No Way to Run a Brothel? Prostitution and Policey in the Late Medieval Holy Roman Empire

Abstract

Abstract This article addresses the relationship between civic prostitution and the concept of ‘gute Policey’ in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. It takes as its object of discussion a series of so-called Frauenhausordnungen (brothel ordinances or brothel rules) from the cities of Nuremberg, Nördlingen, Strasbourg, Constance and Ulm. Previous discussions have characterized Frauenhausordnungen from these cities as members of a coherent genre of regulations, a grouping which this article contests. By placing the creation of new brothel regulations in these cities in the larger context of the emergence of ‘gute Policey’ as a crucial category within domestic administration, the article seeks to expose civic authorities’ moral ambiguities about the role of prostitution in society, which originated well before the Reformation, often seen as the key factor in the vanishing of public prostitution from the urban landscape in the early modern era.