The Times of Whoredom

Abstract This chapter and the next examine how theories of sexual time inform and unsettle narrative knowing. Chapter 3 begins by excavating the multiple and often conflicting temporal logics that underwrite the governing paradigms (‘the necessary evil’, ‘life cycles’, ‘characters, persons, & types’, ‘the fallen woman’, and by way of binary opposition ‘virginity’ and ‘chastity’) through which early modern whoredom has been brought into clarity, both in that era and our own. Reading seminal accounts of prostitution by Augustine, Aquinas, and Martin Luther alongside a range of other primary and secondary materials, this chapters reveals both the extraordinary cultural labour necessary to demarcate the early modern whore and the various fissures and contradictions upon which any such knowledge depends.