From Whores to Prostitutes
This chapter begins with quotations from the Renaissance Spanish work of literature entitled The Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea, popularly known as La Celestina. This chapter is about the new terminology for (and thus status of) public women, sometimes known as whores. During the seventeenth century a significant shift took place in the conceptual history of transactional sex in the Iberian world, a movement towards the creation of the diseased, criminalized and/or victimized prostitute, who, by the early eighteenth century, began to fill the shoes of the still- working sinful and immoral whore. In this chapter, investigations of three Mexico City procuresses document both their traditional association with sorcery and the highly domestic and distinctly African and indigenous culture of seventeenth-century transactional sex. In this era, the crown forbade brothels, but this mandate was an empty rhetorical gesture with no practical application within the criminal justice system.