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- [00:00]
Kate Lister
Hi, I'm your host Kate Lister. If you would like Betwixt the Sheets ad free and get early access, sign up to History Hit with a History Hit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every single week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.
- [00:27]
Holly Fry
We all belong outside. We're drawn to nature. Whether it's the recorded sounds of the ocean we doze off to or the succulents that adorn our homes, nature makes all of our lives, well, better. Despite all this, we often go about our busy lives removed from it, but the outdoors is closer than we realize. With alltrails. You can discover trails nearby and explore confidently with offline maps and on trail navigation. Download the free app Today.
- [00:58]
Vanessa McCarthy
Our Skin Tells a Story. Join me, Holly Fry and a slate of incredible guests as we are all inspired by their journeys with psoriasis. Along with these uplifting and candid personal histories, we take a step back into the bizarre and occasionally poisonous history of our skin and how we take care of it. Whether you're looking for inspiration on your own skincare journey or are curious about the sometimes strange history of how we treat our skin, your you'll find genuine, empathetic, transformative conversations here on our skin. Listen to our skin on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:37]
Kate Lister
Hello my lovely betwixters, it's me, Kate Lister. You are listening to Betwixt the Sheets. But before you can be allowed to go any further, before I can allow your ears to be assaulted by what is coming their way, I have to tell you that this is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things and an adulty way covering a range of adult subjects and you to be an adult too. And hopefully now you feel much safer with what is about to come your way. Because I certainly do. Right on with the Show. Welcome to 16th century Bologna betwixters. Oh, it's nice to be on the continent, isn't it? I would love a slice of pizza, but I don't think that's actually been invented presented yet. Pizza historians don't at me, but what we do have though is a thriving and very visible sex work community. Not to mention a legalized one. See, I'm not going to say bravo because it wasn't necessarily a good thing. There was certainly a handful of beautiful courtesans who were wined and dined and well shagged their way to the very top of society, but they were Most certainly the exception to the rule. This was a very, very, very broad spectrum, as I am about to find out. Should we go and find out what it's all about? Let's do it.
- [02:55]
Unknown
What are you, a corny man?
- [02:56]
Oh, money.
- [02:57]
Of course.
- [02:58]
Kate Lister
You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing a button. Era now.
- [03:10]
Unknown
Era.
- [03:13]
Kate Lister
Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness. What a beautiful diamond. Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the the History of Sex Scandal in Society with me, Cait Lister. We all have an idea of what the Renaissance is, don't we? Like something flamboyant and nude statues and draped paintings and. Well, it's pretty Italian, but when exactly was it? Who got to have a Renaissance? Because I don't think everybody did. And where did sex work fit into the picture? A picture which definitely had a lot more sexual fluidity to it than you might think. We're looking at you, Michelangelo. Well, joining me today for the third episode in our mini series on sex work throughout history is the fantastic Dr. Vanessa McCarthy, fellow at the center for Renaissance and Reformation Studies at the University of Toronto. Lutes at the ready, everybody. Let's do this. Hello, and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Vanessa McCarthy. How are you doing?
- [04:20]
Unknown
Very well, thank you. So pleased to be here. How are you?
- [04:24]
Kate Lister
Oh, so excited that you're here. This is the third in our little miniseries on the history of sex work, and we were obviously going to look at the Renaissance, and the Renaissance in Italy is just fascinating. And that is your bag, baby, that you've written about this, researched this. You've written on masculinity in Renaissance Italy, sex work in Renaissance Italy. My first question has got to be, how did you end up here? You can't have been a little girl in grade school going, I want to write about sex workers in Italy. Did this happen?
- [05:00]
Unknown
No.
- [05:00]
Vanessa McCarthy
Absolutely.
- [05:01]
Unknown
I always wanted to go to university, and it became clear that I was really, really into history. And I've always had a feminist slant. You know, I was raised by feminists, so women's history and the history around sex and gender really caught my fancy. And I think also part of it was the luck of the draw of the kind of professors that were available to me at my undergraduate school, people who specialized in the history of sex, people who specialized in the history of gender in. In the Renaissance and the Middle Ages, but mostly in Italy. I realized how Many interesting questions there were there and how fascinating the topic was and kind of went from there.
- [05:43]
Kate Lister
So then the next question we've got to ask you, and this is. It sounds like a very obvious question, but it's really not. When you get into it, you focus on the Renaissance. But what is the Renaissance? Because we. We think about it like this epoch in history that where everyone in Italy woke up and went, oh, God, it's the Renaissance. Oh, I didn't think it started until next week. Oh, I'm so behind the times. Like, what is it? What time period? What defines it?
