Public, Poor, and Promiscuous? Defining the Prostitute in Sixteenth-Century Zurich

Abstract

The impact of the Reformations, in Switzerland and elsewhere, on the regulation of sexuality has been extensively researched in recent decades. Laws against adultery and premarital fornication were strengthened and promulgated, leading to the decline of the late-medieval public brothel. However, the impact of these theological, legal, and institutional changes on the women who engaged in transactional or commercial sex outside of marriage has been harder to capture. Even the authorities’ definitions of such women remain difficult to pin down: were they viewed as promiscuous sinners to be punished, laborers in a dishonorable profession, poor vagrants to be exiled, or all or none of the above? This paper first discusses the historiography of prostitution to show how previous research terminology and definitions of the phenomenon are insufficient for the early modern context. It then analyses a case study from sixteenth-century Zurich in which different understandings about premodern prostitutes coexisted, intersected, and conflicted with the argument that these individuals were conceived of in terms of authorities’ fears rather than a specific set of characteristics.

1. Introduction

What was prostitution, and who was deemed a prostitute, in post-Reformation Zurich? These questions are more complex than they might at first appear. In early modern Swiss court protocols, the terminology surrounding illicit sex was often ambiguous and was never defined. Furthermore, the words used do not correspond to modern understandings and categorizations. Thus, in my analysis, I must both define and name prostitution—both in my research and in the past.

In this article, I will first discuss why I find the prevailing models of conceptualizing historical prostitutes insufficient for the early modern Zurich context. I will argue that it is instead more helpful to look at the dangers such individuals were thought to pose, rather than their supposed characteristics. In order to achieve this, I will first analyze the ways in which historians from the early twentieth century to the present have defined “prostitution” and “prostitute” in their work. I will argue that previous approaches most often understood prostitutes as a more-or-less clearly demarcated group of people, characterized by their sexual promiscuity and/or the commercial nature of their sexual activities. Over time, these research definitions became both more precise and more flexible, influenced by trends in the field of history as well as broader cultural developments, but still cannot fully encompass the women in my research sample. Especially in the absence of a source definition or even consistent source terminology, focusing on the many intertwined ways in which early modern women who engaged in nonmarital sex acts were thought to threaten the city of Zurich allows me to more accurately interpret my sources and describe these women’s lives. To illustrate this, I will present a case study of a court protocol in which various kinds of “prostitutes” were discussed.

2. Defining Prostitution in Historiography

Developments in the historiography of prostitution, like in all academic disciplines, have always echoed the trends taking place at the time of writing. However, sketching these trends and their influences allows me to show what I believe is new about my approach. In this article, I will focus on histories of the German-speaking early modern world but will incorporate other significant histories of prostitution that evince similar tendencies into my argumentation.

The first authors to work on the history of prostitution during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries viewed the phenomenon as a problem and as a form of victimization of (white) women—often in the context of so-called “white slavery”.1 Iwan Bloch, often considered the father of prostitution history for the German-speaking world, described the phenomenon as “an illness-process of society with a thoroughly antisocial and anti-hygienic character”,2 most likely influenced by his training as a doctor and sexologist (Bloch 1912, pp. 1–2). It is in this context that we must view his definition of prostitution. In the first chapter of his two-volume work on the topic, he first discussed its historical definitions from ancient Greece through the medieval era. He followed these authors’ lead in identifying publicness and promiscuity over payment as prostitution’s identifying features, stating the following:

“Prostitution is a specific type of extramarital sex that is distinguished by the individual prostituting him- or herself more-or-less indiscriminately, to indeterminately many persons, in a continuous, public, and notorious manner, rarely without payment, generally in the form of commercial venality[, in which he or she] surrenders him- or herself to sexual intercourse or other sexual activities, or provokes and provides those [hiring them] with some other form of sexual arousal and satisfaction, and gains a specific, constant type as a result of this business of fornication”3.

(Ibid., p. 38)

This definition, particularly its last section, reflects the biologizing and moralizing trends of his time. Elsewhere in his work, Bloch expanded on this last statement:

“… fully developed prostitution requires a constancy in type and lifestyle of the individuals who prostitute themselves, in greater part acquired through the business of fornication, in smaller part based on innate disposition”4.

