Medieval Sex Workers

Summary

Gone Medieval: Episode Summary – "Medieval Sex Workers"

In the January 28, 2025 episode of Gone Medieval, host Dr. Eleanor Jaenega explores the complex and often misunderstood world of medieval sex workers. Joined by guest Matt Lewis, a historian specializing in medieval studies, the episode delves into the societal roles, challenges, and personal narratives of sex workers in medieval Europe.

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1. Introduction to Medieval Sex Work

Dr. Jaenega opens the episode by addressing the prevalence of sex workers in medieval society. She emphasizes that while modern perceptions often relate medieval sex work to stereotypes seen in media, the reality was far more nuanced. "The figure of the sex worker is one of those classic medieval tropes that comes up time and time again," she notes ([05:00]).

2. Understanding the Social Framework

Matt Lewis provides an overview of how sex work functioned as both a survival strategy and a regulated profession within medieval cities. He explains that sex work was widespread across various societal levels, primarily serving as a means of income for poorer women alongside other low-paid jobs like domestic service. "When cities themselves are growing from about the 12th century onwards... brothels became municipal employees," Lewis explains ([07:00]).

3. Legalization and Regulation of Brothels

A significant portion of the episode focuses on the institutionalization of brothels. Lewis describes how, particularly on the European continent from the 15th century, cities began establishing regulated brothels as public services. These establishments were designed to control and contain sex work, operating under strict rules to ensure they were "appealing" and maintained a semblance of respectability. "There's a fantasy aspect... they've got to be appealing," he states ([22:43]).

4. Challenges in Accessing Personal Narratives

Dr. Jaenega highlights the difficulty historians face in accessing the personal experiences of medieval sex workers due to the lack of direct records like diaries. Instead, researchers rely on judicial and inquisitorial records, which provide mediated insights into the lives of these women. "You can't go at it directly... you need to go through another avenue," Lewis comments ([12:39]).

5. Case Study: The Nurdlingen Brothel

The heart of the episode is a detailed case study from Nurdlingen, Germany, in the late 15th century. Lewis recounts the tragic story of Els von Eichstedt, a woman coerced into sex work who became pregnant. The brothel keepers attempted to induce a miscarriage using an abortifacient mixture, leading to Els suffering a miscarriage at 20 weeks ([32:54]). This case illustrates the severe exploitation and lack of autonomy experienced by sex workers.

6. Systemic Exploitation and Debt Bondage

Lewis discusses the systemic issues within medieval brothels, such as confiscation of personal possessions and inflated prices for necessities, effectively trapping women in debt bondage. "Everything they own is confiscated... they're never going to make enough money," he explains ([38:52]). This economic exploitation ensured the women remained dependent on the brothel keepers.

7. Shifts in Religious and Social Attitudes

As religious movements like the Reformation gained momentum, attitudes towards sex work became more stringent. Dr. Jaenega and Lewis explore how increasing religiosity led to heightened scrutiny and eventual crackdowns on brothels. "There's an increasing religiosity of town government towards the end of the Middle Ages... moral compromise just becomes increasingly difficult to uphold," Jaenega observes ([47:15]).

8. Regional Variations Across Europe

The episode touches on regional differences, noting that while German and Italian cities had structured brothel systems, England largely lacked a widespread municipal brothel movement. Lewis speculates that the centralized royal authority in England may have influenced these discrepancies. "Highly independent cities on the continent had more power to make their own policies," he suggests ([47:41]).

9. Stigmatization and Gender Perceptions

Dr. Jaenega and Lewis discuss how societal perceptions of women evolved, leading to increased stigmatization of sex workers. Women were often derogatorily labeled as "whore" or "panderers," restricting their societal roles and freedoms. This stigmatization was exacerbated by legal crackdowns, making it increasingly difficult for women to navigate public spaces without facing suspicion ([55:10]).

10. Conclusion: Lessons from the Past

In wrapping up, Lewis underscores the importance of understanding the multifaceted nature of medieval sex work. While certain cases, like that of Els von Eichstedt, highlight extreme exploitation, broader records indicate a spectrum of experiences ranging from survival to more regulated engagements. "You need to be careful and mindful of context when you do that kind of history," Lewis advises ([58:43]).

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Notable Quotes:

• Dr. Eleanor Jaenega ([05:00]): "The figure of the sex worker is one of those classic medieval tropes that comes up time and time again."
• Matt Lewis ([07:00]): "When cities themselves are growing from about the 12th century onwards... brothels became municipal employees."
• Matt Lewis ([22:43]): "There's a fantasy aspect... they've got to be appealing."
• Matt Lewis ([12:39]): "You can't go at it directly... you need to go through another avenue."
• Matt Lewis ([32:54]): "She was branded probably on the cheeks and then banished across the Rhine."
• Matt Lewis ([38:52]): "Everything they own is confiscated... they're never going to make enough money."
• Dr. Eleanor Jaenega ([47:15]): "There's an increasing religiosity of town government towards the end of the Middle Ages... moral compromise just becomes increasingly difficult to uphold."
• Matt Lewis ([47:41]): "Highly independent cities on the continent had more power to make their own policies."
• Matt Lewis ([55:10]): "You need to be careful and mindful of context when you do that kind of history."
• Matt Lewis ([58:43]): "You need to be careful and mindful of context when you do that kind of history."

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Final Thoughts

"Gone Medieval" effectively sheds light on the hidden narratives of medieval sex workers, emphasizing the importance of empirical research and critical analysis in uncovering the nuanced lives of marginalized individuals. By examining legal records and specific case studies, Matt Lewis and Dr. Jaenega paint a vivid picture of the socio-economic and religious factors that shaped the experiences of sex workers in medieval Europe.

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For listeners interested in exploring more about medieval sex work, past episodes featuring experts like Kate Lister offer additional insights into related topics.

Transcript

[Matt Lewis]

Hello, I'm Matt Lewis.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

And I'm Dr. Eleanor Jaenega and we're.