- [06:09]
Unknown
That's a fantastic question. What defines it? But also, what does it mean when we think. When we. When we use this category called the Renaissance? I think the Renaissance is sort of an older way to categorize a historical period when sort of at the turn of the 20th century, people were really interested in great man history, great watershed history. Right. And also this is fed into, certainly in North America and the Western world, in going through the 20th century, thinking about what is the state for? How do people think about their community as an organism? Going through World War II, in particular, many, many scholars of the Renaissance moved to North America. And these kinds of questions were really important to them. When did governments begin to see people as people rather than sort of what they juxtaposed with this idea of the Middle Ages as a dark age where everybody sort of did what they were told and that was it. So the Renaissance brings up these ideas exactly as you say, right. People started to honor other people as people rather than as reflections of God. And, you know, this birth of cultural creativity, which to a very secular historical mind is important. Right. It's not just about trying to get into heaven anymore, but also sort of making society better for secular people. I think certainly with the rise of social history, the history of women and masculinity and gender and the history of sex and sexuality, that has kind of fallen out of favor. Right. As I said, right. This idea that we're looking at the history of great men and great military battles and big watershed changes in politics, if we look more at people, we see that changes perhaps are motivated by different concerns and kind of play out differently. So I would say more and more scholars today would use the term early modern because it gets away from Leonardo da Vinci and these teleological ideas of history as steadily marching towards perfection right through the years. And so I would use the term early modern. Right. So what does the Renaissance represent for many people today, especially my students, my mother, my uncles and Aunts. It's Leonardo da Vinci.
- [08:45]
Kate Lister
It's sculptures.
- [08:46]
Unknown
Yeah, it's sculptures and technological advancement and moving into the industrial revolution. So the Renaissance, I don't know, maybe I should say very quickly. When I think of the early modern period, I would say 1450 to maybe 1650.
- [09:03]
Kate Lister
Big chunk of time, isn't it?
- [09:05]
Unknown
200 years. It's not the Middle Ages, but.
- [09:08]
Kate Lister
No, but it's a chunk. And one of the things that fascinates me about your work is you focus a lot on the poorer classes. Because while we call it the Renaissance, I'm not sure everyone got a Renaissance, actually. I'm not sure if you asked some of the poorer people in Florence or Bologna or wherever, are you aware that you're in the Renaissance? I don't. Like, how would they have felt about this?
- [09:32]
Unknown
Exactly. Even the people that really benefited from what we would think of as Renaissance culture, did they even know that they were having a Renaissance? You know, is this a label that came much later, but certainly for people on the ground working, poor people who don't have much power in the government or in the church or writing and reading, their experience, I think was a lot more humdrum and shaped by continuous waves of famines and plagues, you know, every 20 or 30 years through Western Europe, just scrabbling to survive most of the time.
- [10:09]
Kate Lister
Yeah, yeah. Are you enjoying your Renaissance? Just. Just trying to hang on in here at the moment.
- [10:15]
Unknown
Right?
- [10:16]
Exactly. Yeah.
- [10:18]
Kate Lister
But things did shift and there's been lots of scholars that have pointed towards big events that change things. The Black Death, I mean, you know, like the amount of people that wiped out, that's definitely going to have an impact. Shifting religious beliefs, that is going to have an impact. Things were changing. It's just not as cut and dried. But what about sex? How's sex? Because we're moving towards sex workers. But how did that change in the Renaissance period?
- [10:49]
Unknown
Well, perhaps there's two questions. Early modern, right. We can say the Renaissance because people sort of have a picture of what time period that is, I guess. But maybe you're asking two questions. One, was there a difference in the way people thought about sex? And when we're talking about people, we could talk about religious leaders, different kinds of Christian leaders. Right. We can think about your next door neighbor. We could think about a civic governor, we could think about a king. But you're also asking what were the changes in sex work, which I think our best sources come from top down legislation. So did laws change? Did rules change? Absolutely, they did change. And the Reformations and I call that plural, really had a big effect on legislation. The fascinating, perhaps more fascinating question is how did those play out on the ground? Were those new laws enforced? How were they enforced? How quick was early modern society or the different societies throughout Europe, how quick were they to change their traditional thinking.
- [12:01]
Kate Lister
Coming out the medieval period? And again, that's not cut and dried, but that as we're leaving, that there were systems in place, legal frameworks for dealing with and controlling sex work. There's very few examples throughout history I've been able to find of people going, oh, just let them get on with it. There's always a need to. It's either zoning, it's either the authorities get involved and go, right, you can do it, but you can only do it over there. It's complete ban. We're going to punish people if they do this normally, the people doing the sell, and we're going to cut the noses off, we're going to excommunicate them. Or it's sort of a weird, uneasy tolerance that happens. Italy, which is your area of study, is fascinating because the state gets quite involved quite early on with it.
