How to Be a Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty & Female Creativity

by Jill Burke

Baths as places for illicit sex were a continent-wide phenomenon, but lesbianism was especially associated in the European mind with Turkish baths.28 Nicolas de Nicolay (1517–83) documented his impression of the baths when he went to Istanbul with a French delegation in 1551. He recorded his travels in an illustrated book, The Navigations and Voyages Made in Turkey, translated into Italian in 1576, nine years after the first French edition. One of his more memorable descriptions is of the tendency of Turkish women to have sex with each other in baths: ‘In every season, Turkish women delight in going to the baths,’ he says, ‘both to maintain their health, as well as to make their life more pleasant.’