(Ibid., p. 37)

Despite ostensibly defining “prostitution” rather than “prostitute”, Bloch was actually describing a distinct type of person, who acted in specific ways and evinced particular characteristics, instead of an action or a phenomenon. This supports the argument made by Kathryn Norberg that from the late eighteenth century onwards, writers on prostitution attempted to differentiate female prostitutes from other women as either victims or dehumanized “freaks” (Norberg 2013, pp. 404–5). Thus, while trying to scientifically define prostitutes as a specific group with identifiable traits, Bloch in fact helped construct this group, whether or not it actually existed. Although his definition was based on writings from Western Europe, it was intended to apply to all contexts, from prehistory to the modern era, and from Asia to the Americas. This downplayed the differences between various forms of prostitution and foregrounded the historian’s modern view over the source material.

While the usage of such analytical, universalizing definitions of prostitution based on a combination of historical and modern understandings has continued up until the present day,5 during the latter half of the twentieth century many historians began to argue against them and to grapple with their own analytical terminology. For example, Ruth Mazo Karras, working on medieval England, criticized earlier historians for interchangeably employing a broad spectrum of terms, from the modern prostitute to the antiquated harlot, that were not necessarily synonymous (Karras 1996, p. 147, Note 35).

As a result, some historians have chosen to use source terms and understandings as their analytical concepts. Throughout her work on late-medieval prostitution in the German-speaking world, Beate Schuster used the source term Dirne and the contemporary conception thereof (Schuster 1995). Dirne, which over time has become a purely pejorative term meaning prostitute (Nübling 2011), was used much more flexibly in Schuster’s sources (Schuster 1995, p. IIII). Schuster also focused on the source concept of public promiscuity rather than introducing the modern idea of commercial sex. This approach highlighted the ambiguous status of the women she researched and allowed her to compare individuals engaging in different kinds of transactional sex.6 Similar approaches have been utilized in research on other medieval and early modern European cities, from Amsterdam to Augsburg to London (van de Pol 2011; Roper 1989; Karras 1996). Furthermore, this ambiguity has also been studied within the field of historical linguistics, from the diachronic analysis on the specific German term Dirne by Damaris Nübling to the broad analysis on early modern English by Anthony McEnery and Helen Baker (Nübling 2011; McEnery and Baker 2017).

Other researchers have instead focused on the specific historical phenomena that are the closest to what we might call prostitution today. Peter Schuster, for example, has analyzed the municipal brothel system of the late-medieval German-speaking world (Schuster 1992). This approach provided him with a wealth of source material rare for the Middle Ages. Furthermore, restricting his research to an institution and to the women who exchanged sex for money there also allowed him to use the modern research term prostitute (Prostituierte) as well as its modern definition, which he put as “women who make their living fundamentally or exclusively via the trade of their bodies”7 (Ibid., pp. 19–20). He acknowledged that this does not reflect medieval understandings of prostitution outside of the specific context of the municipal brothel and that many of the women in his sources would not have considered themselves prostitutes. Nevertheless, his focus on a specific form and setting of prostitution allowed him to employ this terminology and concept without universalizing them. Historians of early modern contexts in which prostitution remained legal during the sixteenth century and was thus legally defined by authorities, such as Rome or Spain, have also emphasized that a wide spectrum of women existed between the extremes of the officially recognized prostitute and the honorable wife (Storey 2008; von Germeten 2018, pp. 16–20). Thus, historians of prostitution have had to carefully choose their analytical terminology based on their sources and the legal status of prostitution in their contexts.

During this time, various attempts to go beyond source-based terms and definitions without requiring modern ones arose. One method was to research prostitutes as part of a broader group. This development echoed larger developments in the field of history towards a greater focus on those traditionally ignored in grand narratives, such as the history of the working class. Especially in the German-speaking world, the concept of Randgruppen or marginalized groups became popular in later twentieth-century historiography.8 Many categories of undesirable and stigmatized people, from Jews to executioners to prostitutes, were analyzed together using this concept. This engendered debate about whether late-medieval prostitutes fit into this category, as they were integrated into society, at least partially, via the municipal brothel.9 Nonetheless, their inclusion in such analyses has revealed many ways in which their treatment by authorities mirrored that of other marginalized peoples. For example, Leah Otis-Cour has shown that both Jewish individuals and prostitutes from the municipal brothel were prohibited from touching food at the market in late-medieval southern France (Otis-Cour 1985, p. 70).

Similarly, in feminist, women’s, and gender histories, prostitutes have frequently been conceptualized as a specific kind of woman, foregrounding the fluidity that existed in this gender category. This was especially true for women who lived outside the bounds of honorable wifehood or religious orders. For instance, Lyndal Roper has argued that for authorities in sixteenth-century Augsburg, “there was little difference between prostitutes, fornicators, or adulteresses—indeed, any woman might be a prostitute” (Roper 1989, p. 130).10 This focus allowed a variety of promiscuous women, from brothel employees to the mistresses of wealthy men, to be compared to one other without requiring that they all be marginalized in the same way.