[Matt Lewis]

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[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

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[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

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[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

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[Matt Lewis]

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[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

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[Matt Lewis]

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[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

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[Dr. Jamie Page]

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Monday.com the first work platform you'll love to use. Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanaga, and welcome to Gone Medieval From History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research. From the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to Popes to the Crusades, we delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were and how we before we get into today's episode of Gone Medieval, a word of warning. We're talking about sex workers today and the brothels that they worked in. It's all about concepts and people and not sex as such. But if you have little ears listening, you might Want to give this episode a miss further? There's some sad stuff in this episode about infanticide. So if you're feeling a little bit fragile, this might not be the episode for you. Having said all of that, this episode is really, really fun, I promise. The figure of the sex worker is one of those classic medieval tropes that comes up time and time again. Whether it's in medievalisms where we're shown fantastic and luxurious brothels alongside dragons and warring kings, or the saucy tavern wench who's ready to serve up a lot more than just ale, we sort of expect sex workers to be around. When we think about the medieval period, there's a good reason for that. They were. And as my previous conversations with people like the fabulous Kate Lister has shown, there is rather a lot of opining on sex work and sex workers in the Middle Ages. Who are they? Where can they live and work? How will we organize our cities to accommodate them? When can they come to church? These are all questions that resurface time and time again. But when we talk about them, it's all just conceptual, really. There's a lot of thinking about the idea of sex work and sex workers, but we don't often get to hear from the women in question, and that's a shame. After all, it's sort of rude to gossip about people and not even let them have a say back. I'm Dr. Eleanor Jaenega and today on Gone Medieval, I am delighted to welcome Dr. Jamie Page from the University of Grass specifically to address this issue. Jamie is the author of the amazing book Prostitution and Subjectivity in Late Medieval Germany, which specifically looks at the experiences of the women who worked in the brothels that I'm always going on and on about. I may or may not be really, really over excited about this one. So, Jamie, welcome to God Medieval.

[Matt Lewis]

Thank you so much.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

I am absolutely delighted to have you on, which is no surprise. I'm a huge fan of your work and indeed we have worked together, which is why I really wanted to come and speak to you to get into more depth about ideas of medieval sex work. Because this is something I'm always kind of harping on everyone about because I think it's really interesting. But there is so much to it as a concept. And one of the things that your work does so elegantly is it lets us find out more about the individuals themselves as opposed to just like the concept as an amorphous whole.

[Matt Lewis]

Yeah, you're too kind. Thank you for that very nice introduction. You've really put your finger on it then. This is partly how I became interested in this topic because we know a lot relatively about medieval sex work in terms of how it was structured, the kind of organization of what the church thought about it, etc, but the thing that has really been missing is some of the detail and especially from the perspectives of people involved. So I'm really thinking about sex workers themselves, women and I can assume some men, although the evidence really is lucky for that, who did sex work, who worked in brothels, maybe also in the so called black market privately, and what their lives were like, whether they believed in or reflected some of these discourses that we've heard so much about, about kind of whoredom, women's sin, all that kind of stuff, whether they take that on and what their lives look like within this, this kind of context.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Yeah, absolutely. So you hit on something already that I think is kind of important to get up front. And you know, I've talked about this in the past, especially with Kate Lister, but just if we can do a very quick primer on what medieval science sex work looks like. And I mean that's a huge thing to say about a thousand years of history. But of course, yeah, it's, it's very, very different to the way that we treat it now.

[Matt Lewis]

Yeah, I think it's a great question. I think we can assume that one constant all through the period is that sex work is going on kind of all over the place and at lots of different levels of society. So women, and again, I'm talking primarily about women, for them it's a, it's a resource, especially poorer women, basically as, as a source of income, often next to other kind of traditionally low paid jobs, so la, domestic service, that kind of thing. When we start to know the most about it is when we get urban sources. So when cities themselves are growing from about the 12th century onwards, and we mostly know about it through initially attempts to, well, get rid of it, surprise, surprise, surprise, astonishingly so it's the target of lots of legislation in cities, places like France, Italy, England. There comes a point however, where the authorities in these places do a kind of calculation. They realize, you know, it's not going away, we've got to maybe accommodate it. And then we get sources that not just try to get rid of prostitution, but try to regulate it. And the real boon for historians is when we get the legalized brothel movement, which is something that comes in especially on the continent, much less so in England from around the 15th century when cities actually set up brothels as A kind of public service. So there will be a town brothel in many places. The women there are kind of like municipal employees. It's the whole rationale is that they need these places, otherwise men will run wild if they haven't got this kind of sexual outlet as they see it. That's what we know the most about these places. They have rules, they have regulations, we know how much it costs, that kind of thing. And there's a whole culture of brothels as well as a kind of urban institution, something that offers hospitality. A bit like a kind of fancy tavern with extras is how I sometimes think about it. So that's the kind of big picture of what it looks like in the Middle Ages.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Yeah, absolutely. And I think here, important thing to then talk about is that, you know, it's legal and very expressly legal. So that means that there is a right way and a wrong way to be doing it. So you can get in trouble if you're doing it the wrong way or how people think it is incorrect, you know, so the wrong part of town, you know, on, on the wrong days, you know, all these things can be regulated. But I think that kind of also lures people sometimes into a false idea about what actual attitudes towards sex work are. So can you expand on that a little bit?

[Matt Lewis]

Yeah, of course. So I think that there's a real risk with this. When we look at this topic and we read, for example, sermons about sex work, or we read canon lawyers, theologians, and it's a, it's a very negative picture. You know, the women are sinful, they do this because they have fallen, et cetera, et cetera. There's a risk, if we look too much at that, we get a one sided picture of sex work. There is increasingly evidence actually that when we get closer to ordinary people, there was more room for tolerance and more understanding of the kind of circumstances that would, would see women. And again, I say women, I would love to find some evidence. The male sex workers.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Oh God, yes, Callers right in Holy Grail.

[Matt Lewis]

But really it's, it's, it's women's lives we're talking about. I think there's good evidence that actually people understand that this is part of life. And I've been lucky enough to work with a couple of cases from my area of expertise, which is really the German speaking regions that show in quite clear details that this is the case that people do this and that it's not universally condemned. Like the way that it's done by churchmen.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Yeah, absolutely. Because, you know, obviously the church is going to do and say certain things, but especially when it comes to sex, we know that people aren't listening, you know, because it is just one of these things where, yeah, there's an ideal world where you do every single thing that the church wants, and then there's the real world where people are just kind of trying to get by and people are people.

