Early Modern Venetian Sex Work and the Business of Gambling

Abstract

By the sixteenth century, the ever-growing popularity of casini and ridotti in cities such as Venice resulted in the widespread pursuit of women’s gambling. This article argues that female card play, an activity of skill as well as chance and risk, offered women financial opportunities at a time when they were excluded from most “honorable” forms of income-generating work. They included female sex workers who benefited from the game’s popularity among men of all classes, by luring unsuspecting men into fixed card play. Through close readings of visual and textual representations of these types of gaming practices in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Venice, I consider how they not only shed light on the operations of a moralizing social technology reinforcing class and gender asymmetries but also, when read against the grain, illuminate a new kind of economic independence of women as actors and workers overlooked by scholars.