Finally, some historians have used newer approaches focusing on individual lives, such as the history of everyday life and microhistory, in order to chart the complexity of prostitutes’ experiences. Theoretical concepts such as agency became central in this research. For example, in his work on late-medieval Southern Germany and Switzerland, Jamie Page used the term “prostitution” due to its established prominence in historiography but analyzed specific case studies with the concept of subjectivity, rather than attempting a broader overview (Page 2021, especially p. 5, Note 17). Such works have helped to differentiate between authorities’ conceptions of the prostitute as a symbolic figure and the lived experience of individuals.

Another voice that entered this debate in the later twentieth century was that of sex worker activists and academics. They developed new terminology that more accurately fit their self-understandings, foregrounding concepts of work, commerciality, and labor in their definitions.11 In many circles, terms such as sex work, sex worker, and commercial sex have become the most-accepted vocabulary for the phenomenon and the people involved, in part due to their neutrality and lack of stigma.12 However, debate on this topic has continued to the present day, especially in the field of history. For example, Karras has discussed the difficulties that arise when one attempts to apply the concept of sex work to medieval sources (Karras 2004). More recently, Nicola J. Smith has argued for a dual approach, stating “I refer to ‘sex workers’ to describe people who sold sex while also discussing the concept of ‘whoredom’”, the latter of which was commonly used in her medieval English sources (Smith 2020, p. 13).

Recent works on the history of prostitution have generally employed some combination of the above-mentioned terms, concepts, and definitions. Broader works such as encyclopedias or global histories have often used sex worker and prostitute interchangeably, defining both via the concepts of labor and work (Ditmore 2006, p. xxv; Rodriguez García et al. 2017, pp. 2–3). Recent works on the German-speaking premodern world, such as those of Michael Hammer and the above-mentioned Jamie Page, have continued to use the term prostitute, often defined as a public woman based on source conceptions (Hammer 2019; Page 2021). In my own texts on early modern Zurich, I have also opted to use the research term prostitute in order to avoid the focus on work inherent in terms such as “sex worker” (Schulz 2022, pp. 341–43). These analyses have all profited from the increased focus on language, on the poor and the marginalized, on women, and on individuals and their experiences instigated by the historiographical trends of the twentieth century, from the cultural turn to the history of mentalités to Marxist history. However, these works—my own included—still tend to portray prostitutes as a category of people defined by their shared characteristics, lifestyles, workplaces, etc. In fact, Karras has argued that “prostitute” could even be considered a medieval sexual identity (Karras 1999). In the next section, however, I will argue that these approaches do not fully encompass the complex ways in which the women we might call sex workers or prostitutes were discussed in the early modern Zurich sources. I will continue to use the terms prostitute and prostitution, but only as a placeholder. In fact, I believe that reconstructing a specific group, either defined by authorities or self-identified, is impossible.

3. Prostitution Defined by Its Dangers

Instead of trying to create a category that did not exist, I argue that it is more helpful to look at the dangers early modern Zurich authorities attempted to protect themselves against. These threats were not necessarily physical: I use this terminology to mean anything that city authorities considered harmful to its inhabitants, social structures, or the community in general. In the early modern Zurich context, where prostitution was rarely labeled and never officially defined, this approach allows me to flexibly analyze my sources.

Using this conceptualization, prostitutes are not thought of as a certain type of person, but as anyone whose activities were feared in a specific set of overlapping ways. Economically, women who had extramarital sex with married men, whether within a long-term relationship or as a single act, were thought to take money from Zurich families. Similarly, foreign beggars and vagrants, especially poor women who might birth children on Zurich land, were seen as threats to the city’s economy and poor relief system. Religiously, it was feared that sexual sins of all kinds, committed by any of the city’s inhabitants, would attract God’s wrath in the form of natural disasters and other punishments. Socially, fighting, loud partying, illicit sex, and other disturbances of the peace common in the tavern milieu threatened the increasingly important concept of public order (Iseli 2009, pp. 80–83). On a smaller scale, illicit sex was also considered socially disruptive because it led to broken marriages and families. Finally, Zurich authorities feared witchcraft, which was both gendered as female and thought to include love and impotence spells. None of these dangers were exclusively attributed to women or to the sexually promiscuous. Thieves stole from Zurich families, mercenaries fought in taverns, etc. And conversely, few women in my research sample engendered all of these fears at once. But when analyzed intersectionally,13 these fears coalesce into the conceptual figure I am calling “the prostitute”, a negatively viewed woman who engaged in some form of illicit sex that endangered the city by destabilizing families, contributing to public disorder, inviting God’s wrath, appropriating funds meant for families and institutional poor relief, and/or magically attacking the city.

