A Life of Ill Repute: Public Prostitution in the Middle Ages

by Maria Serena Mazzi

Overview

Prostitution is often called the oldest profession in the world. Even in the Middle Ages, people believed that there would always be women willing to use their bodies for profit. But who were these women who offered themselves up to men? In A Life of Ill Repute Maria Serena Mazzi traces and reconstructs prostitution in the early fourteenth century, describing how in medieval European society women - often extremely poor and overwhelmed by debt, or victims either of predatory men full of duplicitous intentions or simply of rape - were traded as commodities. Prostitutes, according to Mazzi, were despised and condemned but considered necessary in an ambiguous and contradictory society that tolerated their sexual exploitation to safeguard the virtue of honest women and counter the vice of homosexuality, while allowing men to vent their own impulses. The theory of the lesser evil - encouraged by both the church and the state - is the grounds on which prostitution flourished in medieval Europe. In the Middle Ages prostitution was censured and considered disgraceful, but at the same time it was deemed inevitable and even necessary. A Life of Ill Repute uncovers the hypocrisy and speciousness of ecclesiastical, political, and social arguments for the justification of the existence of public prostitution.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780228002093
Publisher:	McGill-Queens University Press
Publication date:	03/19/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Maria Serena Mazzi is former professor of medieval history at the Universities of Florence and Ferrara.

Table of Contents

Preface vii

Part 1 The Words for It

1 "Using One's Body for Ill-Gotten Gain" 3

2 The Opinion of the Church 11

3 A Utopia: The Laws and the Public Authorities 21

Part 2 The Reality

4 Clandestine Women and Public Women 35

5 The Identification of a Public Woman 51

6 The Signs of Inequality 57

7 Public Women and Public Officials 67

Part 3 The Places and the Rules

8 Loca inhonesta (The House of Ill Repute) 83

9 A Disciplined Life 99

Part 4 The Business Itself

10 The Work, the People, the Debts 111

11 Marked for Life 129

12 Repentance 142

Notes 149