[Matt Lewis]

Yeah, they're. They're hearing sermons and they're picking up the messages, but actually, life is often a bit messier than that. And I'm not saying people ignore that fully, but I think people have more flexibility in the Middle Ages to accommodate these messages. But also some of the kind of messy aspects of life lived in kind of real terms.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Oh, absolutely. And I mean, I guess that you can also forgive people for thinking, oh, well, you know, if the church says something in the Middle Ages, then everyone goes by it. Because the way that source survival works is that we get to hear from the church because, you know, they're writing rather a lot of things and then they keep those sources, you know, so we know a lot about them because they are all literate and common people often aren't. So this is one of the big issues with studying sex work. Right, is that we don't get to hear a lot from the people involved very often.

[Matt Lewis]

Exactly. And it's not just a medieval thing by any means at all. It's a problem for today as well that the voices of sex workers are massively underrepresented in the record, even when, you know, today we have all the advantages we could want when it comes to recording and hearing marginalized voices. Discourse is dominated by the people who make the rules. And it's exaggerated, really. In the Middle Ages, we just don't have many sources at all through which we can hear these people's voices. And even then when we do, there's all kinds of problems about, well, whose voice are we really hearing? It's a really interesting debate.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Yeah. Okay, so, well, let's just get into that then. You know, these case studies that you find, what is it that you're looking at in order to hear more from these people?

[Matt Lewis]

Well, the problem with this topic is that you can't go at it directly if you're looking for what sex workers in the Middle Ages said and did and thought. There's no. There's no diaries. There's no sense in which these people, partly because, you know, many were likely to be illiterate, were able to record. So you need to go through another avenue. And as with so many aspects of kind of social history amongst non elites is legal judicial records. So you mentioned church court records. That's one great avenue. What we see, especially with towns and cities growing in the late Middle Ages, is urban courts become more productive of written documents, especially when the term inquisition gets a bad rep. But actually, inquisitional sources are brilliant for this kind of thing because it's a kind of irrational mode of proof, almost. An investigation is opened, the authorities come in, they interview people, they make a record of what they say, they compare what they've said to try and find a judgment, et cetera. There are a very small number of such cases from cities across Europe where those people are sex workers or where we can assume that they might have been sex workers. And in sources like that, then we can get a sense of what life was like again, there are big problems. They don't just say what's on their mind. There's a court case happening in the background. They've got to respond to being interrogated and prompted with questions. And so if we read carefully into these sources, bearing in mind these factors, you can get something close to a kind of mediated voice from sex work in the period.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. Because if you've got someone who's on the stand, you know, all they can do is respond to the questions that they're being given by, you know, powerful men, elite men.

[Matt Lewis]

Yeah. The way I've always thought about it is if you give a statement to the police now, for example, which, you know, is something I've done in the past, I won't go into details about exactly, okay, where and how. But what happens is you are questioned by a police officer, Typically you will say what you saw, et cetera, and then it's read back to you. And when this happened to me, I thought, that's not me. You know, they've stitched it into a lovely narrative in which, you know, I was sitting by my window at approximately 11:30pm and I saw a Caucasian male at approximate height, et cetera. You know, it's. It's kind of legalese. And that same thing applies to medieval sources. You've got to try and work with the conventions of the document to get at the person behind it.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

So when we. We have these documents, right. You know, one of the big things that we end up finding out is when illegal things are happening. Right. Because you sort of enter the historical record when you've come to the attention of authorities. Right. You know, exactly. The great majority of sex workers were never going to go and find anything about them, because they're just living their lives within a system that permits them, if it doesn't necessarily cheerlead them.

[Matt Lewis]

Precisely.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Find people when they're doing kind of illegal sex work, which is often, you know, kind of the informal kind. So, you know, where do we find out more about that?

[Matt Lewis]

So it's a great question, and you've really hit the nail on the head with the problem here. One of the issues we have is that it's not until quite late in the Middle Ages that sex work actually does become specifically illegal. The authorities, they don't really care too much about it, and it's not until there's a kind of increasing religiosity of towns on the continent that really looking for sex work becomes an issue for the authorities. So, again, as historians, we've got to find other angles. Now, if you imagine the kind of life circumstances of anyone doing sex work in the Middle Ages, an era before reliable contraception, one of the big risks, of course, is for women is pregnancy. And there are a limited number of options of what you can do if you're doing this work and you become pregnant. So abortion and infanticide is a real theme for people doing sex work at this time. And those are legal issues of exactly the kind that you mentioned, which can get us a little bit closer. So for me, it's been productive to use that kind of lens to look for evidence within the archives of sex work being done.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Yeah. And I think that an important point to make here as well is that this isn't necessarily something that just happens within sex work. We see infanticide being a real issue across medieval Europe, generally, Because if you get pregnant in the wrong circumstances, kind of, what do you do? Which is why the church, often, from a medieval standpoint, is kind of like pretty chill, comparatively, about, like, abortion in the first trimester, and then it gets, like, much more slippery after that. But it is certainly something that's on the cards. Right. You know, because here are women who are in really difficult social circumstances. I mean, it's very difficult to raise a kid in a brothel. Right. Like, that's. That. That's a hard thing to do.

[Matt Lewis]

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

And I mean, you know. Or what if you're one of these women who. This is sort of like your side hustle, you know, you're a laundry woman.

[Matt Lewis]

Yeah.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

And, you know, you pick up extra work on the side.

[Matt Lewis]

Exactly, yeah. So these are the kind of risks that women face. The other one, of course, is the whole reputation issue. How do you negotiate that in your community, if you. Through economic circumstances, maybe like you say, you do a bit of laundry, you do some domestic service, you do a bit of sex work on the side, how do you negotiate what your neighbors think of you? And again, we talked earlier on about this, you know, buying too much into the whole religious condemnation of it. That is a factor. And if you jump into any archive of insult and slander, the number one way in which women are abused verbally in this period is by calling them a whore. But I still think people who do sex work are able to negotiate and can have a role in their communities where it's kind of understood what they do. And if they're skilled in the way they interact with their neighbors and others who know them, they can kind of make it through, as it were.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think that this is such an important point, though, because it's always difficult when you're dealing with issues of sex in medieval documents, because, yeah, you get people in court all the time specifically for concepts of whoredom, but it's because the chick down the street and you got in a screaming match and each started calling each other a. Their term, not ours. Everybody, I'd like to point that out. And. And, you know, they're. They're in a screaming match. They get called before the court for slander and insults. And, like, no one involved actually does any form of sex work. They just don't.

