an environment of fantasy and pleasure.21 Appropriate domestic comfort in this era required religious art, imports from Asia, and furniture or bedding that offered places for guests to sit or lie down. Bautista decorated her lodgings with numerous religious retablos, chairs, cushions (including nine made of “Chinese velvet”), and a gilded wooden bed with a canopy. All of her furnishings suggest the bawd’s ability to host several seated or lounging guests in relaxing comfort, especially in this era when many did not own a bed. Her clothes were all of imported fabrics in shades of black and brown, and she wore an elaborate black and gold velvet mantilla. Bautista’s accusers testified that her lovers gave her gifts of clothing as well as money.
Married men and women committing adultery had a safe meeting place in Bautista’s comfortable rooms, and some, including the bawd herself, enjoyed long-term illicit relationships. Most of her clients were labeled Spaniards, but she also procured lovers for two mulatas (both of whom were her servants and had affairs with Spanish men, including a cleric), a mulatto man, and a mestizo man. Over a period of time, Bautista’s male clients ranged from laborers to priests and royal bureaucrats.22
Her elite clientele mitigated Bautista’s treatment during both her trial and sentencing. Instead of imprisonment during the trial, she endured only house arrest.23 Despite the fact that Bautista herself had lovers, her defense formulated a case that solidified her reputation as an honest, secluded, and devoutly Christian innkeeper who made a small income by providing room and board for important, honorable men, even up to the level of an associate of the viceroy, the Marquis de Guadalcazar.24 The fact that she had lodgers suggested that she could easily make money as a moral landlady, with no need to procure for her boarders. According to statements in defense of her character, including from an official affiliated with the local high court (audiencia), her accuser nursed a violent passion for her that led to attempts to seduce her, break into her house, shame her and her guests by calling Bautista a “whore [puta]” and her guests “cornudos [cuckolds],” and finally bring her up on charges.25
The bawd and her defense team reformulated her bad reputation into a respectable one and created a victim out of an alleged evildoer in order to gain paternalistic sympathy from the judges.26 Bautista denied all sexual misdeeds, and several useful witnesses, including the high court official, a notary, and two friars, backed up her claims to innocence. As a result of this appropriate script with approved characters for the judicial theater, the court absolved her of all accusations, requesting only that she sever all ties and contact with her alleged current lover.27 This lenient outcome symbolizes the general presuppression viceregal tolerance for bawds and brothels. Closing brothels clearly clashed with viceregal popular practices, necessitating the erasure of bawds like Bautista from the surviving records until the late eighteenth century.
CRIMINALIZING BROTHELS
In 1623, Phillip IV (1621–1665) issued a royal decree to shut all brothels in his entire empire, from Spain to the Americas. This proclamation did little to curb sexual commerce. In fact, brothel closure only encouraged more sex work in the streets, taverns, or private homes, but with even less judicial control and regulation.28 After the 1623 decree and another crown mandate seeking to enclose “worldly women” in 1661, the identities of so-called “public” women in Spanish America took on an increasing duality, as did this society’s approach to transactional sex overall. Brothel closure meant that sex for sale became an ever more open secret, a very common illicit act, but something that crown bureaucrats could not admit happened as a regular part of daily life. Regardless of the royal decrees, most unmarried women still needed male financial assistance to survive and prosper. They continued to support themselves by exchanging sex acts and extended sexual relationships for money and gifts from men. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, regulation and illegality created opportunities for many women to pursue “kept woman” relationship status, sometimes with the help of erotic magic. Men, of course including various authorities, benefited from this illicit practice, and thus it remained undocumented.
Until after the mid-sixteenth century, no one debated public brothels’ legality or suggested closing them. They generated a large income for municipalities in Spain, and some of this profit funded charitable Catholic institutions.29 Hints of future repression emerge in the 1560s, when Phillip II began to mandate stricter sanctions against bawds and ruffians, which led to their prosecution in New Spain, under the jurisdiction of the archbishop of Mexico (chapter 1). However, enforcing laws against independent procurers might have served not to suppress selling sex in general but instead to protect the licit income of crown or municipal brothels. The tide began to turn definitively against legal brothels when devastating syphilis outbreaks inspired preachers and clerics to interpret this plague as a divine punishment for lechery. Iberians understood syphilis as a new sexually transmitted disease in the late fifteenth century. It spread rampantly in the context of the Italian wars (where men and women of various nations gathered for both battles and sex) in the 1490s and continued to debilitate armies over the course of the sixteenth century and beyond.30
Spanish brothels enjoyed their greatest prosperity in the mid-sixteenth century, but the ongoing incidence of syphilis led Phillip II to compose and enforce more intrusive regulations in 1570.31 After this point, on some kind of regular basis, brothel workers endured periodic medical inspections and had to leave the brothel for treatment if doctors found any trace of the pox. These reforms also warned against clandestine whores as destructive disease vectors, but this condemnation did not limit their clientele. Instead, by the late sixteenth century, working outside the brothel allowed elite concubines to avoid crown-mandated venereal-disease inspections.32 Despite increasing regulations, most men apparently did not understand how they might catch syphilis. And even if rudimentary condoms existed in this era, they would have been very expensive for many public women. Instead of fearing syphilis, as clerics suggested, clients took a blasé attitude toward the physical and mental devastation that this disease could cause.33 A late-fifteenth-century doctor warned that men could safely “sleep with a sick woman” if she only had bubas (sores and rashes) in her mouth, as long as he did not kiss her. Some courtly, libertine men even bragged about their sores, rejecting any notion of shame for this alleged divine punishment for their sins. A humorous poem observed that all men, even friars, prelates, and the king, enjoyed membership in the “brotherhood of bubas.”34 In the 1520s, observers still spoke of La Lozana’s beauty, and she continued to attract many paying lovers, despite the fact that “she couldn’t wear glasses if she wanted to” because “the pox” had “eaten away part of her nose.”35
Cognizant of syphilis’s rampant spread, Spanish municipalities began founding hospitals to treat and quarantine syphilitics by the early sixteenth century. Mexico City had an institution that treated syphilitics by 1539, called the Hospital del Amor de Dios, although no archives record if the viceroyalties mandated health inspections among those marked as selling sex.36 In Valencia, Spain, around one hundred people a year entered the syphilis hospital. Later, the annual total increased to several hundred men and women. By the end of the century, three or four individuals slept in every available bed.37 The inmates were not all brothel workers, but only these women had to endure exams due to their occupation. Seville also converted a plague hospital to a “hospital de bubas” in 1586.38
As syphilis provoked fears of divine retribution, Jesuit preachers started to speak against the corruptive influences of brothels in Seville. First, the Jesuits demanded the closure of Granada’s brothel, and then they turned their attention to Seville. They rejected the historic justification of legal brothels as a “lesser evil” that prevented widespread sodomy or adultery.39 Jesuits began “invading” the Seville brothel after 1616, and their desire to preach sermons in these legal businesses greatly disrupted the trade. Enthusiasm increased for “reforming” women, and clerical moralizers heartily embraced a familiar discourse of female brothel workers as victims in desperate need of redemption. This rhetoric also led
