Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Sex Work in the Renaissance

Episode Date: June 20, 2025

Early Modern Italy birthed artistic giants like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, saw architectural marvels like Florence's dome and St. Peter's Basilica, and pushed scientific frontiers in astronomy. This same vibrant era was also home to Bologna's uniquely regulated sex work industry.So what was life like for the sex workers of Renaissance Italy? Kate is joined in this episode by Dr Vanessa McCarthy, historian of gender, sex, and sexuality in the early modern world at the University of Toronto.This episode was edited by Tim Arstall. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely bird twixters. It's me, Kate Lister. You are listening to Bertwifers Sheeds. But before you can be allowed to go any further, before I can allow your ears to be assaulted by what is coming their way, I have to tell you.

This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things and an adulty way covering a range of adults and books and you'd be an adult too. And hopefully now you feel much safer with what is about to come your way because I certainly do. Right, on with the show. Welcome to 16th century Bologna for Twixtas. Oh, it's nice to be on the continent, isn't it? I would love a slice of pizza, but I don't think that's actually been invented yet.

Pizza historians don't at me. But what we do have, though, is a thriving and very visible sex work community, not to mention a legalized one. See, I'm not going to say Bravo, because it wasn't necessarily a good thing. There was certainly a handful of beautiful courtisans who were, whined and dined and, well, shagged their way to the very top of society. But they were most certainly the exception to the rule. This was a very, very broad spectrum as I am about to find out.

Should we go and find out what it's all about? Let's do it. What are you a calling man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the fire. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I feel for them.

Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. We all have an idea of what the Renaissance is, don't we? Like something flamboyant and nude statues and draped paintings, and, well, it's pretty Italian. But when exactly was it? Who got to have a Renaissance?

Because I don't think everybody did. and where did sex work fit into the picture? A picture which definitely had a lot more sexual fluidity to it than you might think. We're looking at you, Michael Angelo. Well, joining me today for the third episode in our mini-series on sex work throughout history is the fantastic Dr Vanessa McCarthy,

fellow at the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies at the University of Toronto. Lutz at the ready, everybody. Let's do this. Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheeastern. It's only Vanessa McCarthy. How are you doing? Very well, thank you.

So pleased to be here. How are you? Oh, so excited that you're here. This is the third in our little mini-series on the History of Sex Work. And we were obviously going to look at the Renaissance. And the Renaissance in Italy is just fascinating. And that is your bag, baby. Yes.

You've written about this, research this. You've written on masculinity in Renaissance, Italy. sex work in Renaissance Italy. My first question there's got to be, how did you end up here? You can't have been a little girl in grade school going, I want to write about sex workers in Italy. How did this happen?

No, absolutely. I always wanted to go to university and it became clear that I was really into history. And I've always had a feminist slant. You know, I was raised by feminists. So women's history and the history around sex and gender really caught my fancy. And I think also part of it was the luck of the draw

of the kind of professors that were available to me at my undergraduate school, people who specialized in the history of sex, people who specialized in the history of gender in the Renaissance and the Middle Ages, but mostly in Italy. I realized how many interesting questions there were there and how fascinating the topic was and kind of went from there.

So then the next question we've got to ask you, And this is, it sounds like a very obvious question, but it's really not when you get into it. You focus on the Renaissance, but what is the Renaissance? Because we think about it like this epoch in history that where everyone in Italy woke up and went, oh God, it's the Renaissance. Or I didn't think it started until next week. Oh, I'm so behind my times. Like, what is it?

What time period? What defines it? That's a fantastic question. What defines it? But also, what does it mean when we think, when we, when we, when we, when we, when we, when we, use this category called the Renaissance. I think the Renaissance is sort of an older way to categorize a historical period when sort of at the turn of the 20th century people were really interested in great man history, great watershed history, right? And also this is fed into, certainly in

North America and the Western world, going through the 20th century, thinking about what is the state for? How do people think about their community as an organism? Going through World War II in particular, many, many scholars of the Renaissance moved to North America. And these kinds of questions were really important to them. When did governments begin to see people as people, rather than sort of what they juxtaposed with this idea of the Middle Ages as a dark age where everybody sort of, did what they were told and that was it. So the Renaissance brings up these ideas exactly as you say, right? People started to honor other people as people rather than as reflections of God. And, you know, this birth of cultural creativity, which to a very secular historical mind is important, right? It's not just about trying to get into heaven anymore, but also sort of

making society better for secular people. I think certainly with the rise of social history, the history of women and masculinity and gender and the history of sex and sexuality, that has kind of fallen out of favor, right? As I said, right, this idea that we're looking at the history of great men and great military battles and big watershed changes in politics. If we look more at people, we see that changes perhaps are motivated by different concerns and kind of play out differently. So I would say more and more scholars today would use the term early modern, right? Because it gets away from Leonardo da Vinci and these teleological ideas of history as steadily marching towards perfection, right, through the years. And so I would use the term early modern, right?

