Apologies for the long absence. I've been very, very busy with other projects, including getting a story ready for publication at Strange Horizons. Now, I'm back, hopefully regularly.

A recent book about modern prostitution in Vancouver, "Red Light Neon: A History of Vancouver's Sex Trade" by Daniel Francis, also bears some striking medieval parallels. Though a history of a particular North American city's sex trade from only the 1860s to the present, the book discusses trends and assumptions that we currently share with medieval people about prostitutes. But it also shows how we see some things in a surprisingly different light than in the Middle Ages.

Let's start with prostitution and ethnicity. On pages 60-4, Francis discusses the problems that Chinatown restaurants in Vancouver had with hiring waitresses in the early part of the 20th century. Canadian immigration laws at the time made it very difficult for Chinese women to immigrate to Canada. But these businesses still needed waitresses, so they hired white women. The women were happy for the work, since they had difficulty getting jobs at the time and the wages were good. Some women did go with customers for money, though not all of them. But by the 1930s, reformers were intent on casting this arrangement as part of an epidemic of white slavery perpetrated by Chinese men. Despite a political protest by the waitresses, insisting that they were honest women not prostitutes, the city enacted a law in 1937 that made it impossible for white women to work in Chinatown.

One might examine the current hysteria over "white slavery" involving Eastern European women with a similarly jaundiced eye, especially since it ignores enforced prostitution of African immigrants in Europe. The early 20th century anti-white slavery movement seemed to have as solid a case as anti-slavery activists today and similarly ignored non-white women. Yet, as Francis notes, no actual cases of white slavery networks were ever confirmed in the early 20th century.

The problem for the waitresses was seen to be that white women working in Chinatown were corrupted sexually by Chinese men. The obvious hypocrisy here, of course, is that white men patronized non-white prostitutes all of the time. But though the reformers fulminated against young white men being corrupted by Chinatown, they couldn't actually stop them from going there--or at least, didn't care enough to enact laws to that effect. Not so women. Early in the century, Vancouver enacted a vagrancy law (the infamous "Vag. C") that forbade a young woman from being out in public unless she could "give a good account of herself" (Francis 70). That's right: until 1972, Vancouver actually had a law on its books that made it illegal for a woman to be out in public and inferred that a woman out alone for no definite reason was probably a whore. Definitely a low point in Canadian women's rights.

Sounds medieval? It is. David Nirenberg has written extensively about the role given to Christian prostitutes in late medieval Aragon of maintaining the barrier between religions. In one such case, he talks about a late-14th-century Christian prostitute who screamed rape after she accidentally took on a Muslim client. He had apparently dressed enough like a Christian that she didn't realize his true religion and only noticed at the last moment that he was circumcised. This story was obviously a little dodgy since Muslims, Jews and Christians dressed differently (as mandated by both law and custom). But had the prostitute not taken this legal tack, she might well have been burned at the stake alongside her Muslim client. Voluntary relations between Christian women and Muslim men in medieval Spain were punished in the same way as heresy and probably for similar reasons. Only by crying rape could a Christian woman escape such a charge.

Just as the laws against white women working in Vancouver's Chinatown most likely represented more fears of cultural contamination than sexual contamination, so Nirenberg has asserted that the laws against the sexual mixing of religions reflected a fear in all three religions--Christian, Jewish and Muslim--that mixing would dilute their respective cultures and encourage an assimilation that would result in the disappearance of each as a distinct religious and ethnic group. This was the dark side of Iberian convivencia. Though it has been portrayed (fairly) as an example of medieval tolerance in allowing all three religions to coexist with their own laws, customs and living space, convivencia was also based on mutual intolerance and institutionalized inequality based on a hierarchy of religions. That intolerance and inequality were no more or less in Al-Andalus than in Christian Spain.

But legally, this intolerance was enforced only when it came to women from the dominant religion. Heath Dillard in "Daughters of the Reconquest: Women in Castilian Town Society" discusses the presence of the barragana, a sort of temporary wife who was often Muslim, in frontier Castilian society. Young men who wanted a longer-term relationship than a prostitute took on such mistresses from the lower classes. If a barragana were to bear a child by her lover, he would generally marry her to legitimize the child as his heir. If she were Muslim, she would convert to Christianity. Thus, the tradition of the barragana was a way for Muslim women to transcend their class and religion.

Rich Jews of 13th century Aragon also took Muslim concubines. Authorities did not complain until they were rumored to take Christian concubines as well. But as such men were favorites of the King of Aragon, they were above the law, both Jewish and Christian. So, they got away with it, while increasing Christian resentment against the general Jewish community, according to Yom Tov Assis in The Golden Age of Aragonese Jewry: Community and Society in the Crown of Aragon, 1213-1327.