- [12:44]
Unknown
It certainly does. And I think one of those reasons is because we see the rise of cities, at least in northern Italy, certainly in the 1200s, the 1300s, the 1400s. And that doesn't mean that people think, okay, you know, now that we have a city, here are all the things we have to do, like regulate these people and whatever. Rather, they kind of passively enter into this situation where there are more and more people and some of those people are asking for justice in different ways, are asking for other people to be regulated because they're all living cheek to jowl, right? They're in a face to face society. The population is growing, but it's also a way for governments to cash in on sex work.
- [13:31]
Kate Lister
So never forget that.
- [13:32]
Unknown
That's right.
- [13:33]
Kate Lister
Never forget that.
- [13:34]
Unknown
That's right.
- [13:34]
Kate Lister
It's not necessarily about, we're just gonna try and keep people safe, is it?
- [13:38]
Unknown
That's right. You know, there's all this rhetoric about, well, we need all of the sex workers to live in a specific brothel so that the rest of the neighbors aren't bothered by the immoral things that they do in the public eye and the kinds of things. That's what they say. But the other side of that is if everybody of all sex workers have to live in a civic brothel and can only work in that brothel, the state, the city is making money off these women paying to live there, it's making money on women who want to leave the civic brothel. That's certainly true. In the city that I study in Bologna, they have to pay to get out. It's almost like. It's almost like a ghetto, Right. It's this sort of spatial structure where there are staff sitting at the one door and you have to pay to get in and out. Clients have to pay to get in and out. You know, if you're being fined because you have this population that you can constantly watch, I mean, it's not the Panopticon, don't get me wrong. But right, there's. You can lay fees and fines over these women and make a ton of.
- [14:51]
Kate Lister
Cash to give people a sense of just how lucrative not just the sailor sex can be, but the whole culture of it. I'm pretty sure that I read at some point Rome, the Pope went, right, that's it. All of the sex workers out, get out of the city. And then within like a week or two, all the traders were begging him to bring him back because they were the ones spending the money.
- [15:12]
Unknown
That's absolutely right. It's a huge part of that.
- [15:15]
Kate Lister
Is that true? I love that.
- [15:17]
Unknown
It's absolutely true. And I know you're referring to the work of Elizabeth Cohen on Rome. Sex workers pay rent, but their clients come and they go to taverns, right? And they go here and there. They buy a fancy piece of meat for, you know, the clothes. Absolutely. They are so enmeshed in the service economy that you're right. There was this case in Rome where the Pope and the civic government had never really regulated sex work before. There was a time where they taxed a few of the sort of wealthier sex workers to build a bridge or, you know, to do this and that, but otherwise they were really hands off until after the Reformations. And then, you know, the Pope at first says, all right, we gotta clean up the city. Right? Everybody, especially the Protestants, are making fun of the Catholic Church. So, you know, they're immoral. And all of the clerics and the priests, they break their vows of celibacy. Sex workers are everywhere. So the Pope says, okay, everybody out and within. It's something like all the sex workers out, something like two weeks or something. He allows them to come back in because of the protests of everybody in the service industry, landlords, et cetera.
- [16:39]
Kate Lister
That's crazy, isn't it? That really is.
- [16:41]
Unknown
I mean, it's such an ingrained part of society, but also the economy, when.
- [16:46]
Kate Lister
You just wouldn't have thought of that at all, would you just like, if you take them out, it's like, okay, so now we're moral, but we're also skint. Shit.
- [16:54]
Unknown
That's absolutely right. That's absolutely right.
- [16:58]
Kate Lister
It's about making money. Let's just not forget that. But alongside of it comes all of this weird justification that the state makes and that the church makes for why they're doing this. Because the Bible's pretty. Don't be doing rude stuff. Very naughty. Fornication. Bad, bad, bad. And, you know, it doesn't say good things about wanting to go on the game. So how did the state justify their decision to allow zoned sex work?
