itter
years of Catharine von Bora's active, helpful, noble life.

While a handful of earnest women were studying, thinking, praying,
fashionable women in Germany were doing just what fashionable women
always have done everywhere in all ages, just what they were doing long
ago in Athens when Aristophanes made clever sketches of them, they were
eating and drinking sumptuously; riding, visiting, backbiting, getting
their daughters married, and trying to outdo each other in giving costly
entertainments. It was this mode of life that necessitated the pretty
dresses, "as many as two a day" against which Geiler of Kaisersberg
railed.

Every little German principality had its court, and in nearly all these
courts corruption reigned. The Italian or the Frenchman may be
gracefully, even captivatingly wicked. But in a German sensuality is
invariably coarse, pronounced, and revolting. There is something
fiercely Titanic in a German's embrace of evil. The student, who,
leaving the doings of kings and queens, untangles thread by thread the
biography of lesser men and women connected with these old German
courts, has before him entertainment for a lifetime. In each of these
small court circles he will find stories of sin, passion, and remorse,
beside which the tales of a D'Annunzio, a Balzac, or a Zola seem mere
inchoate records of childish bravado.

The enormous effect of vice upon the women of the Renaissance and
Reformation periods cannot be ignored in any true picture of the time.
Man's lust was an accepted factor of everyday life. Very early, as we
have noted in a preceding chapter, houses of prostitution were
established and regulated by law. The woman superintendent put in charge
of such a house was required to swear formally that she would "serve the
best interests of the city" loyally; _i. e._, she must increase the
revenues. She swore to "induce to come in as many girls as possible."
The inmates of a house of prostitution continued to wear a distinctive
dress whenever they appeared on the streets. This uniform served a
double purpose. It was a convenience to the men, and it prevented the
girls from escaping easily. When a distinguished visitor came to town,
he was, even during the Reformation period, sometimes taken, soon after
his arrival, to one of these houses by the chief magistrate, and the
prettiest girls sometimes richly dressed, sometimes naked were brought
before him for choice. Even in some private houses a simi