The 13th century Kingdom of Aragon had other parallels with 19th and early 20th century British Columbia. Francis talks about the many black prostitutes (most of them American) who came to Vancouver to ply their trade during the early history of the city. These women were tolerated where the white waitresses of Chinatown were not. Tortosa, a frontier city in southern Catalonia, had a similar situation involving its Muslim quarter, called the "moreria". This quarter was notorious for its gambling and prostitution. Christians frequently went there to engage in such activities, despite the thundering from pulpits of contemporary reformers. So entrenched was prostitution in Tortosa that it was tacitly endorsed both by the Kings of Aragon and the lords of the city at the time, the military religious order of the Knights Templar.

In 1280, for example, the King ordered the monks of the Temple to rebuild the public baths (banyas). These baths were patronized by all three religions and were universally considered by medieval Europeans to be used by prostitutes to recruit and meet patrons. Usamah ibn Munqidh, in his 12th century memoirs, generates a rather infamous rant about the alleged looseness of Frankish women in Crusader Palestine from an encounter in a Palestinian bath with a Frankish friend and a Frankish woman who was most likely a prostitute.

The Knights Templar in Tortosa had to obey the King whether they approved of prostitution or not. But they showed their own tacit approval of the trade by exacting a lezda tax on a group of Tortosan prostitutes (sarracenis meretricibus) prior to 1261. This type of transaction went beyond simply turning a blind eye and profiting by it--those groups that paid taxes to the Temple could expect both legal and military protection in exchange.

There is, by the way, no evidence that the Templars participated in this trade themselves. In fact, relations with a woman would earn a Templar brother severe penalties, but no mention is made in the order's Rule of punishing the woman. If anything, the Rule stipulated that a cast-off wife could reclaim a wayward husband from the Order, which refused to take in and shield men looking to escape familial or other responsibilities.

One large difference between medieval and modern attitudes emerges late in "Red Light Neon", however. This comes during the section where Francis discusses the now infamous mystery of the missing sex trade workers of Vancouver. Since 1971, some seventy women, most of them street prostitutes on the Downtown East Side, have disappeared in Vancouver. And they continue to disappear, if recent signs posted in the area are any indication. Since life on the Downtown East Side is a hard one that uses people up quickly, police were initially slow to make a connection between the different cases. In 2002, Robert Pickton, a pig farmer from Port Coquitlam, was arrested and eventually charged with the murders of 27 of the missing women. Pickton's trial has been going on for months now. He is, of course, innocent until proven guilty, but there seems little doubt of the eventual verdict (there is a literal mountain of evidence against him). Even so, initial police hopes that Pickton's arrest would solve the whole mystery have since fallen by the wayside. Pickton is hardly the only monster out there.

Now, the Middle Ages saw its share of monsters. It had its Gilles de Rais and Elizabeth Bathorys (though technically, Bathory is Early Modern). One of the creepiest medieval monsters of all, the cannibalistic Grendel in Beowulf, is given descent from Cain himself.

But there is a crucial difference between how we view our serial killers of today and how medieval people viewed those among them who stalked and killed victims in a similar manner for long periods of time. We glorify these killers to a certain extent. We see them as individualism taken to its logical and horrific limit. We obsess over them in shows like CSI. We hold them up as antiheroes like Hannibal the Cannibal in books and films like Silence of the Lambs. We even see them as reformers. Both Jack the Ripper and Robert Pickton have been cast in this way, as men who showed up the hypocrisy and rottenness of society in a particular city. Until recently, profilers saw serial killers as almost always white males, as if this particular type of crime could be reserved only for those at the top of our society who were severely dysfunctional.

Medieval people did no such thing. Serial killers in the Middle Ages were regarded completely and utterly as outsiders and outlaws. We see them as such today, but it had a different tone in the Middle Ages. Medieval people held up the group as always more important than the individual. Medieval Europeans (and not just Europeans) were strongly communal in their thinking. Individualism was bad. Not only did it go against society, it went against God. Thus, Grendel is a monster not just because he attacks society, but because he lives outside of it. He has only one kin, his mother (I suppose the anonymous author of Beowulf couldn't quite imagine even a monster with no kin whatsoever). He does not participate in the intricate system of communal feasting, fighting and enforced generosity of the Danes. His existence outside of society is his biggest crime and it makes perfect sense to the medieval mind that he is, therefore, also a murderous cannibal who attacks and slaughters warriors in the dead of night.

Similarly, Gilles de Rais (who may or may not have been guilty of the crimes leveled against him) and Elizabeth Bathory were outlaws as well. They used their nobility to evade punishment for their crimes. It's no surprised that they most closely resemble the classic serial killer of modern times, since they had a similar reason for being. They represented nobility gone bad. But unlike the modern serial killer, they were punished for their crimes specifically because even the nobility could not escape divine justice (though Bathory's family influence did gain her perpetual imprisonment rather than the death penalty). Nobles might live near the top of earthly society, but only God is at the top of the medieval pyramid. Today, we have a much more personal view of the relationship between God and humanity. Church and state have been separated. So, we no longer can subordinate those at the top to that kind of authority.

Which is better? I don't know. Society changes over time, after all, because the good old days, as Billy Joel once put it, weren't always good. It's interesting to note, though, that our attitudes toward prostitutes haven't changed much, but our attitudes toward those who prey on them have.