Pieter:	Hi everybody, welcome. I think I know everybody here, so I don't have to say I'm Pieter Judson, but I am, in the history department. I want to welcome you to the Paul Bike Memorial Lecture, which is endowed by the generous donations of his former students and colleagues. Paul Bike taught at Swarthmore from 1945 to 1980, and there are, I'm trying to think if there are more than two of us in this room, who actually studied with him. Of course, a couple of his colleagues as well, who knew Paul when he was teaching here.
	To many of us he was an inspirational professor, in many ways. Once he retired, his students and his colleagues organized this lecture shore. To explain about who we invite to talk about the lecture show, so Paul started as a specialist in the French Revolution, and then in the middle of his career he returned to Columbia University, learned Russian, and retrained himself as an expert in Russian and East European History. 
	Okay, now, all of you who are students, you think, well, it's pretty easy. You take one of the languages for a year, and then, no. Once you're past a certain age, a certain very young age, it's really hard to learn a language, and it's really hard to learn a new field, let me tell you from personal experience. So, it's quite an accomplishment. 
	He then taught both French, and Revolutionary History, and the seminar on Eastern Europe. Traditionally, in his honor, we invite distinguished historians of France or Eastern Europe to share their work with us. Today's distinguished speaker is Larry Wolff. He's Professor of History at New York University, and Director of the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies there. By the way, just for the students, I first met Larry when he was a spec, so to speak, at Columbia, for grad school, and we were trying, all of us were first year students and we were supposed to get Larry to try to come to Columbia. Sadly for me and my friends, Larry decided to go to Stanford instead, where he earned his PhD, but not for lack of our trying. 
	Larry is an expert on the history of the Polish speaking regions of Europe. As you will see, he's also an expert on 18th Century Venice. He's also an expert on opera, among other things, and I have to mention the fact that he's currently serving on one of those committees that decides, that investigates whether a dead person should be canonized by the Catholic Church. In this case, the person in question is the former, the last Empress of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, so Larry's learned all kinds of interesting things about that that he's not allowed to tell us, because they'd kill him if he did. 
	Okay, one of his books, I'm not going to mention them all, but one of his books is called, "Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment." Then, in 2010, also in Eastern European History, he published "The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture." I have to mention, well, I love the Galicia book, but what I particularly love is Larry offers a stunning interpretation of a set of violent events; the Polish Nationalist Rebellion of 1846, which is remembered as a terribly bloody series of events, as seen through the eyes of the young child Leopold Sacher-Masoch. Some of you may know, he later became the author of the book, "Venus in Furs," and from whom we get the term masochism. 
	If you want a really interesting analysis of revolution in 1846, that's something to read. Larry's also the author of, "Venice and the Slavs: The Discovery of Dalmatia in the Age of Enlightenment," and of "Postcards from the Edge of the World: Child Abuse is Freud's Vienna." Today, he's taking us back to Venice and to the 18th Century, to talk about child sexual abuse in Casinova's Venice, and this book, "Paolina's Innocence: Child Abuse in Casinova's Venice" just came out a few weeks ago. Please welcome Larry Wolf. 
Larry Wolff:	Thanks very much, Peter. I'm totally thrilled to be here. I'm really honored to be invited to give the Bike Lecture here at Swarthmore. The campus looks incredibly beautiful today, Peter, and I have been walking around the campus. I can't believe how great it is here, you're so lucky to be here. I feel lucky as well, too. Part of this piece of Swarthmore, academic life, and to get to present the Bike Lecture to you today. I'm going to talk to you about Venice. Beautiful, beautiful city. Probably one of the most beautiful cities in the world, but unfortunately the story I'm going to tell you is not a beautiful story. It's kind of a disturbing story, and the discussion that goes along with it is mostly, fairly disturbing.
	In 1785 in Venice a 60 year old man was accused of having sex with an 8 year old girl. It's not a unique event in European history. It's probably not even a rare event, but this is a special case because it received a lot of judicial attention. It generated a case file as it was being examined of some 300 pages in the Venetian archives, and as far as I know, it's most extensive discussion of child abuse that there is for the Ancien regime, that is to say Europe, up until the French Revolution.