[Matt Lewis]

Yeah, you never know. It's just. It's. It's the most common form of abuse. It's like every single man is called thief or. I love some of the cases. They've got the kind of antiquated, kind of posh indel.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Oh, you.

[Matt Lewis]

You knave. That kind of thing. And you scoundrel and all that kind of stuff. And, you know, these are. These are nasty terms of abuse at the time, but to us, they sound kind of cute.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Yeah. Bring back knave. You know, what can I say? Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the things that is really difficult is kind of sorting through these issues. And you have really broad terms, especially across sexuality, that can mean all sorts of things. Like raptis, which we often translate as being rape, can also just mean, like, taking someone from someone's house. And that can mean that, like, you ran off with your boyfriend, you know, sodomy, which can mean that two people of the same sex are having sex. Or it can mean, you know, that two married people are having a kind of sex that can't relate in procreation. So we always have to be so careful when we're sifting through these things, which makes it even more difficult to sex workers, you know.

[Matt Lewis]

I know. And even our ideas, you know, our concept of sex work, you know, wouldn't really have been recognized as such in the Middle Ages. Although as again, this is the point I'm really insisting on. I think people do have a sense that sex can be work at this time and they recognize it as a survival strategy for poor single women especially.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Yeah, absolutely. You know, like say you managed to run away from the farm. Congratulations. And you know, you make it to the city and you need a job but you know, you've just been a peasant your whole life and you know, you can do all the normal peasant things like run a farm and brew beer and do all these things. But yeah, that's maybe not going to get you by in London. So yeah, you pick up odd jobs here and there or you know, you can go to one of the brothels and you can make a lot of money really quickly. I mean, this is one thing that a lot of the sources often talk about and probably, you know, this is an exaggerated. Because we know that there's a whole gamut of people who are performing sex work. You know, there's people who are incredibly low paid and they live in really difficult conditions and we know there's chicks who are like raking at it as well.

[Matt Lewis]

Yeah, there's a, there's a whole spectrum. I think you're right. And the tricky thing is we know a minuscule percentage of what was going on. So hardly any of the evidence is truly representative. I think it's quite likely that at one end of the scale, yeah, people could probably do quite well financially. I mean, the real kind of classic case of this is if you go into Renaissance Italy, the figure of the courtesan appears and these are women who are totally out open in public. They have big reputations in every sense and they aren't making money. They're making a hawken of living down the other end of the scale. You know, it's really a kind of a way just to survive. And you know, brothels probably sit somewhere to the kind of middle, lower end of that where you can make money. But socially it's difficult to get back out of that kind of situation. Once you've been in the brothel, you can astigmatized and as we can go on and talk about, some of these places are not nice, not easy to exist and work in. Financial exploitation is pretty much the rule.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Yeah. Okay, so let's get into it, right, because there's the city brothels, which are a whole institution in and of themselves. So can you tell us a little bit about how they worked?

[Matt Lewis]

Yeah, absolutely. So the basic idea is they're underpinned by this sense that sex is everywhere in the city. Sex workers exist. If we follow our theologians, Augustine, for example, then by far the best course of action is not to get rid of it entirely, but just to try and accommodate it. Partly because men, it's thought, need this. They need kind of sexual outlets. So we're going to have a gruffle. It's a public institution. It is usually a house or several houses. Some cities have multiple properties which is bought by the authorities and then farmed out to an individual or some individuals, brothel keepers, effectively. So it's a farming system. They are basically responsible for running these places, sometimes to make a profit. And we know that some brothels did make a profit, but basically to provide the public service that they're. Therefore to fill them with women who are healthy, able to do the work and to make them kind of appealing as well. There's no good having a brothel if it's, you know, nasty, cold, dark and dirty. It needs to look nice, it needs to be kind of luxurious. There's many reasons, there's medievalists to take issue with Game of Thrones, but if you think back to that image, the Littlefinger brothel, it's not totally off the mark as to what these things might have looked like. They've got to be appealing. So they'd have a stove, you know, big whoop. The woman might be dressed in kind of fancy clothing. Some of them might be kind of dressed up a bit like a kind of court, as in, like the princely court. There was a kind of fantasy aspect. And again, this is something that, you know, still characterizes brothels. There's one near me where I work in Graz, which is kind of Roman themed, so it's a kind of fantasy element. So as part of the whole package, that's a kind of factor which has never really gone away. What happens then? Well, clients come into the brothel, they pay a nominal amount and it's. The prices are deliberately kept affordable. The whole idea is that men who are unmarried, so journeymen, apprentices, should have access to these places. So the price of visiting the brothel is something like the equivalent of a meal or two, something you should be able to spend your wages on. Once you've done that, as a client, you would find yourself in, effectively, a bar. They're a bit Like a kind of tavern. You would be able to interact with the women who are there who work and live themselves in the brothel and some places different in the way they operated. You'd have in some places access to a whole night with a woman. Other places you would have, you'd go to a room, have sex and then that's it all paid for and you'd go off again. They'd be eating, drinking, fighting. Probably it's hit like a tavern in every sense. And the money would generally be paid into a kind of central chest that women are not allowed to keep it initially. From that, however, they're then paid a wage by the brothel keeper, which in theory allows them to subsist basically. But they also, they live in these places so they're, you know, they're not coming into work, they are there and then the real worst case scenarios, they're basically imprisoned. It's hard to actually physically get out of these places.

[Dr. Jamie Page]

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[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Dear old work platform, it's not you, it's us. Actually, it is you. Endless onboarding, constant IT bottlenecks. We've had enough. We need a platform that just gets us. And to be honest, we've met someone new. They're called Monday.com and it was love at first onboard. Their beautiful dashboards, their customizable workflows got us floating on a digital cloud nine. So no hard feelings, but we're moving on Monday dot com, the first work platform you'll love to use. Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. Recently I asked Mint Mobile's legal team if big wireless companies are allowed to raise prices due to inflation. They said yes. And then when I asked if raising prices technically violates those onerous two year contracts, they said what the are you talking about? You insane Hollywood. So to recap, we're cutting the price of mint unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a [e-mail] switch. $45 up front payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only. Taxes and fees, extra speed slower above 40 gigabytes. Yeah, because you have found some documents very specifically talking about that. Right? Where I mean one of the, the things that is supposed to happen in an idealized world with these brothels is that you can kind of pick it up and put it down. It's a job like, not necessarily like any other, but it is a job. And when you're done you can go get married and, and leave it all behind you in theory. But in practice you found some sources that show that it's very diffic. Get out.

