ABSTRACT
Prostitutes were an integral part of urban life in the Middle Ages, familiar figures in the surviving literature – poems, stories, songs, court records and chronicles. There was almost no town which did not have its ‘good house’ as the brothel was sometimes known. Ivan Bloch (1912–25) has identified seventy-five German towns and cities that contained brothels. One fifteenth-century observer estimated that there were 5– 6,000 prostitutes in Paris, out of a population of 200,000. A hundred prostitutes have been identified in fifteenth-century Dijon out of a population of less than 10,000. The thirteenth-century chronicler Jacques de Vitry painted a vivid picture of the Parisian prostitutes of his day:
Prostitutes were everywhere in the streets and neighbourhoods of the city, seeking to drag passing clerics by force into their brothels. If the clerics refused to enter, they immediately shouted after them ‘Sodomite!’ In one and the same building, there might be a school upstairs and a brothel downstairs. While in the upper part, the masters taught their pupils, in the lower part the prostitutes plied their nefarious trade. In one part, the prostitutes quarrelled with each other and their pimps; in the other part the scholars argued on scholarly matters.
