Paolina's Innocence Child Abuse in Casanova's Venice [Hardcover]

In the summer of 1785, in the city of Venice, a wealthy 60-year-old man was arrested and accused of a scandalous offense: having sexual relations with the 8-year-old daughter of an impoverished laundress. Although the sexual abuse of children was probably not uncommon in early modern Europe, it is largely undocumented, and the concept of child abuse did not yet exist. The case of Paolina Lozaro and Gaetano Franceschini came before Venice's unusual blasphemy tribunal, the Bestemmia, which heard testimony from an entire neighborhoodfrom the parish priest to the madam of the local brothel.

Paolina's Innocenceconsiders Franceschini's conduct in the context of the libertinism of Casanova and also employs other prominent contemporariesJean-Jacques Rousseau, Carlo Goldoni, Lorenzo Da Ponte, Cesare Beccaria, and the Marquis de Sadeas points of reference for understanding the case and broader issues of libertinism, sexual crime, childhood, and child abuse in the 18th century.

Larry Wolff is Professor of History at New York University and Director of the NYU Center for European and Mediterranean Studies. His most recent book isThe Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture(Stanford, 2010). Larry Wolff's account of an eighteenth-century trial of a wealthy Venetian for the sexual abuse of a servant girl is unique for its vivid evocation of social context, its exploration of the phenomenon of libertinage, its identification of a turning point after which the exploitation of the innocent would not be officially tolerated, and, not least, its fluid, jargon-free narrative style. This is a social and cultural study of what happened in Venice in 1785 when a sixty-year-old man was accused of having sex with an eight-year-old girl. Paolina's Innocenceis written in a lovely, accessible style and its subject is one of both historical and popular interest. Its value derives in part from the richness of the court records of the lÃ)