Vetula, Old Whore

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Vetula, Old Whore

The "Old Whore" is a conventional literary figure that the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period inherited from antiquity. She can be described briefly as the pro-curess who, after having sold her own charms, now sells those of others. Her main characteristics—her ugliness, her bawdiness, and her multiple talents of healer, specialist in women's bodies, and organizer of love affairs—remained more or less constant right up until the eighteenth century.

Such women, known individually as a vetula or collectively as vetulae, were frequently depicted in Latin literature. The most influential and popular example of this type is certainly the old bawd Dipsas, a central figure in Ovid's Art of Love (c. 3 bce). An expert in magical arts and aphrodisiac charms, Dipsas is one of the models of the famous "Old Woman" in Jean de Meun's Romance of the Rose, the thirteenth-century French poem about a Lover's quest for the Rose. De Meun's character becomes herself an inspiration for both the Prioress in the "General Prologue" and the Wife of Bath in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The Rose's Old Woman is a repentant whore who invokes her past experience as a prostitute to teach young ladies how to behave with men. In his Testament, the fifteenth-century poet François Villon places a "pretty armourer" (Belle Heaulmière) in the same situation, lamenting her lost beauty and advising the young generation to strip men out of their possessions while they are still in the prime of life and beautiful. Another archetypal figure of the procuress is Celestina in the Book of Calisto, Melibea, and the Old Whore Celestina by Fernando de Rojas, published at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Like many of her counterparts, she does her business under the cover of respectable trades, for instance selling herbs, ointments, makeup, sewing articles, or practicing crafts like embroidering or dressmaking.

Such more or less legitimate activities allowed these matrons to gain access to the privacy of the woman they wanted to introduce to a potential lover in spite of her parent's vigilance or her husband's jealousy. Under this cover, they could also take young women in their house as apprentices or workers who then sold themselves as courtesans or simple whores. Among the skills of the "old whore" are those typical of the traditional "wise woman," the healer and specialist in the human body. She knows how to cure diseases with the help of various herbs, especially ailments related to love and the difficult situations in which sexually active women can find themselves. She concocts aphrodisiac philters and is familiar with contraceptive or abortive practices. As a midwife, she is an expert not only in pregnancy and childbirth, but also in restoring lost virginities. Since magic charms or spells could be involved in the success of her interventions, she could be depicted as a sorceress and even as a witch who signed a pact with the devil. The most complete image of the old matron character in the diversity of her representations can be found in the anonymous fifteenth-century Gospel Distaffs, in which six such matrons meet with their neighbors in order to transmit the fruits of their experience. In a spirit of mockery, the combination of their respective characteristics highlights their love of food, wine, and lust, their irregular relationships (procuress, several times widowed and now married to a young man, concubine of a priest), and their suspicious knowledge of midwifery, healing recipes, and heretical doctrines.

Like the other literary depictions of the old bawd, their portrait corresponds to that of the marginal woman in judicial records. In his account of the margins of society in late fifteenth-century Paris, Bronislaw Geremek exposes the cases of procuresses tried at the Châtelet who provided love philters to men and women, used a variety of spells, and even appealed to the devil (1987, p. 228).

The vetula can also be related to the role ascribed to elderly women in many traditional societies. On the one hand, in a context in which traditions are mainly transmitted orally, vetulae are respected as the Repositary of domestic knowledge. Freed from the burden of fertility by menopause, old women enjoy a status they did not have before. As the example of voodoo priestesses shows, they can even be admitted to the sphere of the sacred normally reserved to men. This new access to a sort of authority is accompanied, however, with a representation of the old woman as aggressive, domineering, and lustful. This last characteristic provides an occasion for holding her up to ridicule, an attitude which is clearly conveyed by the literary tradition of the vetula.

see also Courtesans; Prostitution.