Paolina’s Innocence: Child Abuse in Casanova’s Venice by Larry Wolff (review)

With the lively eye and deft pen of the successful microhistorian, Larry Wolff takes an exceptional document about a rare transgression and crafts a nuanced commentary on a larger cultural transition. From a monumental 300-page trial record from Venice in 1785, Wolff reconstructs the tiny story of one troubling night that Paolina, an eight year old servant, spent in the bed of Franceschini, an aging gentlemen seeking “warming” and revitalization. Using trial testimony from the child’s own mouth, this book contributes to the relatively sparse field of early modern girlhood studies. Paolina herself, however, recites only a small, if crucial, part. Most of the book focusses instead on adult behavior and attitudes about children. Disrupting any presumption that the childhood “innocence” of his title was a timeless universal, Wolff argues that the late eighteenth century saw pivotal, but far from consolidated development of this modern European value. Moving away from religious notions of sin, the Enlightenment began to forge a secular precept that sex and children should not mix. At the same time, since eighteenth-century law did not yet constitute sexual abuse as a criminal harm to persons, the Venetian trial prosecuted Franceschini for the social offense of causing public scandal. Much of the substantial merit of Wolff’s study lies in his careful exposition of these layered ambiguities and, more generally, of the untidy complexities of cultural change.

Wolff works skillfully from the central document outward. Respecting the distinctive challenges of reading trials, he foregrounds the judicial framework by structuring much of the tale through the voices of different witnesses. His wider discussion unfolds through varied, imaginative contextualizations. Drawing on extensive reading in the social history of early modern Venice, he highlights, for example, not only the social diversity of the participants but also the institutional and physical spaces they occupied—tribunal, church, neighborhood, and coffee house. He thickens his description with selections from contemporary high culture such as Goldoni’s comedies and the librettos for Don Giovanni. For analogies to Franceschini’s behavior and self-representation, Wolff mines the memoirs of Casanova and other libertines. And, of course, as the quixotic muse of childhood innocence, Rousseau dominates the discussion of broader Enlightenment culture.

Without lapse into teleology, Wolff approaches Paolina’s story with useful hindsight. Based on his previous study of four cases of child abuse a century later in 1890s Vienna, he makes the critical distinction between behavior and social/cultural categories. Children certainly suffered mistreatment in various forms in the premodern eras. Yet “child abuse” with a focus on sexual violation belongs, as a “sociological and clinical concept,” to the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries. Culturally and socially, the eighteenth century was a very different world. Although Enlightenment philosophers began to articulate rights vested—at least theoretically—in all individuals, real social dynamics remained starkly hierarchical. While Wolff’s argument emphasizes the cultural, his careful attention to social specificity much strengthens the case. The implication that a concern for compromised innocence, if still ungelled, reached down into urban neighborhoods already in the 1780s is striking indeed.

Lopsided social and power relations shaped the central episode under judicial scrutiny in 1785. It began with the libertine gentleman Franceschini seeking a young girl as servant and “adoptive daughter.” Dominant in status and wealth, he proceeded with seduction rather than brute force. Paolina and her mother, meanwhile, were both vulnerable on many scores. Poor immigrants from a backward hinterland, the women had to navigate the big city in the absence of husband and father. Paolina ended up in Franceschini’s bed due less to her own innocence than to hapless misjudgment of her mother, to whom the offer of not only a good wage but also future assistance for her young daughter looked “providential.” Franceschini also courted the girl. According to her testimony, on the only day she spent in his house, he plied her with food and gifts before taking her into his bed, where...