So what does the Renaissance represent for many people today, especially my students, my mother, my uncles and aunts? It's Leonardo da Vinci, it's sculptures. Yeah, it's sculptures and technological advancement and moving into the industrial revolution. So the Renaissance, I don't know. Maybe I should say very quickly, when I think of the early modern period, I would say 1450 to maybe 1650. Big chunk of time, isn't it? 200 years.

It's not the Middle Ages, but no, but it's a chunk. And one of the things that fascinates me about your work is, you focus a lot on the poorer classes because while we call it the Renaissance, I'm not sure everyone got a Renaissance, actually. I'm not sure if you asked some of the poorer people in Florence or Bologna or wherever. Are you aware that you're in the Renaissance?

I don't, like, how would they have felt about this? Exactly. Even the people that really benefited from what we would think of as Renaissance culture, did they even know that they were having a Renaissance? You know, is this a label that came much, later, but certainly for people on the ground, working poor people who don't have much power in the government or in the church or writing and reading, their experience, I think, was a lot more humdrum and shaped by continuous waves of famines and plagues, you know, every 20 or 30

years through Western Europe, just scrabbling to survive most of the time. Yeah. Yeah. Are you enjoying your Renaissance? Just trying to hang on in here at the moment. Exactly. Yeah. But things did shift and there's been lots of scholars that have pointed towards big events that changed things, the black death.

I mean, you know, like the amount of people that wiped out, that's definitely going to have an impact. Shifting religious beliefs that's going to have an impact. Things were changing. It's just not as cut and dry. But what about sex? how is sex, because we're moving towards sex workers. But how did that change in the Renaissance period? Well, perhaps there's two questions you're asking.

Early modern, right? We can say the Renaissance because people sort of have a picture of what time period that is, I guess. But maybe you're asking two questions. One, was there a difference in the way people thought about sex? And when we're talking about people, we could talk about religious leaders, different kinds of Christian leaders, right? We can think about your next-door neighbor. We could think about a civic governor. We could think about a king. But you're also asking what were the changes in sex work, which I think our best sources come from top-down legislation. So did laws change? Did rules change? Absolutely, they did change. And the reformations, and I call it that plural, really had a big effect on legislation. The fascinating, perhaps more fascinating question is, how did those play out on the ground? Were those new laws enforced?

How were they enforced? How quick was early modern society or the different societies throughout Europe? How quick were they to change their traditional thinking? Coming out of the medieval period, and again, that's not cut and dried, but that was believing that. There were systems in place, legal frameworks for dealing with. with and controlling sex work. There's very few examples throughout history. I've been able to find if people going, oh, just let them get on with it.

There's always a need to, it's either zoning. It's either the authorities get involved and go, right, you can do it, but you can only do it over there. It's complete ban. We're going to punish people if they do this. Normally the people doing the cell and we're going to cut the noses off. We're going to excommunicate them. Or it's sort of a weird, uneasy tolerance that happens. Italy, which is your area of study, is fascinating because the state gets quite involved quite early on with this.

It certainly does. And I think one of those reasons is because we see the rise of cities, at least in northern Italy, certainly in the 1200s, the 1300s, the 1400s. And that doesn't mean that people think, okay, you know, now that we have a city, here are all the things we have to do, like regulate these people and whatever. Rather, they kind of passively enter into this situation where there are more and more people. And some of those people are asking for justice in different ways, are asking for other people to be regulated because they're all living cheap to jowl, right? They're in a face-to-face society. The population is growing. But it's also a way for governments to cash in on sex work.

See, never forget that. That's right. Never forget that. That's right. It's not necessarily about. we're just going to try and keep people safe, is it? That's right. You know, there's all this rhetoric about, well, we need all of the sex workers to live in a specific brothel so that the rest of the neighbors aren't bothered by the immoral things that they do in the public eye and the kinds of things that they say. That's what they say.

