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INTRODUCTION
On September 2, 1785, Bartolo Fiorese, a Venetian parish priest, delivered a denunciation to the judicial authorities of the Venetian republic. He reported that a man, Gaetano Franceschini, around age sixty, had spent a night in bed with a little girl, age eight, Paolina Lozaro. The assignation for delivering the girl into Franceschini's hands, ostensibly for training as a chambermaid, had been scheduled to take place in Father Fiorese's own parish church of Sant'Angelo on August 31, and though the priest had learned of the arrangement in advance and failed to obstruct it, he ultimately took responsibility for rescuing the girl from Franceschini's apartment on September 1. "Yesterday I went to the apartment of Signore Gaetano Franceschini, a resident of this parish," the priest reported, in his denunciation, "and removed from that apartment, in the absence of the master, a girl of about eight years, Paolina Lozaro by name, and I delivered her into the hands of her mother Maria. I was driven by the reports I had obtained about the bad reputation and depraved inclinations of Signore Gaetano, and about his keeping the girl, the night before, scandalously in his own bed."1 Venetian justice took up this case of "depraved inclinations," and instituted a thorough investigation, taking testimony from an entire neighborhood, trying to determine what had happened in Franceschini's bed.
The thick case file offers to the historian of the ancien régime one of the most comprehensive explorations of the phenomenon that we today call "sexual abuse" or "pedophilia"-for which there were no such clarifying clinical or legal designations in the world of the 1780s. Though the inclinations of Franceschini may have seemed "depraved" to some of his neighbors, including Father Fiorese, the absence of any clearly defined concept of sexual abuse meant that even the most comprehensive investigation, seeking to establish the facts of the case, would inevitably find it difficult to assess the legal significance and implications of those facts. The case of Gaetano Franceschini and Paolina Lozaro thus offers insight, at a remarkable level of detail, into contemporary perspectives on sexual relations between adults and children.
The case illuminates Venetian law, society, sexuality, and culture in the late eighteenth century. The legal forum for prosecution was the unusual Venetian...