The Terms of Whoredom

Abstract Chapter 1 locates the whore in the history of material texts. The chapter begins with a basic problem of definition: who—or what—was connoted by ‘prostitute’, ‘whore’, ‘strumpet’, ‘trull’, and other related words in early modern England? While scholars have long positioned ‘whore’ as the governing term for illicit female behaviour in the period, the chapter demonstrates that early moderns struggled mightily to achieve any such categorical clarity. Central to this argument is my reading of an emergent lexicographic project, one whose pointedly experimental ethos fostered a range of textual practices that concomitantly informed and unsettled the terms of everyday life. Using texts like John Rider’s Bibliotheca Scholastica (1589), the chapter demonstrates how efforts to stabilize the whore’s meanings in dictionaries produced a far broader field of meanings and relations than previously acknowledged. Cataloguing over seven hundred ‘terms of whoredom’, the chapter then examines how the richness and complexity of this lexicon opens to broader questions of sexual knowledge making in and across time.