[Matt Lewis]

Yeah, I mean, I think you're exactly right. So what my work has been based on, going back to an earlier point is trying to find sources that give us a sense of the everyday. We've got the top down picture that I've just kind of sketched out. What does it look like from the perspective of people who live and work in these places? So one particular case that I've worked on extensively for 10, 15 years now on and off, gives us a kind of micro historical Einstein perspective of one particular brothel in the city of Nurdlingen, which is in the southwest of Germany on the romantic road. If you find yourself for touristic purposes down that way. It's a lovely place. Actually what I would say to your listeners is pause for a second, go on Google Maps, look up Nurdlingen and then zoom out and put the satellite feature on. You will see the city sits in a meteorite crater. It's a very interesting place for all kinds of reasons.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Okay, yeah, yeah.

[Matt Lewis]

If you sit in the middle of the city and look outwards, you will see kind of distant mountains and those are the rim of the old meteorite crater that I think 90 odd million years ago impacted. Anyway, Much more interestingly about Nottingham. This is the site of. In the late 15th century. So 1471, 72 is what we're talking about of this. Absolutely spectacular. I mean, also grim, brutal, awful case, but spectacular for its insights into what brothels were like in the Middle Ages. The circumstances basically are these, that the city council somehow, we don't know exactly how, but somehow gets word that one of the women in the brothel, and her name was Els Else von Eichstedt, which is a town quite nearby, who'd started off working as a kitchen maid, had at some point be forced to start seeing clients in the brothel. And as a result of that, she had become pregnant. So it's. It's going the way of what we talked about earlier, what happens then? And I'll explain how we know this. But the story that then unfolds is that she tells one of the brothel keepers, there are two in Nlingen, may have been a husband and wife, and the wife's name is Barbara. Els goes to Barbara and says, I haven't had my period. I'm a bit worried, what should I do? Barbara takes her aside and says, don't you worry, I'm gonna make you a drink that will fix the problem. And she's ambiguous in the way that she uses this language. She goes away and we get a report of what went into this drink. And the ingredients are quite innocently kind of cloves and wine. Sounds initially quite nice kind of thing you might buy at a Christmas market. But then also Penny Royal and Queen Anne's Lace, which we know through testing as our effective abortifacian. So something that could induce a miscarriage. So Els describes this happening when she later was to testify about all these events. And she also describes how some of the other women began to notice what was going on and warned out, do not take this mixture. Do not drink what the brothel keeper is making up for you if you're concerned that you're pregnant when the time comes to take it as herself described. She said that she refused, didn't want to take it, but Barbara then took a stick, a staff and stood over her and forced her to with the results that you might expect. She immediately began to suffer cramps, as she described it, and then within a couple of hours was basically bedridden. And soon after that, miscarried a child, which she and some of the other women described as being about 20 weeks old, a male child. So. So really, it's a. It's a distressing case. What we Then get is lots of further descriptions about what happened afterwards, especially the attempts of the brothel keepers to try and hush this up, because this is a crime at this point. You can't do this.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

20 weeks, that's a. That is. The church is not happy about that one. You know, like, you get 12 weeks, let's get out of jail free. But 20.

[Matt Lewis]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It fits every definition of abortion and infanticide, which they would need to prosecute and convict. So what happens next is that there's a kind of attempt to cover it up by the brothel keeper. They beat else savagely, as it's described, with a stick, the rod mentioned earlier, with a bullwhip as well. They try and intimidate her physically. She is defiant, she refuses, as she describes it, to go along with it. And they reach a point where the brothel keepers, Bhabhava and who may have been her husband, his name is Leonhardt, come to her and they say, right, we will, we'll offer you a bargain. You can leave the brothel and we will cancel all the debt that you owe to us and you can leave the town if you promise never to tell anyone what has happened. And she says, okay, fine, we're going to do this, but tells everyone else working with her, all of her colleagues, so to speak, at the brothel about what's going to happen. And then right at the end, we get this just kind of incredible scene in which, as it's described, all the women are sitting down to dinner and Barbara tells Els, off you go to the kitchen, get some milk, serve the other women, else leaves the room and then secretly climbs over the fence of the brothel and leaves town. Once that's happened, Barbara comes back in and says loudly, oh, where could Els have gone? We need to have a look for her. She could have escaped. Etc, Etc. The women do this, but of course they know what's happened, they've been let into the plan and there's a kind of big fake search for her, but she's gone, she's out of time, which is kind of where that part of the record ends.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

This is so interesting on any number of levels, right? Because we, we have this classic hallmark of this case is the reason we're hearing about these women at all is some terrible things have happened, right? But it's about, you know, abortion that gets this in here. And the other thing that gets it in is this question of unfree labor. And that comes up a lot, especially in late medieval discussions of sex work, because one of the big ways that women kind of fall into it. It's not necessarily that they're like, oh yeah, well, here's a good job for me and I'm going to do this. Like, I mean, we have tons and tons of records about this. And from Prague, for example, quite nearby, where people move into town and you know, your landlady says, oh yeah, you can get this room and I'll give it to you on credit. And you know what, you can just work it off. You can work off this debt that you're going to owe me. And then the girls say, oh yeah, sure, that sounds great. And then they find out later the work in question is sex work. So there's like a lot of trapping people through debt, but that is legal it in a way. And then you can just say, oh yeah, well, you're in debt. And then that's how you say you can't leave, right? Is by saying, you can't leave because you owe me a debt. Not you can't leave because you're a sex worker and this is the brothel and you belong here. Now there's all these ways of entrapping people.