	The talk I'm going to give today is about the 1780's, and I'm especially pleased about that, because it's the period that Paul Bike worked on, the late Ancien Regime, the 1780's, the period of the French Revolution, and the ways in which that moment in European history represented a historical transition to the modern world. This case, I think you can also see as being one that is indicative of some aspects of that transition, especially in relation to the history of childhood. It's about new cultural concerns about childhood in the late 18th Century, and especially the ideology of childhood's innocence, which is associated with childhood at that time, and the ways in which those concerns also raised certain problematical issues about sex and sexuality. 
	Let me tell you a little bit first about finding the file, which I found rather by accident. Peter mentioned this book that I was working on Venice and the Slavs of Dalmatia in the 18th Century, that's what I was working on. I was looking for Slavs in the Venetian archives, and I found this file, mostly by virtue of how fat it was. It was 300 pages long, so that's a big folder full of papers, and I was curious what was in it. When I opened it, I realized that it was actually very unusual material, which as far as I knew, and as far as I still know, nobody else has written about. 
	The archives in Venice, I know some of you have been there, but it's very special place. It's right alongside the church of the Friary, which if you've been to Venice, you've probably seen. It's the great Franciscan Church in Venice, but if you look off to the right of the church, you can see just to the right of the door, another building alongside it, and that building is the archive. That door on the right is the door that takes you into the archive, and that would be me taking a break. It's not actually me, but it would have been me taking a break from having spent too much time in the archives. 
	The file is 300 pages that look something like that, in an 18th Century Venetian hand, and I actually found it the last day I was working in Venice one summer, and I started reading it. I knew it was really weird and interesting stuff, but I had to make a very sudden decision; am I going to continue reading it all day, or am I going to send it off to the micro film department, which this was still in the 90's. It was before they were scanning anything in the Venetian archives, and everybody went home for the day at lunch, so you need to make your decision by 11 in the morning. 
	I read 10 pages of it, and then sent the whole thing off to be micro filmed. Then I didn't receive the micro film in Boston, where I then lived, until months later and was not able to resume reading it until that point. It's taken me many years, actually, to do what I've resolved to do, which was to write a small book about this case and what it's implications and ramifications were for the world of the late 18th Century. 
	As Peter mentioned, I have been principally involved in Eastern Europe, and the Habsburg Monarchy for most of my academic career, but I've also had this interest in the history of childhood, which I have pursued through one book and several series of articles over the year. There's an older book that Peter mentioned on child abuse in Freud's Vienna, and this one on child abuse in Casanova's Venice turns out to be kind of book ends to the older one, although it takes place in an earlier period. 
	The history of childhood is actually rather controversial subject. What you're looking at there is Breugel's painting, "Children's Games" of 1560, and the controversy around in the field of the history of childhood has to do with the question of whether childhood is actually discovered at a certain moment in European culture. When I say discovered, I mean people begin to identify childhood as a distinctive period with distinctive problems of problems and issues of its own, and children as having a particular childlike character that has to define the way that one relates to them. 
	Then the question is, if such a discover is made, when did it happen? Without going into that controversy, what I would say to you is that until a distinct concept of childhood is formulated, it's impossible to form a distinct concept of child abuse. That is to say, until you have a clearly well defined sense of what a child is, and what makes a child different and distinctive from adults, you can't really begin to think about what it means to abuse children, specifically as children. The issue that this case is really all about is what it means to identify child abuse, when you don't have a concept of child abuse to work with, when that has not been articulated within your culture and society. 
	What I'm going to spend the next 40 minutes doing is talking about four things. First, I'm going to talk about the Venetian Justice System, and the tribunal that goes over this case for a period of months, and produces the 300 page case file. It's actually a blasphemy tribunal, and what they're monitoring in this case, since they don't have a concept of child abuse, is they're monitoring scandal. That's the best name they can put on it, for legal purposes. It's a scandal, and therefor they need to address it judicially. 
	Second thing I want to talk about, this will not be immediately obvious until I get to it of why this is relevant, is coffee houses and the public's fear in the 18th Century. It's super important in this case, because the guy in question, who's charged, lives upstairs from a coffee house. They had a state coffee house on the first floor, guy molesting the eight year old girl up on the third floor. 
