A JOURNAL OF ACADEMIC WRITING VOLUME 8

technically, religious leaders were not supposed to visit them,
along with married men and Jews. Without the brothel and
the service of whores, the medieval man might turn his sexual
needs to married women, good Christian women. Prostitutes,
therefore, became essential participants in the Church’s quest
to preserve the chastity of married women and the virginity of
sexually unfamiliar young ladies.
Medieval prostitutes lived as women split between two
worlds: the unlikely wardens of virginity and the ambassadors
of sexual impurity. Medieval attitudes towards the chaste and
virtuous woman were created by romantic literature focused
on promoting the concepts of courtly love and virginity, both
of which were idealistic myths. In addressing these myths, Dr.
Derek Brewer remarks that the “lady is regarded as dominant,
in contrast to women’s normally inferior social position, the
aspiring lover her servant.” 14 Dominate but submissive females
were echoes of Church belief: women should be strong in faith
and character, they should strive to marry in order to fulfill her
duty as a noble woman, and she must be pure in virginity as the
example set by Mary. A woman’s virginity remained a complex
issue in medieval England, and despite considerable Church
support for marriage and virginity, some women possibly
scrutinized issues pertaining to virginity heavily. 15
The finest literary example of a combatant attitude
towards virginity comes from The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey
Chaucer. “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” although written by
a man, contains interesting commentary on the way Church
cannon affected sexual attitudes. Chaucer crafts the Wife’s
speech around loopholes in scripture: “Please answer me…when
did [God] command virginity…a woman may be counseled
to be pure, but counsel and commandment aren’t the same…
for if God commanded virginity, then marriage he condemned
concurrently; and surely if no seed were ever sown, from where
then would virginity be grown?” 16 Inferring that Chaucer’s
Wife represented a percentage of the English female population,
the ostensible purpose of her speech is to express the opinion
of this group. She is a direct challenge to chastity, calling for
the end of hypocrisy in church doctrine that maintains women
must conform to marriage in order to be sexual at all.
People relied on the humours to explain the natural desires
for sex, concepts of virginity supported the need for whores
14 Derek Brewer, “Chivalry,” in A Companion to Chaucer, ed. Peter Brown,
(Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 61.
15 “Religious authorities saw virginity as a way to salvation, a treasure to
be locked away and promised only to the Divine Bridegroom, Christ.
It was a way to keep the filth of earthly existence from soiling the soul,
and allowed a woman to distance herself from the distractions of worldly
existence and hopefully, therefore, sin. Secular authorities, on the other
hand, saw virginity as something to be guarded and kept, but eventually
dispended in a legal and faithful marriage.” Heckle, “Sex, Society, and
Medieval Women.”
16 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, Translated by Ronald L. Ecker
and Eugene J. Crook, (Palatka, FL: Hodge & Braddock, Publishers,
1993), 155-156.
in male dominated medieval English society. Because good
Christian women were expected to guard their virginity, streets
full of sexually charged men looking to realize their desires
represented the greatest challenge to Church teachings against
sins of the flesh. 17 Given that most medieval English urban
populations were unmarried Christian individuals, a moral
debate ensued regarding the ability of sexual intercourse for
that fragment of the population. Segments of the unmarried
population undoubtedly turned to activities like masturbation
to relieve sexual need. Further complicating the matter were the
teachings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, who damned masturbation
as being a practice against natural law. Many people, therefore,
turned to prostitutes because they did not have any moral outlet
for their sexual humours. By occupying the minds of men
consumed with lust, whores became the sexual focus for men
attempting to violate good Christian wives and daughters. The
services of the prostitute, however, were ultimately a necessity
because society was male dominated.
Medieval European women existed within the limits of
patriarchal governance that firmly delegated their ability to
move freely in their own society. Women were often confined
to spaces considered proper and acceptable in a male dominated
world. These spaces consisted of physical domains that women
traversed, which might be “a house, village, or city quarter
depending on her economic activity and her social class.” 18
Inoculated to the spaces over years, medieval women were
immersed in this system under control of their fathers, and
later, under the control of their husbands. Spaces were not
exclusive habitations for men or women alone, rather, they were
simply physical places understood to be the domain of either
males or females, but not restricted to either. For instance,
women walked the busy town streets among men to shop for
their household, but did so accompanied by other women
because the outside was considered the space of men. Despite
being able to travel in male dominated physical spaces, women
were still noticeably differentiated by other methods: their space
“could be confined by means other than simple geography:
clothing, the way of walking, and even injunctions of speech
could regulate a woman’s access to physical space.” 19 Whores,
who are undeniably the opposite of medieval utopian female
ideals, challenged the established acceptance of physical spaces
by existing in male dominated realms without feeling the strain
of maintaining behavior deemed acceptable by their patriarchal
17 Women had to contend with the many crimes against them being referred
to as sins of the flesh. Even though “sins of the flesh were not all sexual in
nature, of course, but a woman’s sin was inevitably represented as such.”
Katherine L. Jansen, “Mary Magdalen and the Mendicants: The Preaching
of Penance in the Late Middle Ages,” Journal of Medieval History, 21
(1995): 19.
18 Barbara A. Hanawalt, “Medieval English Women in Rural and Urban
Domestic Space,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers, Vol. 52 (1998): 19.
19 Hanawalt, “Medieval English Women in Rural and Urban Domestic
Space,” 22.
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