ABSTRACT
Prostitutes are one of the most popular candidates for taxonomies of social status.1 The historiographical trend of the past two decades to understand prostitutes through a myriad of different social categories has found fertile ground in the central Middle Ages, a period when ecclesiastical criticism and censure of all forms of non-marital and non-procreative sexual relations appear to have reached a crescendo. The repeated orders for prostitutes to be expelled from cities and frequent invectives equating prostitutes with moral malaise all tend to confirm the thesis proposed by historians such as R. I. Moore, Bronislaw Geremek, and Jacques Le Goff that thirteenth-century prostitutes were increasingly excluded from a society becoming less welcoming to those who strayed from or contravened acceptable social norms.2 According to these views, the thirteenth-century prostitute was an unwanted stranger in her own society.
