ABSTRACT
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.