- [17:25]
Unknown
Well, and in fact, I would say in the early modern period, the secular state, that we would think about the secular state and the church, whatever church that is after the Reformations, they always work hand in hand anyway. They're not separate. Right. I keep hearing this on television, like the separation of, of church and state in America. This does not happen in the early modern world. They're all related to each other. They're all friends with each other. So they hand in hand. There are all kinds of ways to justify it, regardless of what perhaps the Bible says or what church doctrine and teachings are. One of the interesting things about Catholicism, certainly before the Reformations, is that there's almost the sense that humans were born to sin. God made them that way after the fall, right after the lapse. So you kind of, in a weird way, need occasions to sin in order to repent for those sins is kind of this, this loosey goosey, I think sort of cultural understanding to sin is to be human. Now, that said, some sins in theology and just general culture, some sins are worse than others. Right. And so there's this argument. Ruth Karras may have said this to you before, because this is the first time I read this was in her book, St. Thomas Aquinas said prostitutes, and this is his word. So sex workers, sex workers in the city are like sewers in a palace. They funnel off what could have been worse sins. Right? So there's this justification by cities in the early modern period and the church, it's awful. And my students hate it when I tell them this because it's so repugnant. But it's true. The idea is that if there is a woman who's sexually available to a man, perhaps he will not go and do what is considered to be a graver sin, such as have sex with another man or have sex with somebody's wife. Right. Which is. Would be adultery and rape or have sex with women who. Girls who are still virgins and have never been married. That for their spiritual arithmetic. The client's spiritual arithmetic. It would be worse to do that than to have sex with. I guess the patriarchal culture structures these as sort of nobody throw away women. And that's also. I mean, there are economic imperatives for women engaging in sex work, but I think there's also this cultural understanding that those women are the kind of women who can be sex workers.
- [20:25]
Kate Lister
Watching the mental gymnastics and the moral acrobatics that they get into is fascinating. You do see that cropping up a lot of, like, look, if we. If we don't have sex workers, they'll all be gay. That one seems to.
- [20:37]
Unknown
That's a big one in Florence, like, come up. Quite a lot of civic governors put that in their legislation. It is to stop men from having sex with other men.
- [20:46]
Kate Lister
It's wild. Where's Tits Bridge? Where's that? The one that's called Tits Bridge. That's supposed to be where the sex workers would go.
- [20:53]
Unknown
And is that in Venice?
- [20:55]
Kate Lister
To tempt men in and to. Yeah, that would make sense. That. Yes, that'll be in Venice. Yeah, the Pianta del Tete.
- [21:01]
Unknown
Well, in Bologna, we have a street that people call Tits Street.
- [21:05]
Kate Lister
Let's talk about Bologna, because that's your baby. I'm trying to get a sense of, like, what it would be like, because the thing about sex work, Italy is one of the richest sources, I think that we have early modern Italy, because it was so regulated, the state got involved. So we can find out what the state thinks and what moralizers think and what law people think in a way that we often can't do. We have anything that tells us what the experience of the people caught up in this would have been. I mean, were there sex workers there going, oh, I'm a sewer? Well, that sounds about fine. Thank you for that. I'm glad to help. Raised just whatever I can do to help. Ridiculous.
- [21:42]
Unknown
I have zero idea about that question for sure. Finding women's voices in the sources, female sex workers voices in the sources can be quite difficult, especially if a lot of the sources. You're using our administrative records. So, for instance, in my city, Bologna, I'm very blessed because starting about the beginning of 1500, the city decides that sex workers should be registered and they should buy monthly licenses. And this system operates all the way till 1796, when Napoleon marches in. So that's, you know, a couple hundred years. Right. And we have hundreds and hundreds of these registers because the women or whoever they asked to go in and buy their license for them would come into the office and the staff would write down their name and where they lived and how much they paid. And so one of the things I've been able to do with those registers is try and think about, okay, well, here's all these sort of streets, right? All these women are listed by street. So I've been able to look year over year over year and get a sense of where are most of the sex workers living in this city during a time when there's no civic brothel where sex workers can basically live anywhere that they can afford to. And looking at the period 1583 to 1630, I think I found something like 50% or 60% of women are living on streets where there's only one or two other registered sex workers, and the other 50% are living on streets where there's something like six or seven or more sex workers. And doing a geographical analysis, I can see that they're living all over the city.
- [23:37]
Kate Lister
Okay, so they're not zoned.
- [23:40]
Unknown
They're not zoned. They're absolutely not zoned. In Bologna, sort of after the 1540s for sure, they can live wherever they can afford. So this tells us a lot about perhaps what their daily lives were like, about how they were knit into their neighborhoods, right into these streets. Especially if I can track women over many years living on the same street, this suggests, like they're part of these local neighborhood groups. And so that gives us the idea that, you know, they're not ostracized as much as perhaps having gone through Victorian time periods. To us, we might think, right, all these women are ostracized. They all, you know, live in various brothels. You know, ones for women who don't have syphilis, maybe ones for the old women who have syphilis. No, it seems to be, you know, a very common, accepted in its way. Right. Everything's based on immediate context, form of work. The other thing I should say is that I don't know in many cases whether women who are registered with this civic magistracy in Bologna, if they're doing other kinds of work or if they're like, this is my identity, I'm a sex worker.
