To browse Academia. Sex work in the Middle Ages could occur at an official city brothel, at a bathhouse, in a private residence, or on certain streets. While the locations of municipal brothels are known in five cities from medieval Hungary, little has been discussed about other sites of prostitution.
The first part of this paper aims to better understand what kind of women interacted with bathhouses in the Kingdom of Hungary and determine if there is any link between the city brothels. The second aspect explored will be using etymological history to understand the geographic links between brothels, bathhouses, and streets associated with sex work in medieval Hungarian cities.
The focus of this paper is the position of prostitutes in urban settlements of medieval Slavonia, a part of the medieval Kingdom of Hungary. The following questions are discussed: which social group did prostitutes come from, what possible reasons led a woman to become a prostitute, were prostitutes involved in the other types of criminal activities, how were prostitutes organized, in which part of the city were prostitutes situated, and what do we know about their customers?
The research shows that prostitution was not limited only to members of the lowest layer of society and people on the margins, and that there existed a certain tolerance towards prostitution. This article discusses the stance and strategies of town magistrates regarding various kinds of sexual behaviour in the kingdom of Hungary in the second half of the sixteenth century.
The study is based on the analyses of judicial cases of accused women. It examines not only the nature of sexual crimes and imposed punishments, but also how the language was used in the court records to name and label the offences and offenders in a way which reflects the moralistic discourse of the period.
