Improper Activities. Along with premarital sexual activity, people engaged in, and were often punished for, a range of other sexual activities and moral offenses during this period. Particularly after the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, religious and political authorities attempted to ban dancing, spinning bees (where young men and women gathered in the evenings to chat while the women worked), and clothing styles that revealed too much of the body or bodily contours. In many southern European cities, women charged with improper behavior such as flirting might be locked up in institutions established by church or city authorities for repentant prostitutes and other "fallen women." Such houses, often dedicated to the biblical figure Mary Magdalene, also began to admit women who were regarded as being in danger of becoming prostitutes, generally poor women with no male relatives; the ordinances stated explicitly that the...