- [24:58]
Kate Lister
You have to be a full time sex worker.
- [25:00]
Unknown
Exactly. I would assume these women are doing all kinds of income generating work because working poor women did. Right. You have to have a really rich client to not have to do other kinds of work. And we do, we see that there are these varying levels of economics, of sex workers, you know, it's. Their lives aren't always very wealthy or very poor. It goes up and down. Of course, markets always do. Right. Because it's an income generating activity.
- [25:32]
Kate Lister
This license that they had to have in Bologna, were the conditions for it. Did you just march yourself into the. I don't know, the.
- [25:40]
Unknown
The office? Yeah, the office.
- [25:42]
Kate Lister
And you said, hello, I would, I would like to go on the game. Please give me my license. Like what, what conditions were there? You just had to pay for it.
- [25:52]
Unknown
Yes. So my sense is most women, if they hadn't been registered, would not register unless they'd been sort of caught by the police or actually having sex with someone else, or naked in bed with a man, or if a neighbor for some reason decided they wanted to get them in trouble. However, the cost of a yearly license was very, very cheap. Oh, yes.
- [26:19]
Kate Lister
So I was expecting you to say that. I thought you were going to say.
- [26:22]
Unknown
No, it's really, really cheap in comparison to Florence. It's like one fifth of the cost of a license in Bologna. I was recently looking over some documents of agreements between registered sex workers and their landlords for how much they were paying for, you know, their little apartment. Everybody in Bologna, everybody in these Italian cities live in, you know, little apartments in sort of buildings. You know, we still have them on the streets, these three floor buildings, and everybody has a couple of rooms in them, with the exception of very elite families. So this one woman, then she had like an outer room, which we might think of as a sitting room. There was a working stove in it and then like a side room which they called like the bedroom. Is it like a modern bedroom? I have no idea. I'm sure they do lots of other things besides sleep and work for sex workers in that room. So she was paying per year, 30 lire. It wasn't a fancy street, but it wasn't a rundown street either. To buy one year license, it costs 3 lire. So her annual rent is 30 lire, but she's paying 3 lire a year for this license. And they're paying it by month in many cases. So it's five soldi. Five soldi, which is a fraction of that. It's not particularly expensive, but the fines associated with it can be. At one point, in 1604, the year 1604, there is 600, roughly 600 women are registered as sex workers in the city. So if you do the math that way. But there are also benefits to being registered which develop.
- [28:14]
Kate Lister
I just wanted to ask you that yes. What was the benefit of doing this?
- [28:18]
Unknown
Yeah, so licensing kind of starts back when they had a civic brothel in the 1400s. But the benefits that the women got for living in that brothel then continue even once the brothels break down. So certainly if you have a license, you cannot be fined for not having a license. So an annual license costs 3 lire. If you're fined, it can be a 10 lire fined. So that's a third of your rent, right?
- [28:47]
Kate Lister
Yeah.
- [28:48]
Unknown
You don't have to, you know, have any legal costs around that. But also, one of the biggest benefits that these women had under this system was that if clients did not pay them, they could take them to the tribunal of this civic office and sue them for, okay, the money. So it's fascinating, some women come in and say, you know, I was with Lorenzo, we had a sexual relationship. You know, maybe he also, you know, she was living in an apartment that he said he would pay for for two years. And all he gave me was this pair of silk slippers and like a ducatone, a big coin. Right. And so the argument then is like, I was only with him. I would assume monogamy, but that's not always the case in sex. And he didn't give me my just reward. And the office will go and interview, they will ask neighbors to come in and the sex worker will say, you know, ask this person, ask this person, they know we were together, they know he always stayed at my house. And they will come in and we have written testimonies written while orally given, and the scribe is writing them down. And if the man wants to fight it, he'll get his fight cronies in to say, no, no, he gave her this and he gave her that. And in many cases, it. They do find in the women's benefit.
- [30:19]
Kate Lister
Wow.
- [30:19]
Unknown
Yeah.
- [30:20]
Kate Lister
I guess in I always want to be careful. And it's like when we're looking to state controlled sex work because it's ultimately, it's not a good thing. But like, that sounds like there was some level of protection of state or at least a recourse for them.
- [30:36]
Unknown
Recourse. If it worked out, we don't know how many cases women brought to the bolete that they were like, eh, we're not going to follow up on that for whatever reason. Right. You know, we only know the ones that did come to court, and there are quite a few and they could be successful. And then those women can use that money for whatever else. One of the questions, one of the tensions in this history is always Were these female sex workers victims who were ashamed of what they did and didn't want people to know? Or were they agents who used kind of the benefits and their positions to their advantage? And so this question about were these women ashamed? Well, if they're coming to court, can't be that ashamed. You can't be that ashamed. And we know that neighbors know what's going on. Friends right when they pull in witnesses for these cases, everybody kind of knows. So it's a huge benefit if if it worked in their favor. And I mean, this is a patriarchal society.