	Third thing I want to talk about is 18th Century Libertinism, and it's relation to the modern concept of perversion and pedophilia. The last thing I want to talk about is the child herself in this question, and what this whole thing looks like from the child's perspective, to the best that we can determine that. 
	That's not her. We don't know what she looks like. This is an 18th Century Venetian child, but it's not the child in question who we cannot provide an image of. The child in question would have been about her age, eight years old. Her name was Paolina. Paolina Lozaro. She was brought by her mother to work as a servant in this older guys house, and she spent one night there in his bed with him, and was then removed from the apartment by the parish priest. There was medical testimony in the case, she was examined by a doctor immediately afterwards. He determined that no intercourse had taken place, therefor it was not rape, and it was not defloration, both of which were crimes in Venice.
	However, she had clearly been, what we would say, molested and or abused, however, to try to decide what crime that was is the problem that the tribunal had to work with. Everyone in the neighborhood knew something really bad had happened to her, but they had difficulty articulating why it was so bad. Of course the contrast with today is very striking, because this is something that we would take absolutely for granted today, in fact so much for granted we would scarcely feel the need to articulate why it was so bad. 
	We live on the other side of a certain revolution in the way of thinking about children and child abuse in which this is self evident to us. It comes to the attention of the authorities through day denunciation that's made to the authorities. The Venetian System of Justice worked on a principle of secret denunciations who were looking at the denunciation there. The piece in the slightly different handwriting up at the top. It goes to this tribunal, which is concerned with blasphemy, is made by a Parish Priest named Bortolo Fiorese. Why does it go to the blasphemy tribunal? This is a tribunal that was created in the 16th Century, to deal with blasphemy.
	Blasphemy is speech crime. It's saying things that are offense to God, Jesus, Mary, and the Saints, and those saying things that were offensive in that way was very severely punishable in Venice from the 16th Century up until the late 18th Century, when Venice ceases to exist. However, this court, here's other kinds of cases as well, and in particular, because it's responsible for blasphemy, it's also responsible for other kinds of scandal. Causing scandal was criminal in itself, and because nobody else can think of quite what else to call what happened to this girl, it falls under the very vague category of causing scandal, and is dealt with in that fashion. 
	The Priest makes the denunciation. He has become acquainted with the girl's mother, who was a poor laundress from the Venetian province of Friuli, so the girl comes from a family of poor immigrants. Poor immigrants in Venice in the 18th Century, like poor immigrants in any big city in the world today, are very easily exploited, and that was what was happening here as well. The Priest actually makes the acquaintance of mother and daughter before it actually happens, before the girl actually spends the night in this guy's bed. He doesn't stop it, he's finally mobilized by other members of the community, and removes the child from the department, and makes the denunciation.
	Here's what the denunciation looks like. He's introducing himself here, [foreign language 00:15:55], I Bortolo Fiorese, the Curate of the Church of St. Angelo, you see, I just want to give you a little bit of an idea of what it's like to read a document like this. He's talking about, here, yesterday [foreign language 00:16:17], to the [carats 00:16:18] of the house of Signore Gaetano Franceschini, that's the guy. [foreign language 00:16:26], an inhabitant of this parish, and he's explaining that he has [foreign language 00:16:31], removed from that house in [foreign lanaguage 00:16:37], in absence of the master, [foreign language 00:16:40] a little girl, [foreign language 00:16:42] of about eight years. 
	[foreign language. 00:16:45] [inaudible 00:16:47], okay and to have delivered her, oh [foreign language 00:16:55], to consign her [foreign language 00:17:00], Maria, her mother [foreign language 00:17:02] taken from the bad reputation [foreign language 00:17:11], and the [depravement 00:17:12] of the nations of the above mentioned Signore Gaetano, and the [betreathement 00:17:16] that he undertook [foreign language 00:17:21], the previous night of the said girl [foreign language 00:17:24]. All right, scandal was the main thing. I've lost my red line. [foreign language 00:17:27], scandalously, [foreign language 00:17:31] in his own bed.
