Profs and Pints Online presents: “Saints and Harlots,” a look at women and sexuality in premodern Europe, with Amy Leonard, associate professor of history at Georgetown University and author of Nails in the Wall: Catholic Nuns in Reformation Germany.

The Madonna-Whore complex is often used to describe the limited options for women in the premodern Western world. One was either the perfect, saintly, subservient wife/nun or the witchy, sexualized, threatening harridan. History allows for more variation than that, however, and women played multiple sexual roles, though the saint-sinner dichotomy was a powerful model.

Come hear Professor Amy Leonard of Georgetown, a favorite of many students there, discuss women and sexuality in medieval and early modern Europe. She’ll focus especially on nuns and prostitutes, to show their social utility, religious justifications, and changing role in culture. The two subsets of the population were often conflated, in large part because of their sexualized identity – either shunning sex or wallowing in it – and because desires to control or reform these groups crossed religious, geographical, political, and chronological boundaries.

Professor Leonard will talk about how premodern Europe generally accepted the one-sex model, where the female body considered just a misformed, inverted man whose uterus was a uniquely female organ that roamed around her body, desiring sex and causing hysteria.  You’ll learn how prostitution was legal before the 16th century, and how the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages owned numerous brothels and often used taxes on prostitutes to support nuns in their convents. And you’ll hear the tales of figures such Veronica Franco, subject of the movie Dangerous Beauty, a famous courtesan in 16th century Venice who secured funding for Venetian wars by sleeping with the king of France. (Ticket: $12. A recorded version of this talk will remain available online.)

Profs & Pints Online: Saints and Harlots