But the other side of that is if everybody, if all sex workers have to live in a civic brothel and can all. only work in that brothel. The state, the city, is making money off these women paying to live there. It's making money on women who want to leave the civic brothel. That's certainly true in the city that I study in Bologna. They have to pay to get out. It's almost like, it's almost like a ghetto, right? It's this sort of spatial structure where there are a staff sitting at the one door and you have to pay to get in and out. Clients have to pay to get in and out. Clients have to pay to get in and out, you know, if you're being fined because you have this population that you can constantly watch. I mean, it's not the panopticon. Don't get me wrong. But, right, there's, you can lay fees

and fines over these women and make a ton of cash. To give people a sense of just how lucrative, not just the sale of sex can be, but the whole culture of it, I'm pretty sure that I read at some point Rome, the Pope went, right, that's it. All of the sex work is out. Get out of the city. And then, within like a week or two, all the traders were begging him to bring him back because they were the ones spending the money. That's absolutely right. It's a huge part. Is that true? Yes. It's absolutely true. And I know you're referring to the work of Elizabeth Cohen on Rome. Sex workers pay rent. But their clients come and they go to taverns, right? And they go here and there. They buy a fancy piece of meat for, you know,

By clothes? The clothes, absolutely. They are so enmeshed in the service economy that you're right. There was this case in Rome where the Pope and the civic government had never really regulated sex work before. There was a time where they taxed a few of the sort of wealthier sex workers to build a bridge or, you know, to do this and that. But otherwise, they were really hands off until after the reformations and then. Then, you know, the Pope at first says, all right, we got to clean up the city, right? Everybody, especially the Protestants, are making fun of the Catholic Church.

So, you know, they're immoral and all of the clerics and the priests. They break their vows of celibacy. Sex workers are everywhere. So the Pope says, okay, everybody out. And within it's something like all the sex workers out, something like two weeks or something. He allows them to come back in because of the protests of. Everybody in the service industry. Landlords, etc.

That's crazy, isn't it? That really is. I mean, it's such an ingrained a part of society, but also the economy. Look, when you just wouldn't have thought of that at all, would you? I was just like, if you take them out, it's like, okay, so now we're moral, but we're also skint. That's absolutely right. That's absolutely right.

It's about making money. Let's just not forget that. But alongside of it comes all of this weird justification. that the state makes and that the church makes for why they're doing this. Because the Bible's pretty, don't be doing rude stuff. Very naughty. Fornication, bad, bad, bad. And, you know, it doesn't say good things about wanting to go on the game. So how did the state justify their decision to allow zoned sex work?

Well, and in fact, I would say in the early modern period, the secular state that we would think about the secular state and the church, whatever church that is after the reformations, they always work hand in hand anyway. They're not separate, right? I keep hearing this on television, like the separation of church and state in America. This does not happen in the early modern world. They're all related to each other. They're all friends with each other.

So they go hand in hand. There are all kinds of ways to justify it, regardless of what perhaps the Bible says or what church doctrine and teachings are. One of the interesting things about Catholicism, certainly before the reformations, is that there's almost the sense that humans were born to sin. God made them that way after the fall, right? After the lapse. So you kind of, in a weird way, need occasions to sin in order to repent for those sins.

is kind of this loosey-goosey, I think, sort of cultural understanding. Chasin is to be human. Now, that said, some sins in theology and just general culture, some sins are worse than others, right? And so there's this argument, Ruth Karras may have said this to you before because this is the first time I read this was in her book. St. Thomas Aquinas said, prostitutes, and this is his word, so sex workers, sex workers in the city are like sewers in a palace. They funnel off what could have been worse sins, right?

So there's this justification by cities in the early modern period and the church. It's awful. And my students hate it when I tell them this because it's so repugnant. But it's true. The idea is that if there is a. woman who's sexually available to a man, perhaps he will not go and do what is considered to be a graver sin, such as have sex with another man, or have sex with somebody's wife, right, which would be adultery and rape, or have sex with women, girls who are still virgins and have

never been married. That for their spiritual arithmetic, the client's spiritual arithmetic, it would be worse to do that, than to have sex with, I guess, the patriarchal culture structures these as sort of nobody throw away women. And that's also, I mean, there are economic imperatives for women engaging in sex work. But I think there's also this cultural understanding that those women are the kind of women who can be sex workers. Watching the mental gymnastics and the moral acrobatics that they get into is fascinating. You do see that cropping up a lot of like, look, if we don't have sex workers, they'll all be gay. That one seems to, weirdly, like, the quarantine civic governors put that in their legislation.