- [31:39]
Kate Lister
So it's a big if.
- [31:40]
Unknown
I mean, it's a big if, but.
- [31:42]
Kate Lister
It'S a small recourse. I'll be back with Vanessa after this short.
- [31:55]
Holly Fry
We All Belong Outside we're drawn to nature. Whether it's the recorded sounds of the ocean we doze off to or the succulents that adorn our homes, nature makes all of our lives, well, better. Despite all this, we often go about our busy lives removed from it, but the outdoors is closer than we realize. With Alltrails, you can discover trails nearby and explore confidently with offline maps and on trail navigation. Download the free app today.
- [32:25]
Unknown
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- [33:13]
Vanessa McCarthy
Join me, Holly Fry, and a slate of incredible guests as we are all inspired by their journeys with psoriasis. Along with these uplifting and candid personal histories, we take a step back into the bizarre and occasionally poisonous history of our skin and how we take care of it. Whether you're looking for inspiration on your own skincare journey or are curious about the sometimes strange history of how we treat our skin, you'll find genuine, empathetic, transformative conversations here on our skin. Listen to our skin on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get Your podcasts.
- [34:00]
Kate Lister
Have you found anything in the records about like, you know, names or were these women married, were they single, were they mothers? How long did they stay in this profession?
- [34:11]
Unknown
Yes, one of the things that I've been able to do in Bologna, because we have these annual registers, I mean, assuming that these people are still doing sex work, I can track lots of women over 10 years, over 15 years, some cases over 30 years. Does it mean they're still engaging in sex work? Who knows? Right.
- [34:32]
Kate Lister
Everyone thinks that sex work is a young woman's game. You would be surprised when you go back through the records. Nope.
- [34:39]
Unknown
That's right. That's right.
- [34:40]
Kate Lister
Even today, the average age, I think in the UK at least, is late 30s, early 40s. So it's.
- [34:46]
Unknown
Yeah, I mean, and I think thinking about sex today, I don't think it's unfair to think of sex in the past and say our idea or historians ideas that men, male clients, only wanted to have sex with women in their late teens or their 20s. I don't think it's unfair to say that can't possibly be true. Just like today. Right. It's just ageism. Just like today, lots of people want to have sex with people of all kinds of different ages. And so often I've seen assumptions that, you know, sex workers, anybody registered, Anybody buying a license? Well, if they're over 35, they must be a madam. I don't know that that's necessarily true. And I don't think being a madam precludes having sex with clients either.
- [35:38]
Kate Lister
So you've got a wide span of ages then. Do we know anything else? Like were they married? Were they allowed to get married?
- [35:46]
Unknown
They were allowed to get married. If they got married, they could no longer register as sex workers.
- [35:51]
Kate Lister
Oh, that's interesting.
- [35:53]
Unknown
At least theoretically. Right, because then that becomes adultery. And actually what we see in the city that I study is that this civic office, the blete and the Archbishop's Court increasingly are fighting over who gets jurisdiction over married sex workers. Right? No, that's not your case. You have to send it to us at the Archbishop's Court. And the people who are actually arresting people for various things, including sex workers, generally are really low level functionaries of these courts. And they do not make a lot of money, but the money that they make is by emoluments, which means if you catch someone doing an infraction and they are fined by the Archbishop's Court or by the civic court, they get a percentage of that fine. That's how they make their money.
- [36:50]
Kate Lister
Oh, look at that.
- [36:51]
Unknown
So what we start to see is these low level arresting officers fighting with each other. The ones that serve different courts know that, you know, practicality is so important when we think about these things. Issues, right? Money, pragmatism. It's very, very important. Follow the money. Absolutely.
- [37:10]
Kate Lister
And of course, something else that's really crucial to. Well, at least it seems to me. But you might tell me that it's not in the early modern period in Italy is this courtesan culture that develops. Because, like, I know you look at working class women and they are fascinating because they often get left out of this discussion, but you do get this courtesan culture. You're super elite, the ones that quite literally shag their way to the very top. And they. They have this weird celebrity status. I often think of them as like being like the Kardashians. If you just go with me, it's like they're really famous. Like, they are people. People are influenced by them, but they're also disliked and kind of looked down upon. And it's kind of like a bit snary and like. Tell me about them. Tell me about the, the. The courtesans.
