My lovely lambs, if you are not on Twitter, I mean first of all congrats for not getting involved in that hellsite? It has been a generally wonderful thing to see these voices elevated outside of the usual bubble, and I for one have been super pleased to see decrim discussed in a more public way.
What we are gonna talk about today is how this concept β that women selling sex are necessarily degraded and need to be saved from their circumstances β is an extremely new one. Now I know that I am constantly ranting about medieval sex work sorrynotsorry , so by now you ought to know the gist of it. Therefore, everyone from St. Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas affirmed that sex workers needed to exist in order to keep the peace. Cities especially were interested in making sex workers available in order to keep it chill.
Often these brothels were municipally chartered, especially in the Holy Roman Empire and France , meaning that cities themselves sort of licenced brothels and said that particular institutions were allowed to exist. Because this was a system of legal sex work, that meant that there were rules about how all of this went down.
If there were municipally chartered brothels, usually sex work had to take place specifically within them. Often, medieval cities would legislate that sex work had to take place at the edges of a town, or outside the city walls. Here in London represent , for example, sex work usually took place across the river in Southwark in order to adhere to these rules. A lot of the time sex workers also had to be easily distinguishable.
There was also, unsurprisingly, a fair amount of snippiness surrounding women who participated in sex work. Super friendly and stuff all around, non? So, the whole thing was nuanced. It was seen as necessary, but people were still kinda about the whole thing, and tried to keep it restricted. Even given all of this stigma and all of the legal restrictions, plenty of women still took up sex work. A single woman could support herself through sex work, and sometimes very handsomely. We have a hint from some medieval lives of St Mary of Egypt , one of the so-called prostitute saints that brothel life was considered pretty alright in the medieval period:.
