Sex Work, Sex Workers, and City Streets: Florence, 1560–1606

Sex workers in early modern Florence worked under a regulatory regime governed by Florence’s Ufficiali dell’Onestà, a magistracy like many others in Italy with similar remit. Under this regime, sex workers possessed both obligations and rights. This article uses sentences promulgated by the Onestà to assess the spatial character of those obligations and rights. Infractions by and against sex workers were punished according to a spatial regime within which sex workers received broad protections; straying beyond the spatial borders enacted by the magistracy removed those sex workers from the protection of the law. The article details the sentences of the Onestà in Florence, demonstrating the gendered spatial characteristics of the regulation of sex work in early modern Florence. It also maps infractions against the regulations of sex work in order to better understand how early modern Florentines lived in, moved through and conceived of their city as a moral and ethical space. Using Historical Geographic Information Systems, this article argues that sex workers in Florence were required to know their place, and to stay within it, in order to work legally and with legal protections.