- [37:56]
Unknown
Courtesans are so few. They are the exception which makes them so special. And I think the biggest courtesans we see are in Rome. They're in Venice, which are highly international cities. Cities like Florence and Bologna and Milan. They are international. Right. We know that there are people coming from all over Europe, in and out for all kinds of reasons, especially trade. Venice and Rome, Rome because it's the seat of Catholicism, and Venice because it's always been such a massive trade hub throughout the Mediterranean, especially with the Ottoman Empire. They seem to develop these publicized courtesans, I think, in their time period and in ours, I see them much less in Bologna, but they certainly are, you know, well educated, loved by men. In the elite classes, there was women.
- [38:54]
Kate Lister
Like Veronica Franco, who was. She wasn't just a courtesan. Like she was writing poetry and she's painted by the masters, and she becomes this, like, symbol of this new culture and this new woman. But I do wonder, when I look at someone like that is. Yeah, all right. Like, she's dominating the media of the time. But how did that translate to the everyday experience of women selling sex? Because there's only one Veronica Franco, right?
- [39:21]
Unknown
I mean, your guess is as good as mine, I think. Certainly if we're thinking about the different levels, sort of economic levels of female sex workers below the exalted courtesan, you know, there are very Poor, moderately poor, maybe what we might call middle upper class. They may be able to derive some honor for themselves through women like that, you know, in passing, in conversations with other people. But we do also see, and again, Elizabeth Cohen has done work on this. We do know that working poor sex workers of whatever class do believe that they have honor, and their society believes that they have honor. So, for instance, Libby Cohen talks about door shaming where sex workers would bring to court men who smeared feces all over their front door. Right. Which is this dishonorable act towards them. It's showing everyone, you know, that this person is dishonorable. The thing that they're defending is not the fact that they're sex workers, but rather that they have an honor above this person who smeared feces all over the door or drew graffiti on their door. So, you know, all that to say working poor sex workers also were seen to have honor in their communities. And maybe Veronica Franco is a bit to help with that. I'm not sure.
- [40:53]
Kate Lister
Maybe.
- [40:55]
Unknown
Yeah.
- [40:55]
Kate Lister
What about male sex work? Because it's interesting that so much of the state and the church is going like, all right, you can do that as long as it stops men being gay. Which suggests to me more than anything else that there was a lot of gay going on in Italy for that to have even been a thought in anyone's head.
- [41:15]
Unknown
Absolutely. And I think it's not for nothing that we particularly see that in the sex work legislation in Florence. Okay. We see, you know, to stop men from having sex with other men, we need to have sex workers. Michael Rocky is a historian who in the 90s, did a ton of work on an office in Florence that particularly works to root out men having sex with other men. And so he has ton of cases. This book is called Forbidden Friendships, and it's. It's absolutely fantastic. So we know that there is a lot of sex between men, certainly in Florence. And other studies have opened that up over the decades. Since the 90s, the civic government would never allow sex between men for money to be legal. Right. So in my city of Bologna, men are certainly not allowed to buy licenses as sex workers, neither, it seems they don't say it outright. But. But having looked at hundreds and hundreds of cases, I don't believe that Jewish women were able to buy licenses as sex workers or Muslim women or orthodox Christian women.
- [42:32]
Kate Lister
Oh, that's interesting.
- [42:33]
Unknown
My sense. Yeah. My sense. And it's interesting that they don't even have to distinctly say, no Jews, no Muslims, no Orthodox. Right. It's sort of this accepted thing, who is it okay to buy sex from? And is that one of the reasons why they're also kind of protecting these sex workers, but certainly no men. Some of more recent studies that I've read, for instance in Siena, which is a northern Italian city, and in Florence and Venice, have found sources that seem to point to non civic governed, non civic regulated, sort of unofficial, ad hoc community based sex work between men, male clients, male sex workers.
- [43:22]
Kate Lister
There might have been an all male brothel, but if there was, it never made it onto the books. That's what we're left with.
- [43:28]
Unknown
Absolutely right. And I think certainly in the later part of the early modern period when civic brothels fall out of style, we have sort of clusters of women living or at least working in the same apartments. Right. Which we could call a brothel. I'm sure the same thing happens with men. There's so much that doesn't get into the records because there is so much under what we would think of as under the table, payments of racketeering, stuff that never makes it into the books because it's, it's not meant to be on the books. It is such a common practice across all sort of social law enforcement and moral social enforcement that we just never see it.
- [44:14]
Kate Lister
I'll be back with Vanessa after this short break.
- [44:22]
Vanessa McCarthy
Hi, this is Frances from Fixable, a podcast from ted. These days, every finance leader is under pressure to save money. But you can't beat the competition just by cutting costs. To win, you need to spend smarter and move faster. You need Brex. Brex is the modern finance platform that breaks the trade off between control and speed with intelligent corporate cards, high Yield Banking and AI powered Expense Management. Join the 30,000 companies that spend smarter and move faster with Brex.