[Matt Lewis]

Exactly. And it's such a familiar trap in the context of sex work. And by no means just in the Middle Ages, I mean, you say that's any sociologist of sex work looking at today. And it, it's a common pattern and it's exactly what's going on in Nurklingen and by extension through some of what the women say when this all comes to trial elsewhere in Germany and anywhere where there's a kind of brothel system, we can kind of assume that this is a risk. So I've told the whole story about the abortion. That's actually only one part of this incredible kind of package of sources, because what happens as well is once the Cantle's discovered what's gone on and Els has been interrogated and told this story that I've then related, what they also do is they have a second parallel investigation when what they do is unprecedented. They get all the women working in Nurdlingen at that time and they have them testify about what has happened in the brothel, what the working conditions are like, how they've been abused in various ways. The reason for this actually is quite pragmatic at heart. The brothel is supposed to be a public institution. It's supposed to work in a kind of orderly fashion. And if you can have a situation where someone is being forced into aborting a child, committing a crime, then of course that's a big problem for the authorities, it totally turns on its head this idea that it's all for the greater good. It's all the kind of lesser evil argument. So what we get alongside this abortion investigation is a kind of catalog through the voices, through the perspectives of these women, of what's going on in this brothel and by extension, probably other ones. And it's exactly that picture that you've touched on, of financial exploitation, of trapping people in the brothel. The first thing that happens to most of these women when they arrive in a brothel is they immediately have all their possessions confiscated. So this is me quoting effectively what the women say. There's one in particular, one woman who, she's the kind of spokesperson of the whole brothel. Her name is Anna, Anna von um, which is about 50 miles away from. From. And she really steps forward in the trial and grabs this whole thing by the collar and gives a really full, you can sense, kind of angry account of what life is like. And so it's financial exploitation. The first thing that happens, the women come in the door, everything they own is confiscated, so all their clothes, anything they've got now belongs to the brothel keeper and they have to work to buy it back. Everything they buy, all the food and drink is given to them at massively inflated prices and they have to work to get it back. Of course, the way the trap works, they're. They're never going to make enough money. And the result is they are. Well, I think you could call it debt bondage, if not modern slavery, is what we'd say if it was happening, which it is today. So the model is, pragmatically, it's supposed to be a kind of neat solution, but actually, the way it actually works is to. Is to trap women into what is seen as a sinful lifestyle.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

But they do kind of get some justice, these women, at the end of it. In terms of what happens to the brothel owners, though, yes, yeah, there's a.

[Matt Lewis]

Kind of happiness ending to this one, happy ending in the context of all kinds of other grim stuff. What basically happens is we get to the end of the investigation and it's pretty clear that the court views these women with a lot of credibility because the brothel keeper, Leonhardt, is more or less immediately dismissed from his post. So, yeah, he gets off quite lightly, actually. He's just sacked and then dismissed from the town. So kind of off you go, not allowed to work here anymore. Bhava, his potential wife, partner, doesn't have it quite as easy.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

She.

[Matt Lewis]

She is convicted of causing an abortion. There's a record in the, the town archive, in the so called blood book, which is a record of all the kind of capital corporal punishments which states that she was branded probably on the cheeks and then banished across the Rhine. So she's expelled from the town, not allowed to return on, on pain of death, probably. And then we have some indication that there's a new set of rules brought in. Shortly afterwards we have a new rule book for the brothel brought in in 1472, which has a lot of what was discussed by the women as is represented in this new rule book. So the women are not, for example, allowed to be kept physically in a brothel. They're supposed to be able to come and go, to leave the sinful life as it put, as they, as they want to. There's attempts to address some of the other abuses that they describe. They talk about being given terrible food, they talk about violence being routine, all that kind of stuff. So we've got this new regime. Whether that had any kind of long term impact I think is probably doubtful. I suspect it probably returned to a kind of unpleasant status quo quite quickly. But they did at least live to see the kind of hated oppressors dismissed and got rid of in this immediate set of events.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Yeah, I think that the one good thing about reading that case is I was like, well, at least those people got in trouble. You really. And I think it's so wonderful actually to hear from Anna when you look at these sources because, you know, she's so eloquent and able to talk about what their situation is and she comes across very clearly. And, you know, I'm jealous of this source because, you know, a lot of the sources that I'm working with in Prague, with sex workers, I don't get to hear from them directly. I get to hear men talk about them. Right. And there's this one that I just kind of like want to throw out, kind of in contrast to Nurdlinge, I guess, is the way, because there is a particular brothel in Prague in the 14th century called Obora. And Obora is kind of up near the castle, kind of, oh, fancy. Oh, you know, you know, kind of a thing. And, and I found out that it existed because there are churchmen complaining about it. There's this guy, Master Ulrich, and his deal is that he thinks that there shouldn't be a brothel there. So he's constantly going in and attempting to run the women out. And I, I would imagine through, through violence, there's, there's probably some like a violent coercion going on there and he Complains to the church that every time he does this. So it's like, okay, I guess this is Ulrich Sabi, right? He gets. He gets bored. He attempts to break up a brothel. The women then go to the town council and say, he's in there again. And the town council is like, ulrich, get out of the brothel. Right? Like, you need. You need to go. So it's really interesting because he says that it's these women who are doing it. And it's like, they're. We don't. We don't hear from, like, a brothel keeper in particular. And he doesn't say that there's a madam, which, you know, that there might be. You know, madams come up a lot in all of these things.

[Matt Lewis]

And.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

But the thing is, they love to get mad at a madam. What we see from the case in Nedlingen is that they come down very heavily on Barbara. And, I mean, quite right, too. You know, she's the one who caused the abortion and all of these things. But there is kind of a way of looking at women in particular, you know, as panderers. We get that term a lot.

[Matt Lewis]

Yeah, exactly.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Where it's like, oh, this is really bad. You know, it's a woman who, you know, she's not doing it herself, but she's kind of promoting this lifestyle. So you would think that if there was a madam involved, Master Ulrich would be like, oh, and there's this terrible madam. But, no, it seems like there's these women who are doing this work and they're like, I live here. This is my. And they're. They're trying to get back into the brothel. And the priest's complaint is that they do this really successfully and they advocate for themselves. And I'm like, I just. I'm so desperate to hear more from these women. And I can't, you know, I can't find anything yet.

[Matt Lewis]

Yeah, but it seems like some kind of corporate organization amongst them. You'd. I think, you know, is there is. There's no sense of a spokeswoman or someone.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

The women, quote, unquote. And so, you know, someday, you know, I will. I will. I will at some point, get far enough through, you know, the Prague city archives that I will. That I will find one of these women. I'm determined.

[Matt Lewis]

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[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

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[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

It is interesting, right, because you have on the one hand some women who seem as though they're quite in control of things and on the other you have these really terrible conditions. So there's this huge spectrum in terms of brothel work and it's one that we don't get to hear tons, a lot about. But yeah, okay, we've got all of these sources, we've got all of like this incredible stuff that we hear. But you and I are talking about cities in the Holy Roman Empire, right? And we don't necessarily get this same kind of system or the same way of looking at sex work everywhere in Europe, do we? Right. Like it's not the same, for example, in England.

