"Depraved Inclinations": Libertines and Children in Casanova's Venice

This article studies a judicial case that came before Venetian law in 1785 concerning a man accused of taking a sexual interest in an eight-year-old girl. The article attempts to place this case in the social, legal, and cultural context of eighteenth-century Venice, and addresses the question of what it meant to prosecute such a case in the late eighteenth century, before the existence of any clear concept of the sexual abuse of children. The article uses Casanova's memoirs as the principal cultural point of reference for considering the libertine view of children as sexual targets.