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.