Susan McDonough, an associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, gave a talk on the connections and community within the medieval Mediterranean as a part of the University of Connecticut’s Visiting Scholar in Gender & History series on Thursday, April 11. This series began in 1998 with support from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies program.
According to her biography on UMBC’s website, McDonough is an author, with her first book, titled “Witnesses, Neighbors, and Community in Late Medieval Marseille,” having been published in 2013. She has also published articles in multiple historical journals. McDonough is currently writing a monograph on “exploring the role of sex workers as knowledge brokers in the port cities of the late medieval Mediterranean.”
History Department Head Mark Healey introduced the Visiting Scholar in Gender & History series before introducing Charles Lansing, an associate professor of the history department. Lansing then introduced McDonough, mentioning the prestigious journals that have published her writing.
McDonough began her talk by asking, “Can we imagine that it’s January 15, 1381?” She contextualized the history of the medieval Latin Mediterranean by setting the scene in Marseilles, France. She gave a quote cited by sex worker Caterina Danton from a court case against another sex worker named Johaneta la Brytoza for slander that could be a part of Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata:” “These old horny women, who are not worth a big donkey’s prick, are in the habit of shaving three times a month,” getting a humorous reaction from the audience.
“There is such richness in Johaneta’s words with its sexual references and ageist language,” McDonough later said. In the court document for the case, the word “prostitute” is said numerous times. “They really want you to know she’s a sex worker,” McDonough said.
McDonough mentioned the notary records that survived. “For medievalists, this is a treasure trove,” she said. However, the details of the notary records, especially for sex workers, “could be just a name and occupation.”
She acknowledged English professor and academic Saidiya Hartman, saying “My approach to medieval sex workers is indebted to Hartman” before explaining the concept of critical fabulation, which allows people to qualitatively imagine what people’s lives could have been like through information we already have that may not tell the full story.
“We must concede that there are many things we don’t know and maybe never know about these women,” McDonough said. She stressed the importance of having a critical imagination to fill in the gaps. Many constraints controlled the lives of sex workers’ dangers to them being inherent.
On the topic of sex workers’ safety and mobility, McDonough said, “There was violence in their lives, and they were not in control of their movement.” She is aware of the stigma that sex workers have and still have, saying churches ban sex workers due to their profession. “The sex workers did not accept those limitations,” she said.
The scene then changed to Valencia, Spain, in 1372 to see what other ways legal cases involving sex workers were handled. According to a document, a father accused sex workers of poisoning his son. Someone else eventually confessed that they slowly poisoned his apples and eggs. McDonough wondered if the sex workers were trying to help and not hurt when they were involved with the son. In another case, a sex worker was fined 10 euros for pulling another sex worker’s hair.
The scene then changed again to Venice and Corelone in Italy. Notarial records from those locations suggest the consideration of sex workers as providers of consumables like fishmongers and that the patrons of sex workers were “consumers of services.” When seeking notarial services, multiple sex workers had the same notary.
Now focusing on Barcelona, Spain, in 1457, McDonough said that Mediterranean women traveled together over long distances for the sake of security. She said that, fundamentally, “Sex work is a way to make money,” highlighting the other forms of work that women in the medieval Latin Mediterranean could do, such as domestic work. There were many risks to being a sex worker if not licensed by the crown of Barcelona, as they would be enslaved and exploited if caught doing sex work. There were incentives, especially financially, to participate in the institution of slavery. McDonough also said that, if fined by the crown, there was an expensive price to pay that could not be paid with money made from sex work. “Their freedom meant nothing if they were poor and couldn’t pay their fines,” she added.
“I presented you my collection of critical fabulations,” McDonough concluded. She said that while not all sex workers moved to the Latin Mediterranean, many of them did. She also noted how the surviving documents judged the morality of sex workers.
The talk was followed by a Q&A session. McDonough noted that people invest in paying for notaries and court documents by sex workers, symbolizing privilege. This, according to McDonough, refuses the notion that women in the Latin Mediterranean were oppressed by their government. “When you see a sex worker in notarial documents, they choose to self-identify as a sex worker. In fines, the legislation identifies them as sex workers,” she added.
McDonough also said, “Some women do sex work for a short time and go on to do other things,” rejecting the notion that jobs are generally permanent. In response to a question about the women traveling, McDonough noted how “Some sex workers were fined for dressing as men. They were fined not because they were sex workers but because they were dressed as men. It was safer to dress as a man than a woman when traveling.”
McDonough aims to destigmatize sex work, saying, “I’m trying to be careful about that.”