PhD student appears in German TV documentary
Wednesday 21 March 2012
Jamie Page, a PhD student supervised jointly by Dr Bettina Bildhauer in the School of Modern Languages and Professor Frances Andrews in the School of History, has appeared in a documentary on prostitution in the Middle Ages in Germany entitled "Käufliche Liebe im Mittelalter," made by the Munich-based production company Bilderfest for the channel SAT.1. Jamie acted as a consultant and was interviewed for the programme in the municipal archive of Nördlingen, where he spent part of last year conducting research for his thesis on legal and literary depictions of prostitution in later mediaeval Germany.
The documentary describes living and working conditions in mediaeval brothels on the basis of archived legal documents from Nördlingen, and focuses in particular upon the career of Els von Eystett, a prostitute at the centre of an abortion trial conducted in the town in the late fifteenth century. The programme, which ties in with the popular Die Wanderhure series of TV films, was aired on 28.02.12 with viewing figures of over 4 million. Further information on the documentary can be found on the SAT.1 web site.