It is to stop men from having sex with other men. It's wild. Where's Titsbridge? Where's that? The one that's called Titsbridge that's supposed to be where the sex workers would go and expose their breasts to tempt men in and to tempt them away. Yes, that'll be in Venice. Yeah. the Pionta del Tete or something.

Well, in Bologna, we have a street that people call Tits Street. Let's talk about Bologna because that's your baby. I'm trying to get a sense of what it would be like. Because the thing about sex work, Italy is one of the richest sources, I think, that we have, early modern, is it because it was so regulated, the state got involved. So we can find out what the state thinks and what moralizes think and what law people think in a way that we often can't. Do we have anything that tells us what the experience of the people caught? in this would have been. I mean, were there sex workers there going, oh, I'm a sewer? Well, that sounds

about fine. Thank you for that. I'm glad to help. Right? Just whatever I can do to help. I have zero idea about that question for sure. Finding women's voices in the sources, female sex workers' voices in the sources can be quite difficult, especially if a lot of the sources you're using are administrative of records. So, for instance, in my city, Bologna, I'm very blessed because starting about the beginning of 1500, the city decides that sex workers should be registered and they should buy monthly licenses. And this system operates all the way till 1796 when Napoleon marches in. So that's, you know, a couple hundred years, right? And we have hundreds and hundreds of these registers because the women or whoever they asked to go in and buy their license for them

would come into the office and the staff would write down their name and where they lived and how much they paid. And so one of the things I've been able to do with those registers is try and think about, okay, well, here's all these sort of streets, right? All these women are listed by street. So I've been able to look year over year over year and get a sense of where are most sex workers living in this city during a time when there's no civic brothel where sex workers can basically live anywhere that they can afford to. And looking at the period 1583 to 1630, I think I found something like 50% or 60% of women are living on streets where there's only one or two other registered sex workers.

And the other 50% are living on streets where there's something like six or seven or more sex workers. And doing a geographical analysis, I can see that they're living all over the city. Okay. So they're not zoned? They're not zoned. They're absolutely not zoned in Bologna, sort of after the 1540s, for sure. They can live wherever they can afford.

So this tells us a lot about perhaps what their daily lives were like, about how they were knit into their neighborhoods, right? Into these streets, especially if I can track women over many years living on the same street. This suggests, like, they're part of these local neighborhood groups. And so that gives us the idea that, you know, they're not ostracized as much as perhaps having gone through Victorian time periods to us. us, we might think, right? All these women are ostracized. They all, you know, live in various brothels, you know, ones for women who don't have syphilis, maybe ones for the old women who has syphilis.

No, it seems to be, you know, a very common accepted in its way, right? Everything's based on immediate context. Form of work. The other thing I should say is that I don't know in many cases whether women who are registered with this civic magistracy in Bologna, if they're doing other kinds of work, or if they're like, this is my identity, I'm a sex worker. You have to be a full-time sex worker. Exactly. I would assume these women are doing all kinds of income-generating work

because working poor women did, right? You have to have a really rich client to not have to do other kinds of work. And we do. We see that there, these varying, levels of economics, of sex workers. You know, their lives aren't always very wealthy or very poor. It goes up and down, of course, markets always do, right?

Because it's an income-generating activity. This license that they had to have on you, were the conditions for it? Did you just march yourself into the, I don't know, the town office? Yeah. The office? And you said, hello, I would like to go on the game, please. Yeah. Give me my license.

What conditions were there? You just have to pay for it? Yes. So my sense is most women, if they hadn't been registered, would not register unless they'd been sort of caught by the police or actually having sex with someone else or naked in bed with a man. Or if a neighbor for some reason decided they wanted to get them in trouble. However, the cost of a yearly license was very, very, very. cheap. Oh. Yes. So I was expecting you to say that. I thought you were going to say it was low. No, it's really, really cheap. In comparison to Florence, it's like one-fifth of the cost of a license in Bologna. I was recently looking over some documents of agreements between registered sex workers and their landlords for how much they were paying for, you know, their little apartment. Everybody in Bologna, everybody in these Italian cities live in,

in, you know, little apartments in sort of buildings. You know, we still have them on the streets, these three-floor buildings, and everybody has a couple of rooms in them, with the exception of very elite families. So this one woman then, she had like an outer room, which we might think of as a sitting room. There was a working stove in it. And then like a side room, which they called like the bedroom. Is it like a modern bedroom? I have no idea.

