. Prostitution was not an important social phenomenon in France until the urban revival of the high Middle Ages, when the use of the term meretrix publica allowed the clear distinction of the professional prostitute from the privately “loose” woman, and when towns began to regulate the profession. In the south of France, prostitutes were generally banned from the centers of towns in the 12th and early 13th centuries but by the late 13th and 14th centuries official red-light districts were protected by the public authorities and sometimes guaranteed as zones where no arrests for adultery could be made. These districts were generally reduced to one house, often owned by the municipality or by the great bourgeois, and sometimes protected by seigneurial or royal safeguard, in the late 14th and 15th centuries. At the same time, repression of competition (procuring and freelance prostitution) was intensified, as was that of concubinage and adultery.
These houses were finally closed under Protestant influence in the 16th century.
The prostitute enjoyed full legal capacity in the late Middle Ages and was protected under rape laws. She had to observe regulations concerning dress and behavior and toward the end of the Middle Ages was virtually cloistered in the official brothel under the direction of the person who “farmed” the brothel (paid a fixed sum to the owner yearly in exchange for rights to all profits). In the bigger towns, religious communities of repentant women, founded by clerics and bourgeois, welcomed retired or penitent prostitutes.
Leah L.Otis-Cour
Otis, Leah. Prostitution in Medieval Society: The History of an Urban Institution in Languedoc. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Rossiaud, J. La prostitution médiévale. Paris: Flammari, 1998.
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