Sex Workers and Salvation in the Renaissance

Pope Pius II once quipped that Florence was a city of merchants, or, perhaps, prostitutes, playing on the similarity between mercatrice and meretrice in Italian. A weak joke, certainly, but it reflected the city’s reputation as a place with an abundance of female sex workers. Florence in the 15th century may have been a city of meretrici, but it was also a city of nuns, with up to ten per cent of its female population living in nunneries. A few women knew both lives.