- [44:55]
Holly Fry
Learn more@brex.com grow out here it's not only the amazing views, but the way time stretches out a little longer and how the breeze hits just right at the summit. With all trails, you can discover nature's best with over 450,000 trails around the world. Download the free app today.
- [45:28]
Kate Lister
So to sort of round things off then. Although if you can round things off.
- [45:33]
Unknown
We'Ve gone everywhere in this country.
- [45:36]
Kate Lister
Yes, but I get the impression from talking to you and I want to be careful that I don't suggest that selling sex in Italy in the early modern period was some kind of utopia and fabulous and fun for everyone. It's certainly not, but it was much more visible and accepted and there were people with rights and licenses and legal protections and in some cases honor and people. Could you Know, there was a weird career trajectory for, you know, one person. Veronica Franco. How did all of this come to an end, then? What happened? Because it didn't stay that. That way.
- [46:14]
Unknown
I mean, what happened? That would be a question for my colleagues who study the 1700s and the 1800s.
- [46:20]
Kate Lister
Was it religion?
- [46:22]
Unknown
I don't think so. I. I mean, nothing is ever just one. I'm sure it's linked up with nationalism, with industrialization, with Napoleon. So in my city, my office stops operating in 1796. When Napoleon comes in, he marches his troops through and he takes over the governing of northern Italy, mostly. Right. He closes all of the religious institutions and he wants to rework. He wants to build an empire. Yeah, but then what happens is sex work then becomes the jurisdiction, I believe, of this sort of modern police force that are being developed at this time. And my sense is it's kind of still business as usual.
- [47:11]
Kate Lister
Yeah, yeah, right.
- [47:12]
Unknown
And I get rid of it. That's like. That's one of the major points, I think, of the history of sex work. Little bits change approaches change, you know, church approaches change, civic government approaches change. And sometimes people are quite excited about those changes and want to implement them really strictly in the short term. But what we see over and over again is that in the medium term and the long term, these. And you're nodding your head because I know you've talked to an ancient Roman historian, you've talked to a medieval historian. In general, it's just pretty much business as usual. So it can be new bottles, but it's the same wine. Right. And when law is enforced, when we have records of enforcement, that's where we see that not much is really changing. I guess there's something in the 20th century, right. Victorian ideas, certainly in the Western world, ideas about sex and sexuality and nationality. And what is sex for? You know, it's for procreat and eugenics and stuff that it really becomes this modern situation where prostitution, sex work is criminal. It is criminal offense, and it should be something that people are very shameful about and should keep very, very secret. Where we don't see that so much in the Middle Ages, in the early modern period.
- [48:44]
Kate Lister
Vanessa, you have been fascinating to talk to. I knew you would be. If anyone wants to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?
- [48:52]
Unknown
Sure. Absolutely. Where can they find me? You can Google me. I have essays and articles online. You can come to a classroom at the University of Toronto to find me. And I'm a fellow at the center for Renaissance and Reformation Studies at Victoria University and the University of Toronto.
- [49:12]
Kate Lister
Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come and talk to us. You've been marvelous.
- [49:16]
Unknown
It has been so fun and playful to be on your show and someone told me about your show about three months ago. I love the hair episode. That's my favorite episode. Oh, the brothels in Pompeii. Fascinating. Really cool. And Merkins.
- [49:35]
Kate Lister
Merkins, right. Thank you so much. You've been a treat.
- [49:41]
Unknown
Okay, have a great day.
- [49:46]
Kate Lister
Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Vanessa for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us@betwixtistoryhit.com Coming up, we've got the next installment in this little mini series and we're gonna be thinking about what made you ugly in the Tudor times. This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again Betwixt the Sheets History of Sex Scandal in society. A podcast by history hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
- [50:30]
Unknown
USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With usaa, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a'@usaa.com bundle restrictions apply. Hey Tinsley, why don't we use Ezcator to order food for staff lunches?
- [50:49]
Holly Fry
Because my 46 page acronym system is so easy. I just have to salad, stay alert to late arriving deliveries, pie put in expenses and guga pie. Go out and get everyone's preferences and allergy information.
- [51:02]
Unknown
Supposed to be simple.
- [51:03]
No, simple is Stephen, Irma and Margie.
- [51:06]
Holly Fry
Prefer lasagna and empanadas.
- [51:07]
Kate Lister
Omg.
- [51:09]
Unknown
No need to make work life more complicated. Just use EasyCater, the easy way to get food for work.