Prostitution, Community, and Civic Regulation in Early Modern Bologna

While during the late Middle Ages most major European cities legalized and regulated prostitution, historians have argued that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries religious reform and shifting ideas about acceptable sexual and gendered behaviour resulted in the criminalization and repression of prostitution. Scholars have also demonstrated that early modern cultural depictions and social attitudes increasingly cast prostitutes and their clients as greedy and immoral, as socially and publically disruptive, and as sinners in need of reform. This dissertation argues, however, that in the northern-Italian city of Bologna secular and religious civic authorities, magistrates, law enforcement, and the general populace approached prostitution primarily as an issue of economics and public order, and secondarily as an issue of morality and public decorum. Due to the city's economic reliance on university students who sought sex and companionship, since the late Middle Ages civic authorities regulated prostitution as a civic, commercial issue and prostitutes as fee- and fine-paying workers governed by their own civic magistracy, the Ufficio delle Bollette. This approach developed further in the early modern period due to Bologna's continuing economic reliance on students, the demands and needs of workers (both male and female) in its growing, seasonal silk industry, its particular political traditions, and its local social customs. As a result, late sixteenth- and early seventeenth century Bolognese civic authorities neither criminalized prostitution nor attempted to repress it, but instead issued comparatively relaxed, moderately restrictive legislation. Likewise, the Bollette's officials and functionaries negotiated between legislation, their own desires, and the needs of individual prostitutes when enforcing regulation. Finally, the hundreds of women who registered annually as prostitutes were more-or-less integrated into local communities through residence and through familial, work, and affective relationships and had greater opportunities for agency than broader cultural, religious, and social ideals would lead us to expect.

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