	So, that was what I read the first day in the archive, and I thought wow, I haven't seen anything like this in the archives before, and that's page one of the docket that this generates. What happens with a denunciation like this, you may know this, in Venice it goes into the mouth of the lion. There are stone receptacles for secret denunciations, and there are a number of them in Venice. They go in the mouth where they are received by the Venetian Government, which makes what it can out of them. In this case, refers it to the tribunal. 
	This is the church of St. Angelo, which is where the Priest worked, [foreign language 00:18:14]. It's a church where he also met the mother and the girl. It's a church that doesn't exist in Venice anymore, so if you were at the square of St. Angelo today, it's totally empty. The church is gone. That was a little weird for me, all set in the idea that this, I mean, most of Venice, most of the buildings that were there in the 18th Century are still there today. It's not a city whos cityscape has changed very dramatically in the last 200 years, but this particular site is gone. 
	That's an image of an 18th Century Venetian laundress, and gives us some sense of the life of the mother. Maria de [Lamadre 00:18:52], who was a laundress immigrant from Friuli, as this woman probably was, too, judging by her costume. Friuli was a province of the Venetian Republic, it's to the northeast of Venice, just at the top of the Adriatic Gulf. I should have a map here, I'm sorry. The people who come from Friuli speak a distinctive language. They actually still do. They wear a distinctive costume, which she is wearing there, and are a recognizably distinct ethnic minority within Venice in the 18th Century, doing a lot of menial labor in the city in the late 18th Century. 
	The secret investigation summons the mother to testify, and then summons basically the whole neighborhood, one at a time. That's why the file is so big. To testify about what they know about what happens during that one night between Franceschini and the little girl. He's a man of some consequence, Franceschini, he's from a family of wealthy silk merchants in the nearby city of Vicenza. The court has a lot of trouble deciding what to do with this case in the end, partly because it's difficult to determine what crime has actually been committed. By the time you get to the end of the case file, there's balloting. There are four judges, and as you can see over here, they divide two and two, two against two, in round after round of voting on what the possible penalties might be in his case, until they finally settle on here three to one, up here, on making him pay what for him would have been a rather small fine in compensation, to the girl's family. Then the four members of the tribunal sign off on this and he pays the fine and disappears from history. 
	The last we know of him is this receipt for the money, 200 dockets, which the girls father receives, and since the girl's family is entirely illiterate, the father signs it with an X, in the absence of being able to write his name. This is the last page. I showed you now the first page of the docket, and the last page of the docket, but it closes with this. The turning over the money, he's set free, he disappears, and presumably, from what we know of such characters, goes on to molest other little girls elsewhere during the remaining years of his life. 
	Let me talk to you a little bit about the coffee house, which is downstairs from where he lives. I told you, the coffee house is on the first floor, he lives on the third floor. It's important, because the coffee house is the reason that this whole case comes to anybody's attention at all. The people downstairs in the coffee house are talking. They're having coffee, and they're talking. Coffee houses are a new phenomenon in 18th Century Venice, as they are all over 18th Century Europe. In Venice, they're the subject of a very famous play, by the great Venetian playwright, Carlo Goldoni. [foreign language 00:21:55], which just means "the coffee house," and it was produced in Venice in 1750 in the [foreign language 00:22:00], the St. Angelo Theater, which by coincidence would have been right around the corner from [foreign language 00:22:05], where that particular priest was working and first encountered this case. 
	This would have been a generation earlier in 1750. The play simply reflects the fact, there you can see [inaudible 00:22:21] an 18th Century production. The coffee houses have become super important in the life of the city, and not just in Venice, but all over Europe. Coffee is introduced to Europe in the 17th Century from the Ottoman Empire, becomes immensely popular before coming to speak, Pieter's heads shaking for a coffee, he said that I would be up for doing this, and the 18th Century is really the century which people begin to feel like that about coffee in Europe. 
	There are 200 coffee houses in Venice in the 18th Century, and there are many more in Paris and London, say, which are larger cities. Venice, it's limited to 200 for fear that there would actually be an even greater number. They keep the limit to 200 in a city of 140,000 people. It's a new institution in the 18th Century, and they're hugely popular. There's the coffee house, a coffee house in Venice, and shows us the figure of the caffettiere, the man of the coffee house who probably owns the business, works behind the counters, serves the coffee to his patrons. He's a crucial figure in the Goldoni play, and a crucial figure in this case file, because the coffee house, that I was reading about, which is on a street called [foreign language 00:23:43], the street of courtesy. 
