptions to this rule. But I mean, certainly here in London, there's a big crackdown led by Henry VIII, you know, one of the most spiritual guys who ever, whoever lived, right? Where he tries very famously to kind of close the stews, which are the series of bathhouses and brothels down in Southwark. And he says, no, like we're not doing that anymore. And it becomes this kind of way of.

• 52:45Eleanor Janega?

  Showing that you care about these things, even if it is just, you know,

• 52:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 52:51Eleanor Janega?

  some kind of flex. And, you know, yeah, the fact of the matter remains that this doesn't get rid of sex work. Like, you know, you can't get rid of sex work. That's just not going to happen.

• 52:58Speaker 05

  No, it's a way for rulers to kind of throw their weight around and to be, you know, ostentatiously doing the public good. And, you know, that's a whole other debate as to whether, you know, is this ultimately a public good if prostitution is legalized and regulated and so on and so forth, which has never gone away.

• 53:15Eleanor Janega?

  No, and I mean, I suppose that one of the big things that we end up seeing as a result of all this, you know, there are, of course, those who say, oh, and isn't it great? Because, you know, now women aren't being abused in these particularized way. But what ends up happening as a result as well is that now individual women get a whole lot of stick for being what they call whores, right? You know, and suddenly now your very identity is a crime.

• 53:43Speaker 05

  For sure. And there's definitely a sense that when we get this atmosphere towards the end of the Middle Ages, especially in European cities, where the brothel is becoming more controversial and some of them are closing and people are preaching more about sexual behavior, life for women who are doing sex work, whether in brothels or out with them, gets increasingly difficult. What we see in criminal archives especially is that, just as you described, that women are now being picked up by the authorities for being prostitutes, not just for, as we've seen in the past, for kind of auxiliary stuff like abortion and infanticide. It becomes, there's an increasing sense of this solidifying

• 54:24Speaker 05

  as a crime. And they are asked specifically about sex they've had, with whom, where they've been, where there might be private brothels operating. And there's a kind of general atmosphere that it's becoming harder and harder to kind of make it through than it had been in the earlier period.

• 54:42Eleanor Janega?

  And I suppose that the other thing to just kind of acknowledge here as well is when

• 54:48Eleanor Janega?

  Whore as a slur is something that gets thrown around all the time. There's also the fact that there are a lot of women who get called

• 54:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 54:56Eleanor Janega?

  Whores and certainly that get brought before the authorities. And it has nothing to do with sex work. So, you know, I've got cases wherein women are called suspect. So they'll call them suspect women and they're, why are they suspect? Well, they're at the beer hall.

• 55:12Speaker 05

  Hmm. Yeah.

• 55:13Eleanor Janega?

  Right.

• 55:13Speaker 05

  Women who spend time in kind of male spaces or even who are, who are in the streets, who are visibly present and who don't have a chaperone or any kind of legitimate, obvious visually, obvious reason to be there, run the risk of this kind of labeling.

• 55:31Eleanor Janega?

  And certainly we see that being a problem when we look at women even into the modern period, you know, because Hallie Rubenhold's work on, for example, the Jack the Ripper cases has shown that a lot of the women that we said, oh, well, they were sex workers. It's like, that was just a chick who went to a bar, you know? And we're really desperate to say, well, well, she must have been because she was in a bar and people did that in the medieval period as well. And then that means that it just becomes illegal to be a woman in public. It becomes illegal to be a woman in a masculine space. And so there is this idea of saving women in all of this, like from themselves. But what it also means is that there is a narrowing of the acceptable places for women to be in the world.

• 56:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, and there's even before that, there have been attempts to kind of force sex workers to display themselves as such through certain types of clothing. So if you go out on the streets, you'll need to wear, well, it differs from different towns, whether it's a red cap or some kind of sash or something to try and eliminate who, who is and who isn't. But once we get to the later period and, and sex work in general is much more heavily outlawed. Any woman can run the risk of being classified in this way just by being out and about in public and not visibly with a man, you know, related to her or through marriage, et cetera.

• 56:53Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, I guess there are also these knock on effects because, as you say, sex work doesn't go away, right? You know, even in an increasingly hostile place and you still kind of have some legal brothel keepers and then you have kind of the more clandestine sex work. I'm stealing, I'm stealing words.

• 57:13Speaker 05

  No, it's a good, it's a good term.

• 57:15Eleanor Janega?

  Clandestine prostitute is a term that some of my sources use, right? And then they end up like beefing in public and then there's like a whole other crime because they're like fighting and pulling each other's hair.