[Matt Lewis]

That's something I wish I knew more about. We don't get the kind of brothel movement in England in the way that we do in European cities. There are a couple of exceptions kind of incongruously. I think Sandwich in Kent has got kind of municipal brothel.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

All right, Sandwich, yeah.

[Matt Lewis]

And I think there are some port towns in East Anglia as well. And I guess the logic there is maybe these are places where you have a lot of foreign men coming in and they expect to find conditions that they know from home. And if they don't find those conditions, then there's again a kind of public risk to women. There's also, of course, there's the kind of the famous brothels in Southwark which are, I think ultimately belong to the Bishop of Southwark, don't they?

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Or Archbishop of Southwark and Winchester as well. He rents a lot of them out.

[Matt Lewis]

Yeah, so, exactly. So we've got, we've got those brilliant rules which again, have a lot of similarities with what you see on the continent. But we don't get that kind of widespread municipal brothel movement. That we see in German cities, in some French cities, Iberia as well. And I think Italian cities also have this feature as well. And something I wish I knew more about or understood better.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Why do we think England is so weird? Huge question. You know, whole show. Whole show. Why is England weird? You know, I mean, what. What is it about England that it doesn't kind of adopt the same continental standards about these sort of things?

[Matt Lewis]

My best guess, really, is that the kind of cities that you and I are looking at are they're basically city states almost. They are. They're highly independent. They have a lot of power to make their own policy and decide things like, what do we do about. About sex workers. Whereas in England, cities are not anything like, as free to operate this more kind of heavy royal and seigneurial power in the background, which. Which prevents. That would be my best guess, but I'm. I'm not totally sure. Ah.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

It's always, you know, the debate, the imperial royal debate, Jamie. Just like, this is why the Holy Roman Empire is so interesting. I can't help it, you know, I. I simply.

[Matt Lewis]

Everyone should do more Holy Roman Empire history is.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

That's right.

[Matt Lewis]

What we're getting from this. Right? Yeah.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

All right. But, okay, you have this situation where there's all of these brothels, and, you know, maybe we don't get to hear from them as much as we would like, but, you know, you and I are both like, oh, that's an interesting brothel. Check out my brothel, you know, because we're cool, right?

[Matt Lewis]

Oh, no, we are not cool. I hate to break it to you, but.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Jamie, let me have this.

[Matt Lewis]

Well, you may be. You may be. I'm not. I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna claim that.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Okay, we have this big crackdown, right? Kind of from the 16th century onwards. Suddenly, what is this? Municipal institution, and at the very least, suddenly gets cracked down on. I think that's a safe thing to say, right?

[Matt Lewis]

I'd call it that as well.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Yeah. I mean, I generally tell people that why this tends to happen is a result of the Reformation. Right. You have this big kind of. I always say it's a spiritual arms race, right? Where, like, the Protestants are like, we're really holy, and the Catholics are like, nah, no, you're not. And then everyone goes, well, if you're so holy, then why is there a brothel?

[Matt Lewis]

And then.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Yeah. And then you kind of like, have to shut down all of them. And, like. And that's certainly in there, right?

[Matt Lewis]

Yeah. Spiritual arms race. I'm going to Use that. That, I think, is probably still the best explanation. What you can see is there's an increasing religiosity of town government towards the end of the Middle Ages. So we're talking about the late 15th century, when City governments become increasingly confident in their ability to govern, but also aware that they are the ones who are responsible for shaping the godly community. And this kind of moral compromise that has allowed the grovel to exist just becomes increasingly difficult to uphold in that kind of atmosphere. And stories like that have nerdig and only make it more difficult. How can you claim to be acting for the common good if this kind of stuff is happening in your public institutions? Would be one way to attack them. And then when, as we get towards the Reformation, as you say, we actually get targeted campaigns from preachers who will come into a town and whip up public sentiment by pointing to the brothel as an instance of the kind of corruption, what's going on. Even then, however, they're very persistent brothels, or resistant, rather, with lots of times where long into the 16th century there is still a public brothel. And it does take some time for the movement to go away. And of course, it doesn't mean that prostitution vanishes. It still continues as just unofficial, illegal, black market, whatever you want to call it after that point.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

I mean, yeah, absolutely. You've already mentioned, for example, that, like, meanwhile in Venice, right, during this period, like, actually, the cortisones sort of take off, and they're just making more money now. Now they're very, very fancy indeed. Right. So there are always exceptions to this rule. But I mean, certainly here in London, there's a big crackdown led by Henry viii, you know, one of the most spiritual guys who ever. Who ever lived, right. Where he tries, very famously to kind of close the stews, which are the series of bath and brothels down in South. And he says, no, like, we're not doing that anymore. And it becomes this kind of way of showing that you care about these things, even if it is just, you know. Yeah, some kind of flex and, you know. Yeah. The fact of the matter remains that this doesn't get rid of sex work. Like, you know, you can't get rid of sex work. That's just not going to happen.

[Matt Lewis]

No, it's. It's a way for rulers to kind of throw their weight around and to be, you know, ostentatiously doing the public good. And that's a whole other debate as to whether, you know, is this ultimately a public good. If prostitution is legalized and regulated and so on and so forth, which has never gone away.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Yeah. And I mean, I suppose that one of the big things that we end up seeing as a result of all this, you know, there are of course, those who say, oh, and isn't it great? Because, you know, now women aren't being abused in these particularized way, but what ends up happening as a result as well is that now individual women get a whole lot of stick for being what they call whores. Right. You know, and. And suddenly now your very identity is a crime for sure.

[Matt Lewis]

And there's definitely a sense that when we get this atmosphere towards the end of the Middle Ages, especially in European cities where the brothel is becoming more controversial and some of them are closing and people are preaching more about sexual behavior, life for women who are doing sex work, whether in brothels or out with them, gets increasingly difficult. What we see in criminal archives especially is that just as you describe it, women are now being picked up by the authorities for being prostitutes. Not just for, as we've seen in the past, for kind of auxiliary stuff like abortion and infanticide. It becomes there's an increasing sense of this solidifying as a. As a crime. And they are asked specifically about sex they've had with whom, where they've been, where there might be private brothels operating. And there's a kind of general atmosphere that it's becoming harder and harder to kind of make it through than it had been in the earlier period.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

And I suppose that the other thing to just kind of acknowledge here as well is when. As a slur is something that gets thrown around all the time. There's also the fact that there are a lot of women who get called and certainly that get brought before the authorities. And it has nothing to do with sex work. So, you know, I've got cases wherein women are called suspect. So they'll call them suspect women and they're. Why are they suspect? Well, they're at the beer hall.