Of course, analyzing all these intersections would far exceed the scope of this article. Therefore, in the following, I will discuss one court protocol from 1566 in which the connections between monetary, foreign, and social threats are particularly visible. This trial record contains two intertwined cases with two defendants (StAZH A 8.1, Nr. 93 n.d.): Caspar Bleuler and Jacob Wild, both male Zurich inhabitants. Caspar Bleuler was accused of “ärgerlicher Einzug”, or of hosting undesired individuals who troubled the neighbors.14 Approximately 150 cases were brought before the Zurich courts during the sixteenth century involving this complaint.15 During this case, several individuals’ sexual misdeeds were recounted, including those of a woman referred to as Brami Kullen’s wife. Jacob Wild was accused of maintaining an adulterous relationship with a so-called public prostitute referred to by the nickname Bernerli. More than two hundred cases of adultery and fornication were tried in sixteenth-century Zurich, excluding the more nebulous cases against those with dissolute lives and divorce trials. Thus, the differing portrayals of promiscuous women in this protocol—and especially those of Brami Kullen’s wife and Bernerli—highlight the usefulness of a flexible understanding of the early modern phenomenon we might call prostitution.

In the case of Caspar Bleuler, anonymous prostitutes labeled as public women were discussed as part of the broader threat to public order posed by Bleuler’s tavern and its visitors. These women were thus defined using the ancient and medieval conceptions discussed above and employed by Bloch and other historians. The protocol stated the following:

“… the neighbors say that for a long time there was a wild, shameful, and wanton life in the named house, with fighting, drinking, and singing from one midnight to another, and likewise they often saw public women go in and out”.16

While the Zurich authorities began promulgating strict laws against nonmarital sex in the 1520s as part of the Reformation’s valorization of marriage, the municipal brothel remained in operation until at least 1560 (Schulz 2022, pp. 345–46). Thus, when this case was heard in 1566, the brothel had either just been closed or may even have still been in operation. Furthermore, while married men were punished for engaging in adulterous relationships throughout the sixteenth century, single acts of nonmarital sex only began to be routinely prosecuted toward the end of the century (Ibid., pp. 348–49). Therefore, it is less surprising that the case focused on the disorder caused by the loud partying at Bleuler’s house, with illicit sex only mentioned as part of this larger problem.

This is underscored by the anonymity of the women involved. The prostitutes in Bleuler’s house were never named and were instead described as four public women (“vier gmein mëtzen”), one public woman (“einer gmeinen dirnnen”), public women (“gmeine Wyber”), two public women (“Zwo gmeine mëtzen”), and all sorts of public women (“allwëg gmein frouwen”).17 This language is typical for the early modern Zurich court records, in which almost any word meaning woman could be used to refer to a public prostitute when paired with an appropriate adjective. Thus, the ancient and medieval conceptualization of prostitution as public referenced by Bloch and other historians was understood and used by early modern Zurich witnesses and authorities. Such women were considered troublesome and undesirable but were not considered dangerous enough to warrant them being identified or separately charged. Instead, the Zurich man who hosted them was held responsible for the disorder.

However, such public women were considered more dangerous to the Zurich community when they engaged in longer-term relationships with local men. In this context, they still remained anonymous: while the male defendant in the second protocol was identified as one Jacob Wild, as married, as the son of another Jacob Wild, and as from the neighborhood of Eierbrecht, just outside Zurich, his partner was referred to only as “a public prostitute named the Bernerli”.18 Her nickname references the city of Bern, implying that she was most likely not a local Zurich woman. She was not further identified and did not appear before court. Her illicit sexual activities with Wild, her foreign origin, and the money Wild spent on her combined to make her a threatening “prostitute” in the eyes of Zurich authorities. Because she was not a member of the community, any money that Wild spent on her left the city. According to sub-bailiff Bleuler (most likely unconnected and unrelated to the accused Caspar Bleuler), Wild took 13 Gulden from his father and went away.19 Sub-bailiff Bleuler then went with Wild’s father and another man to the nearby city of Baden, where they found Wild with Bernerli. While sub-bailiff Bleuler never indicated that Wild paid Bernerli for any sexual services, this story implies that Wild at least spent money with her. By wasting his father’s money with and most likely on a foreign, sinful woman in a Catholic city, Wild shortchanged both his family and his community. The conclusion of the protocol generalized this concern, stating “the married men latched onto such vices as had been heard [in the case], that they made mistakes with [the prostitutes], and hereby left their wife and child great deprivation”.20 Thus, prostitutes were not only disruptive to public order as part of a large, rowdy crowd but also individually when they economically damaged the family unit.