I'm sure they do lots of other things besides sleep and work. for sex workers in that room. So she was paying per year 30 Lire. It wasn't a fancy street, but it wasn't a run down street either. To buy one-year license, it costs three Lire. So her annual rent is 30 Lire, but she's paying three Lire a year for this license. And they're paying it by month in many cases.

So it's five-souldie, five-souldi, which is a five-souledi, which is a fraction of that. It's not particularly expensive, but the fines associated with it can be. At one point in 1604, the year 1604, there is 600, roughly 600 women are registered as sex workers in the city. So if you do the math that way.

But there are also benefits to being registered, which develop... Just about to ask you that. Yes. What was the benefit of... of doing this. Yeah. So licensing kind of starts back when they had a civic brothel in the 1400s.

But the benefits that the women got for living in that brothel then continue even once the brothels break down. So certainly if you have a license, you cannot be fined for not having a license. So an annual license costs three liere. If you're fined, it can be a 10 liere find. So that's a third of your rent, right? You don't have to, you know, have any legal costs around that. But also, one of the biggest benefits that these women had under this system was that if clients did not pay them, they could take them to the tribunal of this civic office and sue them for the money.

So it's fascinating. Some women come in and say, you know, I was with Lorenzo. we had a sexual relationship, you know, maybe he also, you know, she was living in an apartment that he said he would pay for for two years. And all he gave me was this pair of silk slippers and like a duk atone, a big coin, right? And so the argument then is like I was only with him. I would assume monogamy, but that's not always the case in sex work. And he didn't give me my just reward. And the office will go and interview. They will ask neighbors to come in.

And the sex worker will say, you know, ask this person, ask this person. They know we were together. They know he always stayed at my house. And they will come in and we have written testimonies written orally given. And the scribe is writing them down. And if the man wants to fight it, he'll get his cronies in to say, no, no, he gave her this and he gave her that. And in many cases, they do find in the women's benefit. Wow.

I guess I always want to be careful when it's like when we're looking to state-controlled sex work because ultimately it's not a good thing. But that sounds like there was some level of protection of state or at least a recourse for them. Recourse if it worked out. We don't know how many cases women brought to the bolete that they were like, we're not going to follow up on that for whatever reason, right? You know, we only know the ones that did come to court. And there are quite a few.

And they could be successful. And then those women can use that money for whatever else. One of the questions, one of the tensions in this history is always, were these female sex workers victims who were ashamed of what they did and didn't want people to know? Or were they agents who used? kind of the benefits and their positions to their advantage. And so this question about, were these women ashamed? Well, if they're coming to court, it can't be that shanful.

It can't be that ashamed. And we know that neighbors know what's going on. Friends of, right? When they pull in witnesses for these cases, everybody kind of knows. So it's a huge benefit if it worked in their favor. And I mean, this is a patriarchal society. So, I mean, it's a big if. I mean, it's a big ill.

But it's a small recourse. I'll be back with Vanessa after this short break. Have you found anything in the records about, like, you know, names or were these women married? Were they single? Were they mothers? How long did they stay in this profession? Yes. One of the things that I've been able to do in Bologna, because we have these annual registers,

I mean, assuming that these people are still doing sex work, I can track lots of women, over 10 years, over 15 years, some cases over 30 years. Does it mean they're still engaging in sex work? Who knows? Right. Everyone thinks that sex work is a young woman's game. You would be surprised when you go back through the record. Nope.

That's right. Even today, the average age, I think, in the UK at least is late 30s, early 40s. So it's... Yeah. I mean, and I think thinking about sex today, I don't think it's unfair to think of sex in the past and say our idea or historian's ideas that men, male clients only wanted to have sex with women in their late teens or their 20s, I don't think it's unfair to say that can't possibly be true. Just like today, right? It's just ageism. Just like today,

lots of people want to have sex with people of all kinds of different ages. And so often I've seen assumptions that, you know, sex workers, anybody registered, anybody buying a license, well, if they're over 35, they must be a madam. I don't know that that's necessarily true. And I don't think being a madam precludes having sex with clients either. So you've got a wide span of ages then. Do we know anything else? Like, were they married?

