Writing the Sex Industry into the Urban Life of Early Modern Venice and Rome

An interview with Hannah Johnston, Ph.D. candidate in History and 2023-24 Fulbright Fellowship Recipient

Ph.D. candidate Hannah Johnston received one of the 2023-24 Fulbright Commission Research Awards, one of the most competitive research grants granted to conduct research in Italy. 

Hannah Johnston is finishing their 3rd year in the doctoral program in the Early Modern Europe field at Stanford Department of History. Focusing on gender, sexuality, and labor in early modern Italy, their research explores the sex industry through the lenses of testamentary and material culture, urban space, and demography in early modern Venice and Rome.

Congratulations on your Fulbright Fellowship. Please tell us about your research project.

In Autumn 2023, I’ll be heading to Italy through the Fulbright to do archival research for my dissertation. I’m interested in exploring how the sex industries in early modern Rome and Venice unveil the broader socio-economic fabric of family, neighborhood, trade, parish, and community in these two important cities. Rather than focusing exclusively on sex workers, however, my research primarily studies the people (mostly women) who worked with them, that is,  the procurers who managed transactions between sex workers and their clients and negotiated the exchange of money and information for these transactions. Focusing on procurement raises new kinds of questions about how this industry functioned, and also offers a wider perspective on the relationships that characterized it. By looking at criminal records, census documents, and notarial documents like wills, I hope to identify procurers and connect them to the communities, industries, and individuals with whom they engaged. This will allow me to reconstruct the networks of often poor, working class individuals in exploring the role and centrality of sex industry in early modern European cities.

Different from most analyses on this topic, you are focusing on both Rome and Venice. How does this methodological choice contribute to the field? 

The sex industry was deeply entangled in pre-modern urban life in Europe. Any given city had different economic challenges and opportunities that influenced the growth and management of the industry. Rome and Venice are two really great cases for thinking about this: Rome’s response was informed, as in the case of its other industries, by the city’s place as the seat of the papacy, and Venice’s was informed by its republican traditions and commercial cosmopolitanism as the seat of a maritime empire. These kinds of differences are among the reasons the scholarship has tended to focus on single cities or regions, but one of the things I’m interested in is getting a sense of how cities shaped their sex trades and vice versa. Examining the sex trades of these cities together can reveal both the regional idiosyncrasies of each industry and the commonalities of urban life that are not as widely studied in early modern European historiography. 

Why is it important to study sex work in the 16th century Italy?

The early modern sex industry in Italy was really diverse; some women, like the courtesans, engaged in sex work as a profession, while many others engaged in it only sporadically to make ends meet. Despite its marginal status, sex work was also a central part of society in this period. The relationships that defined the industry — between sex workers, procurers, and clients, but also the government and the broader community — spanned every part of society, and nearly every physical part of a given city. It’s not only an essential part of the history of women’s lives, but is also a crucial and often-neglected piece of economic and social history. The history of sex work is worthy of study in its own right, but it can also tell us much about the relationships, spaces, constraints, and opportunities that defined life in early modern Italy.

You visited the Italian archives in Summer 2022. What surprised you the most during this trip?

Most of my work during my 2022 trip helped me to get familiar with the archives and think through the approaches I want to take as I get going on my dissertation research. Rome and Venice each had pretty different approaches to things like will-making, census-taking, and of course archiving, so it was great to be able to go over there and get a sense of things for myself before diving into my project. 

One thing I found that was particularly exciting, however, was a source that connected to my first-year seminar paper! I had written about this really fascinating catalog of over two hundred courtesans that was printed in Venice around 1565 that listed the names, locations, and prices of over two hundred of the city’s most famous and most expensive sex workers. Also in the catalog were one hundred and twenty-eight other people, primarily women: mothers, neighbors, servants, and others identified as procurers. One of the people I was most intrigued by, and in fact the person who appeared the most on the list, was a procurer: a woman named Chate Schiavona, who worked near a convent church in the north of Venice. She procured for 12 women — far and above what anyone else on the list was doing, and representing five percent of the women on the list — and would have brought in quite a bit of money doing so. When I came to Venice, I was hoping to find other records that might explain how this woman became a major entrepreneur in the Venetian sex industry. To my delight, I discovered that, in 1550, a woman named Catharina (“Chate” was probably her nickname) Schiavona was tried for procuring before the Provveditori alla Sanità, a magistrate tasked primarily with legislating matters of public health. Catharina’s sentence is suggestive of how her business functioned: the magistrates forbade her from offering lodging to any kind of nurse or servant (professions frequented by poorer, often unmarried women who might engage in sex work to make ends meet), on pain of banishment and heavy fines. Clearly, she wasn’t deterred by her brush with the law, and fifteen years later we see her running quite a thriving business at the highest levels of the industry. Of course, I have millions more questions about her, and I’m hoping to answer when I return to the archives, but this was a really exciting start!

Could you share with us some of the archival documents you have seen?

Of course! This image  from the State Archive of Rome- is a 1614 notarial copy a courtesan named Fillide Melandroni, perhaps best remembered as the one-time muse of the painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. You can find her likeness in a number of his most famous works: My favorite is her appearance as Judith in Judith and Holofernes ), which he painted sometime between 1598 and 1602 and can still be seen at the Palazzo Barberini, Rome. Melandroni’s will tells us a lot about her life and relationships. The bequest I find the most interesting is a sum of money she left to a “Madalena,” whom she names as her “pupil.” In the Archive of the Vicariate of Rome, which houses many parish census records from the period, I found  in a 1607 census that Melandroni was living with another sex worker and a young girl named Madalena, recorded as being 8 years old. I wish I had a picture of the census, but photos weren’t allowed in that archive. Connecting these two documents gives us a sense of Melandroni’s life and relationships within and outside the industry, and offers insight into the ways women and girls entered — or were brought into — the sex industry in Rome.

 Judith and Holofernes, painted by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, 1598-1602

Courtesan Fillide Melandroni’s bequest, 1614, State Archive of Rome
 

Another image I can share is the card catalog to the testamentary archive in the State Archive of Venice. This archive has thousands of wills written over centuries organized by the surname of the testator. It’s not complete, which makes it challenging to use, but since so much of my research relies on connecting documents through the names of individuals, this was a useful place to start when I got to Venice. Plus, it’s not often you see a hand-written card catalog these days, let alone one as long-lived as this one! I can’t even imagine how long it must have taken to put it all together. Archivists are amazing.

Card catalog to the testamentary archive in the State Archive of Venice