In London’s Southwark, on the south bank of the medieval Thames, stood a row of buildings called the “stews.” Nominally public baths, they were in fact licensed and taxed brothels under the authority of the crown and the bishop. The women licensed by the bishop, the lord of the manor, were known as the “Winchester geese,” and they received customers from London citizens to provincial pilgrims. Medieval Christian society preached sex as sin while never letting go of prostitution as a social safety valve. The double structure of ideal and practice is the skeleton running through more than a thousand years of European sexual history.

The history of sexuality in Europe covers the development of sexual norms, institutions, and practices from the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century to the early twentieth century. This article covers the formation of Christian sexual norms, the medieval licensed brothel, modern marriage and surveillance, the Victorian double standard, and the changes of the interwar years.

The formation of Christian sexual norms

The open sexual customs nurtured by Roman culture changed rapidly after the recognition of Christianity in the fourth century. Augustine, in The City of God and the Confessions, tied sexual desire to original sin and systematised a theology that counted non-procreative sex as sinful. Intercourse was justified only within marriage and only for procreation; all else (masturbation, contraception, same-sex acts, adultery) was sin.

In the early Middle Ages the monasteries set out the ideal of an ascetic life, and clerical celibacy was institutionalised by the Gregorian reform of the late eleventh century. In secular society, Germanic and Celtic customary traditions persisted, and church ideal and lived practice stood in constant tension.

The medieval licensed brothel

Medieval Europe set up public prostitution in its towns even while professing Christian sexual norms. The logic Augustine himself recorded, that removing prostitutes from the city would throw it into disorder through unchecked desire, gave theological cover to institutional prostitution.

From the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, European cities organised public brothels: Venice, Florence (with its 1403 Onestà commission), London (the Southwark stews), Paris, Hamburg, Vienna. Prostitutes were registered, required to wear marking garments (a yellow band, a red-trimmed hood), and taxed under municipal, episcopal, or royal authority. In the Reformation, Protestant rigorism closed many public brothels (Geneva 1525, London 1546), while Catholic regions continued the institution into the nineteenth-century system of regulation.

Disease and regulation

The spread of syphilis from the late fifteenth century sharply raised social anxiety about sex. The great Naples outbreak of 1493–1494, widely attributed to the Columbian exchange, changed the practice of sexual contact across Europe.

In the nineteenth century, “regulationism,” originating in France, spread across Western Europe. Built on registration of prostitutes, compulsory periodic medical inspection, and licensed premises, it ran from Napoleonic France through Britain (the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864–1869), the German states, Italy, and Japan (licensed prostitution of the Meiji period).

The Victorian double standard

Victorian Britain (1837–1901) is the standard example of the “double standard”: a surface of sexual rigorism over a flourishing underground of sexual practice. Within the home sex was spoken of as a procreative duty and female sexual pleasure denied, while London held an estimated eighty thousand street prostitutes, and the middle-class man was effectively assumed to meet sexual demand outside the home. Steven Marcus’s The Other Victorians (1966) analysed this underground through the anonymous autobiography My Secret Life. Mass-produced pornography spread at the same time, exploiting post-industrial printing, and the 1857 Obscene Publications Act, aimed at this trade, failed to suppress the market.

The First World War and the interwar years

The First World War irreversibly changed European sexual culture. Mass venereal infection among soldiers led armies to distribute condoms officially, and the surplus of women left by the war strained traditional marriage norms. The flapper culture of the 1920s, the nightlife of Berlin, and Josephine Baker’s Paris career all symbolised the postwar opening. Weimar Germany led interwar sexual progressivism with the world’s first institute of sexology (Magnus Hirschfeld, founded 1919), gay rights organising, and sex education, until the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 destroyed the institute and sent gay men to the camps, ending the opening by force.

Toward the postwar sexual revolution

After the Second World War, alongside US-led reconstruction, the era of the sexual revolution arrived. The oral contraceptive (1960), the narrowing of obscenity doctrine, and the rise of second-wave feminism produced a shift in European sexual norms beyond the thousand-year structure inherited from the Middle Ages.

See also

• Sexual culture of ancient Rome
• History of sexuality in East Asia
• American pornography industry
• History of venereal disease in modern Japan