	This coffee house is owned and run by a man named [Dominico 00:23:49]. Dominico [Ravasili 00:23:50]. He stands at the center of the whole network of discussion about everything that's going on in the neighborhood, including what's going on in Franceschini's bed on the third floor. Coffee house is down on the first floor, up on the fourth floor [Ravasili 00:24:00] lives with his with Francesca and their family. Down on the first floor he is presiding over discussion with everyone who's drinking coffee in his coffee house, about the news of the neighborhood. Up on the fourth floor, his wife has a little internal balcony that looks down on the common staircase in the building, and she can see everyone who is going to Franceschini's apartment. 
	So, two networks of gossip. One down below in the coffee house, one up above at the top of the fourth floor staircase, but produce an enormous [00:24:42] of information about this case, since everyone is summoned to testify about what they've heard and what they said. I was very interested in trying to locate this coffee house, where it would have been. Here's the [foreign language 00:24:56] where the church used to be, and this street, which is today called [foreign language 00:25:00], the street of the Aman, is probably the street on which the coffee house was located. That's what the [foreign language 00:25:10] looks like today, with no church in it. That empty space over there is where the church in the earlier print. 
	That's [foreign language 00:25:18] looking out, looking towards the square, and I'm guessing the coffee house has to be right around here on ground level. These are four story buildings that match the description in the archives. They would have had a shop down on the first floor, which would have been the café, or the coffee house, the way this on is down here on the first floor. We know from the coffee house proprietor's wife, who's watching the staircase, who goes to Franceschini's apartment on the third floor. The person lives on the second floor is interesting, too, but I don't think I have time to tell you about him. 
	We know everyone who lives in this building. Who's coming to his apartment? Well, a lot of Friulians are going to his apartment. There is a typical Friulian in Friulian costume. We have reports of one Friulian after another, sometimes with daughters going to his apartment. Then various claims of prostitutes. There's a very rich vocabulary for prostitution in 18th Century Venice. This is the [foreign language 00:26:21]. This is the [foreign language 00:26:23]. This is the [foreign language 00:26:26]. They are all seen going up and down the stairs of the building that's above the coffee house on [foreign language 00:26:32].
	People know everything about what's going on in the building, and all of that information is disseminated from the coffee house down below around the whole neighborhood. It's gossip, and the Goldoni play is about gossip, but I would suggest that it's a little bit more than gossip. There's this whole discussion about coffee houses in the 18th Century, in which, I mean, this shows you a coffee house as something that generates gossip. That is to say he's having coffee down below, while he's talking to someone in the neighborhood one floor up. The discussion of coffee houses surrounds this book. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, but Jurgen Habermas, which argues that coffee houses in the 18th Century created a new kind of public life, or were one of the institutions that created a new kind of public life in which people discussed things in a critical way. That is to say public issues, that was different from the way that they discussed public issues in the past. 
	What I would suggest is that there's a moment in 1785, when people are actually discussing, in this coffee house, what it means for adults to have sex with children, in a way that transcends mere gossip, and takes it to the next level of posing the question of why this is publicly problematic for the neighborhood, for the man on the third floor to have an eight year old girl in hiss bed. It's a strange manifestation of this public's fear that Habermas describes. Coffee house of the 18th Century, again, illustrative of the kind of public discussion oriented atmosphere that would be created in a coffee house. There is no continual public awareness dating back to the 1780's about child abuse, that is to say the issue is raise, and then buried. 
	It first emerges into say the public press, into the newspapers, a century later in the 1880's. There is actually a really interesting book by Judith Walkowitz, The City of Dreadful Delight, which talks about the scandals of the 1880's, about men and very young prostitutes in London. It won't be until the 1960's that we actually have a consistent moderate awareness of child abuse, following from the, this issue being taken up by doctors and sociologists. First in the battered child syndrome of the early 1960's, which is about battering abuse, and followed by a parallel interest and concern about sexual abuse. [inaudible 00:29:11] public issue in the modern world, is for there be posters like this one that bring peoples, make people aware of the fact that this is something that happens in society all around us, or posters like this one. 
