Architecture, Mobility, Segregation: The Everyday Spatial Practices of Women in Early Modern Venice

FAIN: FEL-273338-21

Saundra Weddle
Drury University (Springfield, MO 65802-3712)

Research and preparation of a book studying the opposing forces of mobility and confinement of women in Venice during the 16th-18th centuries.

This urban history examines the everyday spatial practices of nuns, sex workers, and widows in early modern Venice, where marginalized status presented obstacles to and opportunities for women’s agency. Convents, brothels, and widows’ residences established a certain alterity for their inhabitants, but analysis of residential, institutional, and professional nodes and networks reveals the instability of this "otherness.” Relying on archival sources, I produce digital maps that establish, assess, and present gendered patterns of mobility, interconnectivity, and segregation in the context of daily life. More than mere illustrations, they serve as spatial and relational texts, conveying embodied experience in ways that analog maps or even site visits cannot. Focusing on mechanisms of control, tactics for asserting agency, and ways the built environment conditions activities, a broad range of case studies produces a critical reading of Venice as dynamic space rather than static place.

Associated Products

The Brothel and Beyond: An Urban History of the Sex Trade in Early Modern Venice (Book)
Title: The Brothel and Beyond: An Urban History of the Sex Trade in Early Modern Venice
Author: Saundra Weddle
Abstract: 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 and photographs of key sites, 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.
Year: 2025
Primary URL: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-10021-0.html?srsltid=AfmBOopn4HwRVsIopnO9EI-286BGVFm88Jy1TEw-kp16LDHNuuP53Bzd
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-0-271-1002
Copy sent to NEH?: No

The Place-Based Networks of Sex Workers in Early Modern Venice (Book Section)
Title: The Place-Based Networks of Sex Workers in Early Modern Venice
Author: Saundra Weddle
Editor: Marlee Couling
Editor: Elizabeth Cohen
Abstract: The sex workers of Venice, and especially its high-end courtesans, were famous in the Renaissance and have continued ever since to attract the attention of scholars. Taking a novel approach to sex workers as a group, my larger project uses mapping to situate their activities and movements within Venice's unique urban geography. This article draws on a combination of sources from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to reconstruct how space framed interactions between these women and other urban dwellers. Although contemporaries deemed sex workers ubiquitous in the city, some locations and pathways, where they habitually encountered clients and other Venetians, became associated with the trade. These include not only the two official brothels, but also sex workers’ private dwellings and other sites in zones where complementary businesses, low rents, and intersections of circulation networks of various scales served their needs. Examples from the parishes of San Cassiano, Santa Maria Formosa, and San Giovanni Novo, and the district of Cannaregio show that sex work was a highly social, publicly visible business and that the city served as the sex worker's workplace. Alleys, quays, bridges, porticos, and peripheral squares anchored her interactions with procurers and, more often, procuresses, as well as servants, lodging house matrons, bathhouse attendants, tavern and inn keepers, porters, gondoliers, clients, and others who moved in and out of her orbit. The places where they met, generally overlooked by architectural and urban histories that privilege the monumental over the vernacular, produced a spatial syntax of sex work that integrated the trade into everyday neighborhood life.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/nonelite-womens-networks-across-the-early-modern-world/33942500865F5F336B537B2B6E00F641
Publisher: University of Amsterdam Press
Book Title: Non-Elite Women's Networks across the Early Modern World
ISBN: 9789048553754

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