Prostitution and Subjectivity in Late Medieval Germany by Jamie Page;

Author:Jamie Page; [Page, Jamie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192607560
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2021-02-10T00:00:00+00:00

‘Dear Margrette, I know well you won’t say anything about it, which is why I want to tell you’

These dramatic scenes appear to have been followed by a period of relative quiet in the brothel. Both Anna and Margrette refer to the passing of a few weeks, while their statements also suggest that although the other women in the brothel knew Els had been ill, they did not yet know that she had been pregnant or had lost her child. As Els herself testified, evidently in response to a direct question, ‘the child came from her, but she does not know if it was a boy or a girl, and nobody was with her but the brothel-keeper [Barbara]’ (Do kam das Kind von ir, aber Sie wiß nit ob es ein knab oder medlin und nyemant bey ir wer gewesn dan die frauenwirtin).72 Only one other person seems to have had any knowledge of this scene. This was Barbel von Esslingen, who in Els’s own statement is described bringing water to Els after her miscarriage and seeing the baby’s body on a bench before witnessing Barbara dispose of it in a latrine. Els claimed that Barbel then ‘went down to the women, and said to them “oh dear women, what a miserable thing I have seen”’, and when asked what this was, had replied ‘it is not the time for me to say’ (Do wer dieselb Barbel wer hinab zu den frauen komen, und zu den gesprochen, O lieben frauen was herzen leydes han ich gesehen. Befragten die sie, was das were. Antwort sie, es ist nich zeit, das ichs sag).

This silence persisted for a short time, an indication perhaps of Barbara’s initial success in preventing most of the women in the brothel from finding out exactly what had happened. At this stage—or so he later claimed—Lienhart also appears to have been unaware of Els’s pregnancy and Barbara’s role in ending it. This was to change rapidly around the time of the Whitsun fair, however, when a set of converging factors contributed to knowledge of what had happened becoming public. The fair is mentioned in several of the women’s statements and was a major annual event in the city’s calendar, drawing in textile merchants from across southern Germany and Italy.73 This undoubtedly meant a busy time for the brothel, when a higher than usual number of visitors made it harder to contain the spread of talk and rumour—a set of circumstances the women within it were able to capitalize on.

The first step in this process saw knowledge of Els’s child spread among the other women in the brothel. As Els herself testified, only she, Barbara, and Barbel von Esslingen knew initially that she had miscarried. This was to change when Els revealed what had happened in two private conversations reported by Margrette von Biberach and Anna von Ulm. Margrette’s statement suggests that Els was prompted to speak to her by a visit to the brothel by the council’s men, Stählin and Bernhart.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.