Were they allowed to get married? They were allowed to get married. If they got married, they could no longer register as sex workers. Oh, that's interesting. At least theoretically, right? Because then that becomes adultery. And actually what we see in the city that I study is that this civic office, the Blete, and the Archbishop's court increasingly are fighting over who gets jurisdiction over married sex workers. Right.

Right? No, that's not your case. You got to have to send it to us at the Arctic. Archbishops court. And the people who are actually arresting people for various things, including sex workers, generally are really low-level functionaries of these courts. And they do not make a lot of money, but the money that they make is by emoluments, which means if you catch someone doing an infraction and they are fined by the Archbishop's court or by the civic court, they get a percentage of that fine. That's how they make their money. Oh, look at that. So what we

start to see is these low-level arresting officers fighting with each other, the ones that serve different courts, know that, you know, practicality is so important when we think about these issues, right? Money, pragmatism. It's very, very important. Follow the money. Absolutely. And of course, someone else that's really crucial to, well, at least it seems to me, but you might tell me that it's not in the early modern period in Italy is this cortisand culture that develops. Because I know you look at working class women and they are fascinating because they often get left out of this discussion. But you do get this cortisan culture. You're super elite, the ones that quite literally shag their way to the very, very top and they have this weird celebrity

status. I often think of them as like being like the Kardashians. If you just go with me, they're really famous. Like they are people, people are influenced by. them, but they're also disliked and kind of looked down upon and it's kind of like a bit sneery and like, tell me about them. Tell me about the, the, the, the courtesans. Cortisans are so few. They are the exception which makes them so special. And I think the biggest courtesans we see are in Rome, they're in Venice, which are highly international cities. cities like Florence and Bologna and Milan, they are international, right? We know that there are people coming from all over Europe in and out for all kinds of reasons, especially trade.

Venice and Rome, Rome because it's the seat of Catholicism and Venice because it's always been such a massive trade hub throughout the Mediterranean, especially with the Ottoman Empire. They seem to develop these publicized courtisans, I think, in their time period and in hours. I see them much less in Bologna. But they certainly are, you know, well-educated, loved by men in the elite classes. There was women like Veronica Franco, who was, she wasn't just a cortisand, like she was writing poetry and she's painted by the masters. And she becomes this, like, symbol of this new. culture and this new woman. But I do wonder when I look at someone like that is,

yeah, all right, like she's dominating the media of the time, but how did that translate to the everyday experience of women selling sex? Because there's only one Veronica Franco. Right. I mean, your guess is as good as mine. I think certainly if we're thinking about the different levels, sort of economic levels of female sex workers below the exalted cortisone, You know, there are very poor, moderately poor, maybe what we might call middle upper class.

They may be able to derive some honor for themselves through women like that, you know, in passing in conversations with other people. But we do also see, and again, Elizabeth Cohen has done work on this. We do know that working poor sex workers of whatever class do believe that they have honor and their society. beliefs that they have honor. So for instance, Libby Cohen talks about door shaming where sex workers would bring to court men who smeared feces all over their front door, right, which is this dishonorable act towards them. It's showing everyone, you know, that this person is dishonorable. The thing that they're defending is not the fact that they're sex workers, but rather that they have an honor above this person who smeared feces all over the door or drew graffiti

on their door. So, you know, all that to say working poor sex workers also were seen to have honor in their communities. And maybe Veronica Franco is a bit to help with that. I'm not sure. Maybe. Yeah. What about male sex work? Because it's interesting that like so much of the state in the church She's going like, all right, you can do that as long as it stops men being gay, which suggests to me more than anything else that there was a lot of gay going on in Italy for that to have even been a thought in anyone's head. Absolutely. And I think it's not for nothing that we particularly see that in the sex work legislation in Florence. Okay, we see, you know, to stop men from having sex with other men, we need to have sex workers. Michael Rocky is a historian who in the 90s did a ton of work on an office in Florence that particularly worked to brute out men having sex with other men.

