The Brothel and Beyond

The Brothel and Beyond deepens our understanding of women’s engagement in urban life through a close study of Venice’s sex trade. Centering questions of gender, agency, and mobility, it reveals how sex workers were embedded in the social and spatial fabric of the city.

From the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries, the Venetian government attempted to control commercial sex by segregating it in municipal brothels in Rialto and later by minimizing the public’s contact with sex workers, limiting their profits, and cracking down on recruitment. These decentralized efforts proved ineffective, and women who performed this labor lived and worked throughout the city. This book traces the diffusion of sex work from the brothels to the alleys, gondola landings, taverns, bathhouses, and peripheral squares of Venice. Saundra Weddle uses legislation, criminal records, contemporary chronicles, and other archival sources to reconstruct the networks of sex workers, procuresses, clients, landlords, and others who facilitated or profited from their labor. Using maps, three-dimensional models, and renderings, Weddle demonstrates how the built environment both constrained and enabled women’s practices, offering an alternative urban history that foregrounds embodied experiences and vernacular spaces.

By assigning new meanings to everyday locations and spatial conditions, this study challenges monument- and elite-centered narratives of Venice and redefines the place of women within its urban history. It will be of interest to scholars of architectural and urban history, women and gender studies, early modern social history, and Italian studies.

“From the highly original perspective of built forms and local geography, Weddle’s study reconstructs the lively sex trade of Renaissance Venice in new, broader dimensions. Assembling a rich array of primary sources and offering many maps and images, the book moves beyond the often-mentioned, but few, Venetian courtesans to trace the movements and agency of a varied population of women and men in distinctive urban spaces.”—Elizabeth S. Cohen, York University

“Mapping the spaces of Venice’s early modern sex trade far beyond the official brothel with sensitivity and insight, Saundra Weddle’s book reveals a fresh, illuminating history that puts at center stage both the women and the material qualities of sites of encounter in the city (alleys, bridges, and porticoes).”—Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw, author of Cleaning Up Renaissance Italy: Environmental Ideals and Urban Practice in Genoa and Venice

Saundra Weddle is Professor of Architectural and Urban History and Theory at Drury University. She is the editor and translator of The Chronicle of Le Murate and coeditor of Convent Networks in Early Modern Italy.

Art History & Architecture

           Architectural History

           Early Modern

           European

Gender Studies

History

           Early Modern

           European

Medieval and Early Modern Studies

           Early Modern Art and Architecture