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Paolina's Innocence: Child Abuse in Casanova's Venice. By Larry Wol ff . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. Pp. 328. $90.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).
Larry Wolff's study reads like a really good mystery. It hinges on the outcome of a case brought against Gaetano Franceschini, an eighteenth-century Venetian near-nobleman, for committing sexual abuse with Paolina Lozaro, an eight-year-old girl placed in his service. Since conceptions of pedophilia were still very much in embryo in this period, the accused's culpability is far from clear. Wolff purports that this case shines a penetrating light on the precise historical moment when modern notions of childhood innocence were taking shape. The episode illuminates the multiple currents of social, cultural, economic, political, religious, and legal history that converged to create present-day beliefs about childhood and childhood innocence, as well as social, sexual, and criminal deviance. Paradoxically, Wolff communicates the intense ambiguity of this cultural instance by clarifying or, better, sharpening the edges of its numerous and crucially intersecting facets. Support for his thesis is excellent and innovative. Among other sources, evidence deriving from prevalent stage entertainments, visual arts, and literature shows how popular culture both mirrored and helped create an ethos about what it meant not only to be a child but also to protect, abuse, defend, desire, and revere a child.
The book is organized in four parts, each containing five chapters. Part 1 contains an exposition of the case and its main characters. Wolff then introduces pertinent Venetian social and judicial organs, along with a history of the Bestemmia tribunal. He discusses poverty's impact on moral conduct, insofar as the alleged victim...