for her dowry. Men who pander their own wives, other married women, virgins, nuns, or widows with a good reputation deserve the death penalty. This title ends with the note that all of these laws also apply to women: procuresses or alcahuetas. The next title moves on to sorcerers and diviners, crimes closely connected to alcahuetería (see chapter 2).
As these complex medieval legal definitions show, procuring encompassed a broad range of activities. The Siete Partidas blended together what archival court cases show to be the very different functions of male and female procurers. Across Europe, grammarians used Latin terms to define alcahuetería and demonstrated confusion about gender roles within this profession. In a Castilian dictionary dating from 1516, alcahuete is simply defined as lenocino. In 1570, alcahuetería is equated with rufianismo in Italian. A Spanish-English dictionary from 1591 translates alcahueta as a bawd or lena.24 In their interactions with litigators, courts viewed procurers as criminals.
In contrast to procurers, the Siete Partidas do not provide a simple definition for the women who made their income from sexual commerce. While they are written and, therefore, acknowledged as a category, their legal status is ambiguous and obscured, even in this most basic, fundamental Spanish law code. While making them indecipherable as actual criminals, this semi-erasure also suggests the importance of a grassroots social or moral understanding of these women’s acts and reputations, which may or may not show up in the surviving documentation. Specific case studies underscore their illegible textual identity.
Even the terminology used in legal codes, royal decrees, court cases, and witness statements varies widely and often contradicts itself. Castilian King Enrique III in the 1398 Cortes de Toro made a distinction between “putas públicas [public whores],” clarifying that rameras were on the other hand “encubiertas [secret whores].”25 As private concubines, rameras had to pay a larger tax because they were thought to make more money working with a select clientele outside the public brothel.26 The first time this word appears in a Spanish dictionary was in Antonio de Nebrija’s 1495 vocabulary of Spanish and Latin words, where interestingly Nebrija defines ramera as a “puta onesta [honest whore]” or, in Latin, meretrix. The same definition continued in the 1505 and 1516 dictionaries, where the entries for puta continue to equate this word with ramera or meretrix.27 Therefore, if a public whore equates to an honest whore, the definitions of ramera had changed from the late fourteenth century to the sixteenth century. Despite the unstable terminology, a classification emerges: public women and brothel workers (implying sexual accessibility to all men) contrasted with secret or semimonogamous concubines. Of course, this distinction matters only when everyone could publicly acknowledge the existence and functioning of the legal brothel. In the more ambiguous American context, Spanish officials in the New World frequently applied the term mujeres públicas to a wide variety of women.
While panderers had a clear punitive threat applied to their actions, public women and concubines did not—their crimes faced moral not criminal sanction. The authorities attempted to legislate over women’s clothes, hair, jewelry, and other markers to make a clear public distinction between sexually controlled women and women perceived as promiscuous.28 For example, in this society only young virgin girls traditionally wore their hair uncovered and displayed its beauty. A covered head signified a sexually active adult woman. But women labeled whores also took pride in showing off their beautiful loose hair, rejecting the standard expectations for a secluded married woman’s appearance.29 The crown often failed in enforcing sumptuary laws or policing fashion. The fact that early-modern women with virtuous reputations imitated the official dress designated for whores has confounded historians since the nineteenth century. Historians, assuming that all women in the past also bought into the official condemnations of non–sexually conforming women, could not grasp why some honorable women actually wanted to emulate scandalous women’s appearance and dress.30 In fact, literary sources such as La Lozana Andaluza (introduction) and La Celestina (chapter 2) portray sixteenth-century courtesans as the cosmetologists of their day, helping women in the arts of hair dye, makeup, facial hair removal, care of their hands, and even dental health.
One fascinating medieval definition does a better job than the sumptuary laws in defining these women, even if it probably misunderstands their lives completely: rameras were “women who don’t spin,” a definition perhaps inspired by La Lozana’s rejection of this feminine task.31 In other words, whores, unlike all other women, neither made their living nor just passed their time by doing needlework. They rejected the essential task of a genteel or hardworking woman.
BROTHELS IN SPAIN
The Siete Partidas’s harsh condemnation of panderers and procuresses may derive from royal patronage of legal brothels, even in this early era of Spanish history. Independent mediators competed with the municipal, crown, and even church ambitions to capitalize on sex for sale.32 Preceding the opening of legal brothels, licensed sex workers operated in Seville and Cordoba and paid taxes to the Islamic rulers.33 Under Christian rule, crown or municipalities or even religious institutions tended toward owning brothels instead of taxing independent women. From approximately 1300 until the late sixteenth century, regulated legal brothels flourished throughout the re-Christianized Iberian Peninsula. Valencia and Barcelona had documented brothels from the early fourteenth century, while Castilian monarchs regulated this institution at least from the mid-fifteenth century.34 They viewed legal brothels as an opportunity to enclose male violence and competitiveness into a bounded area.35 Street-level commercial sex led medieval urban dwellers to make legal complaints mainly because it caused neighborhood violence.36 Brothel regulations stipulated that men had to surrender their weapons upon entering, and thus this separated space served as a possible deterrent to street battles.
Politically, the grant of a brothel license helped unstable or contestable monarchs (including Ferdinand and Isabella) reward those subjects who served them loyally. Those who received monopolistic access to the bounteous brothel revenue could hand down this privilege to their heirs, and thus the recipients of these privileges jealously defended the institution.37 Access to prized crown brothel monopolies actually predated the Christian reconquest. For example, the great “whoremonger” Alonso Yáñez Fajardo received enormous benefits from a royal grant to the brothel monopoly for numerous cities, including all of Granada, six years before its official conquest by the Catholic monarchs.38
Financially, regulating sex work by legalizing only one official brothel in each town or city created many opportunities for the judiciary to collect a huge income in fines, even beyond the steady taxed income brothels generated as successful businesses.39 Iberian brothels made their large profits not for their residents but for their managers, the monarchs, and the municipalities that later received their revenue.40 Collecting fines on all possible minor infractions against the strict brothel regulations generated enough income to fund public offices. Overall, regulated sex work allowed late-medieval and early-modern Iberian authorities to attain the perfect balance between an apparently benign paternalistic tolerance and the possibility of harsher but lucrative enforcement of laws at any whim.41 Legal brothels extended the reach of both Iberian monarchs and town governments and helped consolidate their authority in this era of growth in crown legal institutions. Looking ahead to the second half of this chapter, apparently the Spanish crown either could not or did not want to extend this reach effectively to the Americas.
Despite the tradition of philosophical and theological writings that encouraged humans to control their baser passions, and the view of sexuality as an opposing force to spirituality, in medieval and early-modern Iberia and across Europe, the general population, church, and state voiced a discourse of brothels as a public good, especially from the mid-fourteenth century to the early sixteenth century.42 As a result, clients who visited legal state or municipal brothels received sexual services at a reasonable cost. This society viewed nonmonogamous,