This combined focus on money and foreignness echoes another early modern fear, that of vagrants. Not only was Bernerli foreign and presumably poor, but Wild and Bernerli also traveled together. Their relationship was even referred to in terms of movement, as Wild was said to have “pulled [her] around”. Early modern authorities, in Zurich and across Europe, argued that foreign and undeserving beggars took up resources intended for the local poor, in effect stealing from these individuals and from the community (Wandel 1990, pp. 77–123; Simon-Muscheid and Schnegg 2015). While there is no indication that Bernerli asked for state charity, she was still a prime example of a potential vagrant due to her sinful, mobile lifestyle and her non-Zurich origins. Thus, Bernerli was not conceived of as simply public, socially disruptive, promiscuous, or foreign, but as all of the above at once: a dangerous figure I refer to in my research as a prostitute.

Bernerli can be compared to the only identifiable woman in the case, an unnamed Zurich inhabitant referred to only as Brami Kullen’s wife. The latter was not labeled as public, but was instead directly accused of engaging in specific acts of adultery in exchange for money. An Ehegaumer, a local official in charge of monitoring the populace for morals infractions, reported: “She lay twice with Andreas Hottinger and he gave her a Batzen as compensation”.21 This wording emphasizes the commercial and transitory nature of the interaction. Thus, her activities fit the modern concept of commercial sex more closely than they do older notions of public promiscuity.

She also posed different dangers to the city of Zurich than did Bernerli. While one Batzen was a significant amount, it was insignificant compared to the thirteen Gulden Wild took from his father, as a single Gulden was worth fifteen Batzen (Körner et al. 2001, p. 441). Furthermore, the Batzen given to Kullen’s wife presumably continued to circulate within the city, as she was a local woman. Thus, although she committed the same acts as Bernerli, she was far less economically dangerous to the Zurich community. Conversely, as a local woman, she was both easier to discipline and more likely to cause social upheaval. As an identifiable individual, she was part of early modern Zurich’s system of informal and formal justice and could be punished for her actions by her husband, by her social circle, or by the legal system. She knew this, as shown by her attempts to keep the affair secret: she allegedly asked that “one tell her husband nothing”. Thus, both she and her interrogators knew that her actions could damage her family’s bonds, as well as the relationships between the different families involved. However, this story was told within the broader context of the disturbances occurring at Caspar Bleuler’s house, and there is no record of a separate trial against Kullen’s wife. Hence, I would argue that her actions were viewed as part of the disorder created by various unruly elements within the city. In this context, the many anonymous public prostitutes and Kullen’s wife were all part of one larger problem, that of public disorder, despite the differing understandings of their sex acts and of them as individuals.

4. Conclusions

Bernerli and Kullen’s wife fall within two different definitions of prostitution, one of public promiscuity and the other of commercial sex. However, the two women were described similarly in many ways, and neither fit perfectly into either category. Bernerli, for example, was labeled as public even though she was never described as having had sex with more than one man. While her partner Jacob Wild most likely did spend money on her, this potential commercial exchange was never made explicit. Conversely, even though Kullen’s wife engaged in extramarital sex acts in exchange for money, she was not described as a public woman. Thus, notions of publicness and commerciality were both important to Zurich authorities but were not necessarily considered connected. Neither of these understandings alone, and certainly no combined definition, can be used for both women. But at the same time, they cannot be analyzed as two completely separate types of women. Thus, I believe that attempting to define the prostitute as a specific category of woman, as historians throughout the twentieth century have done, is unhelpful for the early modern Zurich context. Zurich authorities had a flexible, even contradictory understanding of the phenomenon and of the women involved: while such women were often thought of as publicly promiscuous, it was also understood that they generally received compensation of some kind for their sexual encounters.

Thus, while the increased attention on language and on individual experiences in more recent historical accounts of prostitution has allowed researchers to paint a fuller picture of these women’s lives, I would like to go a step farther. By focusing instead on the reasons that these women were considered undesirable or dangerous, I can compare their treatment by authorities and their accounts of their lives without forcing them into imperfect categorizations. This approach reveals Zurich authorities’ fears about sexual and non-sexual sin, social disorder, economic loss, and foreigners, especially about foreign, poor, and promiscuous women. This last word—women—is essential, as I would argue that it was the prostitutes’ gender that was central to the connection or intersection between these different concerns.