Saundra Weddle, "The Brothel and Beyond: An Urban History of the Sex Trade in Early Modern Venice" (Penn State UP, 2026)

Jan 28, 2026

Saundra Weddle, professor of architecture who studies how buildings shape social life, discusses her book on Venice’s sex trade. She traces how sex work spread beyond municipal brothels into alleys, gondola landings, taverns, and bathhouses. Conversations cover mapping and archival methods, neighborhood patterns, networks of workers and intermediaries, and how urban space shaped mobility and everyday practices.

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INSIGHT

Built Environment Shapes Women's Agency

Venice's built environment both shaped and recorded women's activities in ways archival texts alone miss.
Mapping vernacular urban spaces reveals how sex workers were embedded in everyday neighborhood life.

INSIGHT

Mapping Reveals Hidden Urban Patterns

Digital layering of historical maps lets patterns of sex work concentration emerge across Venice's labyrinthine streets.
Vernacular urban history exposes everyday places that traditional monument-focused studies ignore.

INSIGHT

Hierarchy Within The Sex Trade

The sex trade formed a clear social hierarchy from elite courtesans to street solicitors with different economic roles.
Evidence for training or 'apprenticeship' exists but lacks detail on actual practices.

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Saundra Weddle joins fellow Venetianist Jana Byars to talk about her pathbreaking new release, The Brothel and Beyond: An Urban History of the Sex Trade in Early Modern Venice (Penn State UP, 2026). This book 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.

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