Conclusion

This chapter returns to the issues surrounding ‘voices’ and subjectivities posed in the Introduction, and reflects on what the voices of medieval women like those whose cases make up Chapters 1–3 might play in present-day debates on sex work. The chapter reflects on the final difficulty of attributing ‘complex’ subjectivity to individuals and engaging meaningfully with their experience without at least some form of objectification, a vital concern for the history of prostitution.

Municipal Prostitution and Subjectivity

This chapter explores a criminal investigation into an alleged abortion in the municipal brothel of Nördlingen in 1471–2. As well as abortion, the city council was drawn into investigating a range of exploitative labour practices imposed on the women by two brothel-keepers after allegations of abuse surfaced from the women in the brothel during the initial hearings. The chapter argues that municipal prostitution created the opportunity for women to engage a subject position of common women (gemeine frawen) in dialogue with the authorities, one which enabled them to push for redress of unfair working conditions. The latter sections of the chapter focus on one woman in particular, Els von Eichstätt, alleged to have been forced to abort her child. It places Els’s own ordeal in the larger context of abuses uncovered at the trial to examine how discourses surrounding municipal prostitution shaped individual experience.

Secret Women

This chapter presents a case study of apparent clandestine prostitution in Zurich in 1392, embedded within an attempted prosecution of abortion of a single woman named Repplin. The chapter aims to investigate the ambiguities of the concept of clandestine prostitution and whether it offers a satisfactory means of engaging with the subjectivity of medieval women. In doing so it additionally seeks to participate in existing debates on sex and social classification in the Middle Ages in which prostitution has been central. The chapter ultimately argues that while prostitution offers a useful means of making visible the lives of marginal women, imposing categories upon past subjects is also fraught with problems. In arguing that the idea of prostitutes as ‘secret women’ can help the reader to understand the symbolic and material dimensions of Repplin’s case, the chapter also makes the case for resisting the attempt to fully ‘capture’ past subjects.

Introduction

This chapter situates the book in relation to key questions relating to the themes of prostitution and subjectivity, explaining its contribution to existing scholarship on both and bringing the reader up to date on relevant historiography. It outlines several definitions of subjectivity as the term has been employed by historians and makes the case for the importance of seeing medieval prostitutes as ‘complex subjects’, both within the history of prostitution specifically and in the larger context of histories from below. A concluding section asks what ethical obligations might be at hand in the archival encounter with past subjects.

‘[T]his miserable, shameful life’

This chapter focuses upon the interrogation record of a woman named Gerdrut Birckin, questioned in Augsburg in 1497 initially on suspicion of theft before being accused of whoredom. It places Gerdrut’s experience in the larger context of the ‘new moralism’, an era which saw civic authorities in the empire increasingly concerned to punish sexual sin in individuals. It argues that the subject position of the whore was used by the Augsburg judges as a weapon to dominate Gerdrut in the interrogation and destroy her agency, part of a performance of moral authority which was to expand significantly towards the Reformation, when civic prostitution ceased to have a function in most German and Swiss cities