[Matt Lewis]

Yeah, right. Spend time in kind of male spaces or even who are. Who are in the streets, who are visibly present and who don't have a chaperone or any kind of legitimate, obvious, visually obvious reason to be there, run the risk of this kind of labeling.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

And certainly we see that being a problem when we look at women even in to the modern period, you know, because Hallie Rubenholtz, work on, for example, the Jack the Ripper cases has shown that a lot of the women that we said, oh, well, they were sex workers. It's like that was just a chicken who went to a bar, you know, and we're really desperate to say, well, well, she must have been because she was in a bar. And people did that in the medieval period as well. And then that means that it just becomes illegal to be a woman in public. It becomes illegal to be a woman in a masculine space. And so there is this idea of saving women in all this, like from themselves. But what it also means is that there is a narrowing of the acceptable places for women to be in the world.

[Matt Lewis]

Yeah. And there's even before that there have been attempts to kind of force sex workers to display themselves as such through certain types of clothing. So if you go out on the streets, you'll need to wear. Well, it differs from different towns, whether it's a red cap or some kind of sash or something to try and eliminate who is and who isn't. But once we get to the later period and sex work in general is much more heavily or outlawed, any woman can run the risk of being classified in this way just by being out and about in public and not visibly with a man, you know, related to her or through marriage, et cetera.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Yeah, I mean, I guess there are also these knock on effects because as you say, sex work doesn't go away. Right. You know, even in an increasingly hostile place and you still kind of have some legal brothel keepers and then you have kind of the more clandestine sex or. I'm stealing, I'm stealing words.

[Matt Lewis]

No, it's a good, it's a good term.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Clandestine prostitute is a term that some of my sources use. Right. And, and then they end up like beefing in public and then there's like a whole other crime because they're like fighting and pulling each other's hair.

[Matt Lewis]

Yeah. And actually some of some really interesting sources towards the, the end of the Middle Ages when the whole market is contracting a bit and, and it's more difficult and there's increased competition and so on, which show that there could be kind of rivalry between sex workers who are working in different ways. I mean that the Nurduringen case, I think is a great example of the kind of solidarity amongst women. But we've also got cases where that is not the case. We get petitions, for example. There's a great one given to the city council of Nuremberg in the 1490s by the women of the public brothel. So they are official municipality sex workers and they have caught wind of private operators elsewhere in the city and they send in this list and say exactly where they are and where the council can find them. And they Say, go and get them. There's a really nice turn of phrase in which they say, you know, they, they're out there and they're, they're working much more kind of rudely or roughly than we do in the public brothel. So there's a sense, you know, there's decorum in sex work and then there's.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

You know, beyond the pay on girl, on girl crime. I hate to see it.

[Matt Lewis]

You know, you're often glad when you find stories of solidarity. But there's, you know, the other side of the coin is very much part of the picture as well.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

I mean, I suppose it is an important thing to say here as well, because we've both brought them up. But, you know, the kind of reverse image of all of this crackdown and the legality questions and the kind of scrapping for survival is of course the Italian courtesans. But they are also a particularly rarefied group. Right, like that. They're not the same thing as like the Nerdlingen girls at all.

[Matt Lewis]

No. Although there was actually one Italian woman in the Brussels. Well, I don't know whether maybe she had been a courtesan. It's, it's not sure. But I mean, all that tells us about is the kind of extent to which some of these women were trafficked and moved around. But yeah, just to circle back exactly as you say, there is. There was a real spectrum of sex work across the whole period. When we look at what there is at the very kind of top end, not, you know, kind of morally or that perspective, but financially, economically, there is the, the kind of courtesan picture very much part of that Renaissance Italy context. And then at the other end, there's people who are really scrimping and saving and just trying to survive really, for whom life, I think, is much more difficult.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

And I mean, I suppose that's the thing is it's a broad church. And when we talk about medieval sex work, or indeed early modern sex work, that can mean all sorts of different things. And it's been so useful to have you come along today because I think it is incredibly important that we do find these records of actual individual women instead of just conceptualizing it, instead of just saying, oh, here's the way that you think about sex work and that's how life was for people. Because until you have the words out of individuals mouths, it's not always clear how that shakes down.

[Matt Lewis]

Yeah, I think we need both parts of the picture. The only note of caution is that just because there are so few sources that have the individuals themselves at their center. You've always got to ask, well, how representative really is it? Do they speak for other people or has this case only survived because it's particularly egregious and grim and awful? Was it like that for most people in reality? So again, all I'm talking about is just is being careful the way you read the sources. You can get a lot from looking at individual case studies, I think, but you need to be careful and mindful of context when you do that kind of history.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Yeah, absolutely. You know, not every single person was being treated this way and that's why it goes to court.

[Matt Lewis]

Yeah. And in fact, if we can quote Anna von Ulm again, she does say, well, I've worked in other brothels and this is by far the worst one. So she gives us a little insight into maybe nerdling and was a particularly bad example of something that was nevertheless going on more broadly.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Thank you, Anna. Like, what a queen.

[Matt Lewis]

She's brilliant.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

So good. Well, Jamie, this has been an absolute pleasure.

[Matt Lewis]

Likewise. Thank you so much for having me on.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

I can talk to you about this all day. Sorry for being too enthusiastic, but it's just been brilliant. Thank you so much.

[Matt Lewis]

No, you're incredibly welcome. Thank you.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Thanks so much to Jamie once again for joining me. And thank you for listening to Gone Medieval from history hit. If you were interested in this topic, you might want to check out my past episode with Kate Lister where we talked about the medieval rules of sex. Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly and ad free podcasts by signing [e-mail] subscription there are some fabulous films that we've made for you to enjoy there, including my episode on life and death in medieval London where we look at the final resting place of some of London's medieval sex workers. Remember, you can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have a moment, please drop us a review or rate us everywhere. You listen to podcasts and tell your friends and family that you've gone medieval. Otherwise, the wonderful Matt Lewis will be back on Friday for more medieval action. And I'll see you all as always, next Tuesday. Until next time.

[Dr. Jamie Page]

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