An interview with Hannah Johnston, Ph. 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. 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. 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.
