Women, Sex-Work, and Taverns: the Digital Humanities in Renaissance Florence

Join Woodworth College for an Alumni Café lecture featuring Woodsworth's Vice-Principal and Professor, Jennifer DeSilva. She will be speaking on "Women, Sex-Work, and Taverns: the Digital Humanities in Renaissance Florence."

If you could walk down the street in Renaissance Florence, peering into houses, workshops, and taverns, where would you go? Would you visit the cathedral, shop at the market, or have a drink at a tavern? This presentation will introduce research conducted with The DECIMA Project, which uses GIS data to connect a 1561 tax census to a 1582 map of Florence, Italy. Using this Digital Humanities project we can test contemporary ideas about taverns being men-only spaces and women turning to sex work in hardship.

This is an online lecture via Zoom.

Bio: Jennifer DeSilva earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of Toronto and specializes in cultural and social history. Prior to returning to Toronto, she taught at Ball State University (Muncie, IN, USA) and Eastern Connecticut State University (Willimantic, CT, USA) from 2007 to 2023. She has edited several collections of essays on issues of space and religious reform, on the Borgia family, and on the papal possesso (with Pascale Rihouet).

Jennifer DeSilva also co-edits the Sixteenth Century Journal. She has published numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and chapters related to identity, reform, festive studies, vice activity, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. She is also the author of The Office of Ceremonies and Advancement in Curial Rome, 1466-1528 (Brill, 2022).