• 57:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, and actually, some of the, some really interesting sources towards the end of the Middle Ages, when the whole market is contracting a bit and it's more difficult and there's increased competition and so on, which show that that there could be kind of rivalry between sex workers who are working in different ways. I mean, that the Nerdringen case, I think, is a great example of the kind of solidarity amongst women, but we've also got cases where that is not the case. We get petitions, for example. There's a great one given to the city council of Nuremberg in the 1490s by the women of the public brothel. So they are, you know, official municipal sex workers and they have caught wind of

• 58:07Speaker 05

  private operators elsewhere in the city and they send in this list and say exactly where they are and where the council can find them and they say, go and get them. There's a really nice turn of phrase in which they say, you know, they're out there and they're, they're working much more kind of rudely or roughly than we do in the public brothel. So there's a sense, you know, there's decorum in sex work and then there's, you know, beyond the pale.

• 58:28Eleanor Janega?

  Girl on girl crime. I hate to see it, you know?

• 58:32Speaker 05

  You're often glad when you find stories of solidarity, but there's, you know, the other side of the coin is really much part of the picture as well.

• 58:39Eleanor Janega?

  I mean, I suppose it is an important thing to say here as well because we've both brought them up, but you know, the kind of reverse image of all of this crackdown and the legality questions and the kind of scrapping for survival is of course the Italian courtesans.

• 58:58Eleanor Janega?

  But they are also a particularly rarefied group, right? Like that they're not the same thing as like the Nerdling and girls at all.

• 59:07Speaker 05

  No, though there was actually one Italian woman in the Brussels in Nerdling and who, well, I don't know whether maybe she had been a courtesan. It's not sure, but I mean, all that tells us about is the kind of extent to which some of these women were trafficked and moved around. But yeah, just to circle back exactly as you say, there is, there was a real spectrum of sex work across the whole period when we, when we look at what there is at the very kind of top end, not, you know, kind of morally or that perspective, but financially, economically, there is the, the kind of courtesan picture, very much part of that Renaissance Italy context. And then at the other end, there's people who are really scrimping and saving and just trying to survive really for whom life I think is much more difficult.

• 59:50Eleanor Janega?

  And I mean, I suppose that's the thing is it's a broad church. And when we talk about medieval sex work, or indeed early modern sex work, that can mean all sorts of different things. And it's been so useful to have you come along today because I think it is incredibly important that we do find these records of actual individual women instead of just conceptualizing it, instead of just saying, oh, here's the way that you think about sex work. And that's how life was for people because until you have the words out of individuals' mouths, it's not always clear how that shakes down.

• 1:00:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think we, we need both parts of the picture. The only note of caution is that just because there are so few sources that have the individuals themselves at their center, you've always got to ask, well, how representative really is it? Do they speak for other people? Or has this case only survived because it's particularly egregious and grim and awful? Was it like that for most people in reality? So again, all, all I'm talking about is just is being careful the way you read the sources. You can get a lot from looking at, at individual case studies, I think, but you need to be careful and mindful of context when you do that kind of history.

• 1:01:00Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, absolutely. You know, not every single person was being treated this way, and that's why it goes to court.

• 1:01:06Speaker 05

  Yeah. And in fact, if we can quote Anna von Olm again, she does say, well, I've worked in other brothels and this is by far the worst one. So she gives us a little insight into maybe nerdling was a particularly bad example of something that was nevertheless going on more broadly.

• 1:01:23Eleanor Janega?

  Thank you, Anna. Like, what a queen.

• 1:01:25Speaker 05

  She's brilliant.

• 1:01:27Eleanor Janega?

  So good. Well, Jamie, this has been an absolute pleasure.

• 1:01:31Speaker 05

  Likewise. Thank you so much for having me on.

• 1:01:32Eleanor Janega?

  I could talk to you about this all day.

• 1:01:36Eleanor Janega?

  Sorry for being too enthusiastic, but it's just been brilliant. Thank you so much.

• 1:01:41Speaker 05

  No, you're incredibly welcome. Thank you.

• 1:01:43Eleanor Janega?

  Thanks so much to Jamie, once again, for joining me. And thank you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. If you were interested in this topic, you might want to check out my past episode with Kate Lister, where we talked about the medieval rules of sex. Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly and ad-free podcasts by signing up at historyhit.com/subscription. There are some fabulous films that we've made for you to enjoy there, including my episode on life and death in medieval London, where we look at the final resting place of some of London's medieval sex workers. Remember, you can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have a moment, please drop us a review

• 1:02:28Eleanor Janega?

  or rate us everywhere you listen to podcasts and tell your friends and family that you've gone medieval. Otherwise, the wonderful Matt Lewis will be back on Friday for more medieval action. And I'll see you all, as always, next Tuesday. Until next time.

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