The period between the demographic disaster of the Black Death and the reli­gious revolution of the sixteenth century saw surprisingly little change in the law and theology of sex and marriage.

This relative stability is unexpected, since one might suppose that the disappearance of between a quarter and a third of Europe’s population during the mid-fourteenth-century epidemics would have produced drastic changes in the ways society dealt with sex, mar­riage, and reproduction.

This is not to say that no changes occurred in sex and marriage law. But inno­vations during this period had more to do with the administration of the law, with its enforcement, and with the formal sources of sex and marriage law than with the basic principles, on which there seemed to be general agreement by this time.

Two developments in this period were particularly striking. One was the greatly increased activism of royal and especially municipal governments in reg­ulating sexual behavior. We have seen evidence of the beginning of this devel­opment during the preceding period, but it became far more pronounced dur­ing the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. A second notable innovation was the public takeover of the prostitution industry, notably in northern Italy, southern France, and southern Germany. In those regions, though rarely else­where, publicly owned brothels suddenly appeared in many towns—only to vanish abruptly in the sixteenth century.