And so he has a ton of cases. This book is called Forbidden Friendships. And it's absolutely fantastic. So we know that there is a lot of sex between men, certainly in Florence. And other studies have opened that up over the decades since the night. 90s, the civic government would never allow sex between men for money to be legal, right? So in my city of Bologna, men are certainly not allowed to buy licenses as sex workers. Neither it seems, they don't say it outright, but having looked at hundreds and hundreds of cases, I don't believe that Jewish women were

able to buy licenses as sex workers or Muslim women or Orthodox Christian. women. Oh, that's interesting. My sense. Yeah, my sense. And it's interesting that they don't even have to distinctly say, no Jews, no Muslims, no Orthodox, right? It's sort of this accepted thing. Who is it okay to buy sex from? And is that one of the reasons why they're also kind of protecting these sex workers? But certainly no men. Some of more recent studies that I've read, for instance in Siena, which is a northern Italian city, and in Florence and Venice, have found sources that seem to point to non-civic governed, non-civic regulated, sort of unofficial, ad hoc, community-based sex work between men, male clients, male sex workers. There might have been an all-male brothel, but if there was, it never made it onto the books. That's kind of what we're like with.

Absolutely. Right. And I think certainly in the later part of the early modern period, when civic brothels fall out of style, we have sort of clusters of women living or at least working in the same apartments, right, which we could call a brothel. I'm sure the same thing happens with men. There's so much that doesn't get into the records

because there is so much under what we would think of as under the table payments, a racketeering, stuff that never make. it into the books because it's not meant to be on the books. It is such a common practice across all sort of social law enforcement and moral social enforcement that we just never see it. I'll be back with Vanessa after this short break. So to sort of round things off then, although if you can round things off, it's such a huge We've gone everywhere in this conversation.

We have, haven't we? Yes. But I get the impression from talking to you, and I want to be careful that I don't suggest that selling sex in Italy in the early modern period was some kind of utopia and fabulous and fun for everyone. It certainly wasn't that. But he was much more visible and accepted and there were people with rights and licenses and legal protections and in some cases, honour. And people could, you know, there was a weird career trajectory for, you know, one person, Veronica Franco. How did all of this come to an end then? What happened?

Because it didn't stay that way. What happened? That would be a question for my colleagues who studied the 1700s and the 1800s. Was it religion? I don't think so. I mean, nothing is ever just one. That's not, is it? I'm sure it's linked up with nationalism, with industrialization, with Napoleon.

So in my city, my office stops operating in 1796. When Napoleon comes in, he marches his troops through, and he takes over the governing of Northern Italy, mostly, right? He closes all of, you know, the religious institutions, and he wants to rework. He wants to build an empire. Yeah. But then what happens is sex work then becomes the jurisdiction, I believe,

of this sort of modern police. force that are being developed at this time. And my sense is it's kind of still business as usual. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And I get rid of it. That's like that's one of the major points, I think, of the history of sex work.

Little bits change. Approaches change. You know, church approaches change. Civic government approaches change. And sometimes people are quite excited about those changes and want to implement them really strictly in the short term. But what we see over and over again is that in the medium term and the long term, these, and you're nodding your head, because I know you've talked to an ancient Roman historian

and you've talked to a medieval historian. In general, it's just pretty much business as usual. So it can be new bottles, but it's the same wine, right? And when law is enforced, when we have records of enforcement, that's where we see that not much is really changing. I guess there's something in the 20th century, right? Victorian ideas, certainly in the Western world, ideas about sex and sexuality and nationality. And what is sex for? You know, it's for procreation and eugenics and stuff. That it really becomes this modern situation where prostitution, sex work. is criminal. It is criminal offense and it should be something that people are very shameful

about and should keep very, very secret. Where we don't see that so much in the Middle Ages in the early modern period. Vanessa, you have been fascinating to talk to. I knew you would be. If anyone wants to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? Sure, absolutely. Where can they find me? You can Google me. I have essays and articles online. You can come to a classroom at the University of Toronto to find me. And I'm a fellow at the Center for Renaissance and Reformation Studies at Victoria University in the University of Toronto. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come and talk to us. You've been marvelous.

It has been so fun and playful to be on your show. And someone told me about your show about three months ago. I love the hair episode. That's my favorite episode. Oh, the brothels in Pompeii. Fascinating. Really cool. And Merkins? Merkins, right? Thank you so much. You've been a treat. Okay. Have a great day. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Vanessa for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like with you and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com.

Coming up, we've got the next installment in this little mini-series, and we're going to be thinking about what made you ugly in the Tudor times. This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.