Policing Sex and Gender in Renaissance Florence featuring Professor Colin Rose
Early modern Florence was a bustling city of 50,000 souls, including high numbers of unmarried young men and relatively young widows. Many of these widows made their way into and through a network of civic and religious institutions designed to support and control them in a deeply patriarchal society; others joined a legal and regulated sex trade to attempt to provide for themselves and their families outside institutional orbits. Policing the latter to protect the former from the influence of the latter was critical to a program of moral reform imposed upon Florence by its second Duke, Cosimo I. Responsibility for the policing of Florentine sex work lay with the Ufficiali dell’Onestà, the Officers of Decency. This paper analyzes 30 years of sentences levelled by these men against women sex workers, their clients, and others embroiled in conflicts with them. By mapping these sentences and the incidents that provoked them against the religious and socioeconomic landscape of the early modern city, we better understand how moral reform, public order and patriarchal authority were spatially imposed upon the men and women of Renaissance Florence.
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