Before royal decrees mandated brothel closures, the fictional Celestina did it all: consulting women on their beauty regimes, running a brothel where she entertained many couples, and weaving seductive spells into ensorcelled thread, leading lovers to their tragic ends. Her powers revolved around her constant and persuasive talk, her use of dark magical conjurations, and the fact that the crown had not yet made selling sex illegal. This chapter is about how words eventually destroyed alcahuetas such as Celestina, as well as the new terminology for (and thus status of) public women, sometimes known as whores. During the seventeenth century, a significant shift took place in the conceptual history of transactional sex in the Iberian world, a movement toward the creation of the diseased, criminalized, and/or victimized prostitute, who, by the early eighteenth century, began to fill the shoes of the still-working sinful and immoral whore. However, this wording and the new kinds scribal seductions that it generated did not end the exchange of sex for cash, as rich and powerful men (as well as their poorer fellow clients) continued to want it and willingly pay for it. In fact, transforming women from morally corrupt and sinning whores to pity-inducing prostitutes may have even increased their eroticism for their wealthy patrons and the scribes who described them (who may have been at times one and the same person).
Throughout the seventeenth century, the traditional vocabulary of procuring (alcahueta, consentidora) predominates in the available cases, although the word puta also appears both in marriage disputes and Holy Office investigations, especially when the scribes wrote the precise wording of insults exchanged between litigants.2 When the authorities of this era assume a more elevated tone in their pronouncements, they used vaguer terminology such as “worldly women [mujeres mundanas]” or “women who lead evil lives.”3 A transition occurred when the term prostitute, after 1700, started to become a common label applied with disdain and censure or pity and objectification. The new use of this word explicitly signified trading money for services and put a greater emphasis on greed for rewards, or victimization by a panderer, while both the older and ongoing use of “whore” more vaguely referred (and refers) to a woman with a publicly sexual reputation, who may or may not make an income off her sex acts.4
Although bilingual Spanish dictionaries mentioned the word prostituir and its translations into French, Italian, German, and English, dating back to the early seventeenth century, the words prostituta and prostitución do not appear in a Spanish monolingual dictionary until the end of the eighteenth century. Before then, French/Spanish bilingual dictionaries translate prostitution simply as abandonnement. The English translation offered is “debauched, exposed to common life.” In 1783, the Spanish definition takes on a more sexual tone: “abandoned to all types of lewdness and sensuality.” In 1788, Esteban de Terreros y Pando defines it as “abandonment to licentious lewdness, infamy,” hearkening back to the traditional understanding of a whore. His definition for prostituta includes references to medieval terms such as “ramera [whore],” as well as the general idea of a prostitute as a lost or public woman, but he also significantly brings greed into the picture, mentioning “intereses” or gain.5 Terreros y Pando also explains prostituir as a metaphorical insult in reference to corrupt, bribable judges or authors.
Coinciding with the gradual increase in the use of the term prostitution was the slow decline in stature of the medieval bawd. While the fourteenth-century Ruiz presented Trotaconventos (aka “Good Love”—a name that also had a religious resonance in this work) as an appealing, helpful, and funny character (chapter 1), in contrast, Celestina’s erotic black magic caused both murder and suicide in Fernando de Rojas’s 1499 work entitled Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea.6 Rojas may have interpreted such a loquacious woman who operated in the public sphere as a horrifying contrast to the moral female, who ideally closed herself off in both her sex and her speech.7 Every character in the Tragicomedy understood Celestina as a slick talker who could trick innocent women into committing sinful acts. The fact that she talked for a living defined Celestina as a disgraced woman and a danger to others. With his tale of Celestina’s negative influence on the lives of her clients, Rojas warns readers to avoid old women who profit from their immense experience in the sexual realm. While she communicated great confidence in her function, other characters viewed her as notorious and infamous, or worse, a greedy witch who deserved a brutal, violent death.
Although she causes multiple tragedies, this early-modern bawd still speaks at times as a very sympathetic character. Celestina’s soliloquies and persuasive discussions with her clients reveal her understanding of the cruel nature of love and sexual desire in her historic context. Humans crave sex like beasts, according to Celestina, and without a mediator’s help, they would have no way to verbalize and thus satisfy their needs. She organizes sexual encounters in a perilous setting where people lose their health to unrequited passions and speak their affections and emotions painfully, because no licit sexual communication or fulfillment exists. Despite her proud self-assertions, Celestina also plaintively explains that, without inherited wealth or land, plotting affairs and selling potions provide her with the only way that she can earn an income.8
In this chapter, investigations of three Mexico City celestinas document both their traditional association with sorcery and the highly domestic and distinctly African and indigenous culture of seventeenth-century transactional sex. Framed by these cases in Mexico City, here I also discuss King Phillip IV’s two decrees that banned brothels in his territories, tracing the seventeenth-century transition from an open and widespread tolerance of bawds and brothels to the gradual criminalization of the occupation that became known, by the early eighteenth century, as “prostitution.” In this era, the crown forbade brothels, but this mandate was an empty rhetorical gesture with no practical application within the Mexican criminal justice system. Although Phillip IV and his advisors inscribed brothels and public women as important and widespread moral concerns, their judicial functionaries in the New World did not carry through on the mandates with effective policing and suppression. Why would they, when many of them wanted to continue to patronize these women? In response to these hidden scribal seductions, the archives of transactional sex did not expand in the seventeenth century. If they did, they have since disappeared.
Arguably, crown regulations created a paradoxical juridical quagmire for viceregal judicial officials. Sanctions against transactional sex led to sparser documentation, which did not increase until well into the eighteenth century, an era when crown reformers prized written reports and statistics. To acknowledge that sex for sale still existed, which would happen if anyone started a secular court case against a brothel manager, meant that local law enforcement had to admit that, up to that point, it had disregarded the king’s decrees. Additionally, a case from 1621 demonstrates that high-ranking bureaucrats comprised the brothels’ key clientele. Within the complicated legal setting of overlapping imperial jurisdictions, hypocrisy, and subjects’ need to show their obedience to the crown, instead of more criminal cases against brothels, a new group of royal functionaries found their niche in the indirect prosecution of bawds for African- and indigenous-influenced sorcery, a goal that fit more comfortably within the imperial mindset than writing limitations on male sexual proclivities. The American Holy Office Tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition investigated the popular practice of love magic, fueled by a European perception of indigenous and African colonial subjects as allied with the devil, and as potential sexual corrupters of Spanish women. In an urban, plebeian context, the authorities also worried about how the practice of seventeenth-century erotic magic disregarded official viceregal racial identities by bringing women together to cooperate in their goals of finding well-paying male patrons.9
Rojas’s multitalented literary creation anticipated two bawds prosecuted by the Mexican tribunal of the Holy Office: Isabel de San Miguel, a procuress, con artist, and love-magic practitioner investigated by the Mexico City Inquisition tribunal in 1617; and the early-eighteenth-century innkeeper Doña Nicolasa de Guzman, who is discussed at the end of this chapter. These cases demonstrate both continuities and change over time in the archives of transactional sex. Both bawds found
