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 women's lives in early modern Italy, explores Venice's sex trade and its place in the city's urban fabric. She maps where sex work happened, traces networks of workers, procuresses, clients and landlords, and shows how everyday streets, bathhouses, gondola landings and taverns shaped mobility and social life.

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INSIGHT

Space Shapes Social Life

Saundra Weddle links human activity and relationships to the built environment to reveal how space shapes behavior.
She uses architectural history to trace women's everyday experiences in Venice's sex trade across neighborhoods.

INSIGHT

Mapping Reveals Hidden Patterns

Weddle maps scattered archival records and layers them digitally to reveal spatial patterns invisible on the ground.
Her vernacular urban-history approach reframes the sex trade as embedded in neighborhood geographies.

INSIGHT

Hierarchy And Silent Majority

The Venetian sex trade composed a hierarchy from elite courtesans to street solicitors with differing visibility and documentation.
Street-based women left few firsthand records, so legal and fiscal sources must be read spatially to recover their lives.

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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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