Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door
of her father's house, and the men of her city shall
stone her with stones that she die: because she hath
wrought folly in Israel, to play the whore in her
father's house.
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Deuteronomy 22:21
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Attitudes to prostitution have oscillated throughout the ages.
Often they were determined by the immediate interests of the
Church. Biblical passages like the one above could be used or
ignored according to taste: those who wanted to ignore it could
claim that it applied only to married women, or only to Jewish
women, or that the provision had been over-ridden by the New
Testament. So it was that the Church could embrace prostitution
when it suited, as it did for financial reasons.
At one time there was a successful church brothel in Avignon
where the girls devoted part of their time to religious duties,
and part of it attending to the needs of Christian customers
— inheritors of the ancient practice of temple prostitution.
Pope Julius II was said to have been so impressed by the one
in Avignon that he founded a similar one in Rome.
Prostitution was regarded as a lesser evil than sodomy, so brothels
were sometimes founded in order to encourage heterosexual sex.
Following a series of clerical reports in 1415, an Office
of Decorum was set up in Florence to reduce endemic homosexual
activity. One of its tasks was to set up a municipal brothel.
The Church certainly leased property to brothel keepers. In
the late Middle Ages the papacy netted 28,000 ducats a year
from such property. The
Church seems to have taken some pride in its promotion of prostitution,
as for example at Lyons. When Pope Innocent IV left an extended
Church Council there in the mid-thirteenth century, Cardinal
Hugo made a farewell speech.
We have made great improvements since we have been here.
When we arrived, we found three or four brothels. We are leaving
only one behind us. We must add, however, that this one brothel
stretches from the east to the west gate.
At the Council of Basle held between 1431 and 1449, some 1,500
prostitutes serviced the Fathers of the Council. In England
the Bishop of Winchester was so well known for his brothels
(called "stews") in Southwark that prostitutes in
his 22 licensed stews came to be known as Winchester Geese.
To have been bitten by a Winchester Goose was to have
contracted the great pox (i.e. syphilis).
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