Tracing Migrations Within Urban Spaces: Women’s Mobility and Identification Practices in Venice (Sixteenth–Eighteenth Centuries)

The chapter deals with the relationship between the process of identification and women’s mobility. In particular, it explores when and how migrant women were identified in early modern Venice. A gendered approach and the intersection of different types of sources—administrative records and legal proceedings—enable to call into question some historiographical assumptions about identification: the equivalence of identification and coercion, the monopoly of the government in recording and classifying people, the replacement of orality (in terms of reputation and social networks) by written documents. The first part of the chapter focuses on legislation concerning the registration of foreigners, and it discusses the presence or absence of women in this type of documentation. The second and third parts analyze some case studies, focusing mainly on the role of the social actors, especially on the way they used identification to obtain economic resources or claim local membership.