“Against Her Will and Crying Out”: Poverty and Human Trafficking in Late-Medieval Europe

During the Reformation of the sixteenth century, the status of prostitution evolved from being seen as a trade or a profession, however marginalized, into a source of malignant temptation; the prostitute ceased to be a sex worker who sought to alleviate her economic insecurity through commercial sex, and became a vain, selfish woman who desired wealth and opulence, and who led upstanding married men astray and thus threatened their souls and the moral and civic orders of a reformed society. Sex workers became the literal embodiment of the decadence and corruption that threatened to engulf the world as epitomized by the richly attired Whore of Babylon astride the seven-headed Beast. Yet, the study of late-medieval human trafficking makes clear that vanity, selfishness, and spiritual malignance had little to do with prostitution and the commercial sex industry. Instead, the commercial sex industry thrived upon poverty, limited employment opportunities for women, and attitudes of male entitlement, all of which led to vulnerability, and thus to victimization, as women and girls struggled to alleviate their economic duress.