	Nothing like this is part of the world of the 18th Century. What I'm arguing is that there are three months in 1785 where there is something like that kind of public awareness in at least one neighborhood in Venice, and generated by the tribunal, together with the coffee house, and the fact that the people who are sitting in the coffee house are being summoned to the tribunal, then going back to the coffee house and talking about what kinds of questions they were being asked at the tribunal. 
	The indictment that's made against Franceschini, the offender, makes the case that he leads a scandalous life with bad women. However, the indictment is pretty subtle in thinking about his sex life. The argument is made that he has been seen with all kinds of bad women, we know who they are, the [foreign language 00:30:20], the [foreign language 00:30:21], the [foreign language 00:30:23], all of whom can be identified. The indictment argues that there's a particular pattern in his sex life. That he's interested in young girls, and they have witnesses who try, attempt to establish this. They say that he has sex with a lot of bad women, but pushing it still further, [foreign language 00:30:45], you went so far as to procure innocent girls of tender age, treacherously disguising your guilty intentions with alluring promises in order to obtain the girls, seeking them with premarital pretext to obscure the circumstances of your turpitudinous purpose, and to achieve it, you attempted by seductive means to deceive the feeble mentality of the girls in order to bend them to your satisfaction, and thus by allude acts and dishonest licentiousness, and perpetrated malice, taking from them that innocence that was supposed to form the most sturdy rampart of their virtue. 
	The idea that he's taken their innocence from them is the formulation of what child abuse is in the late 18th Century. What's interesting about this is not just what it says about child abuse, but what it says about his sexual character. It argues that there's a pattern in his pursuit of young girls, that he's not just looking for sex, but that his sexuality has a particular character. What we would call a perverse character, that he harms the girls by taking away their innocence, but, as you would probably be aware, the term pedophilia as a clinical concept, is still 100 years in the future. 
	That's not a term that anybody has at hand to apply to him, even though they can describe it empirically, reasonably well based on the evidence that they have from this particular case. Pedophilia, as a clinical concept, again, dates to 100 years later, and to Krafft-Ebing, Professor of Vienna, who creates these categories of sexual psychopathology in the 1880's, including pedophilia as one of them. If we think about the history of sexuality, super important is this work by Michel Foucault, "The History of Sexuality," which you've probably all heard about already in the course that you have taken. 
	Foucault argues that during the course of the 19th Century, so after the period that I'm talking about here, sex stops being just a practice, and becomes a mark of character. That sexuality actually begins to define a person. Foucault writes that all those minor perverts, who 19th Century psychiatrist entomologize, studied as if you were classifying them as insects, by giving them strange baptismal names. So, in the 19th Century there are zoo arrests, or zooaphiles, for those interested in animals, but also pedophiles. It becomes a character. It becomes a category. It becomes a diagnosis. It becomes a crime, but not until the 19th Century. 
	In the 18th Century something like it can be described empirically, but nobody has a name to give it. It's being interested in bad women, but pushing it still further, as the indictment says. What Franceschini says about himself, in his own defense, is he says, "I'm a free man." [foreign language 00:33:51], meaning unmarried, unconstricted by family ties, and free to do whatever he wants in his private life, as long as he's not broken any known law, which apparently he has not done. He's using the language of the enlightenment, and the language of 18th Century Libertinism. 
	The most famous figure of 18th Century Libertinism is Casanova, whose name has become a byword for Libertinism since the 18th Century. There you see him. The other most famous figure of 18th Century Libertinism, who's a fictional figure, is Mozart's Don Giovanni, or Don Juan. We know him under that name as well. Don Giovanni, which was created not only by Mozart, but by his librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, who was Venetian, and came from the same Venetian world as Casanova, who was Venetian and Gaetano Frenceschini, who was also Venetian.
	I want to try to draw some Venetian connections through the world of high culture that take us back to this case. Foucault, going back to "The History of Sexuality," writes about Don Giovanni and says, "We have a likely reason for the prestige of Don Juan, which three centuries have not erased. Underneath the great violator of the worlds of marriage, stealer of wives, seducer of virgins, the shame of families," right, Don Juan is the Libertine, "and an insult to husbands and fathers, another personage can be glimpsed," says Foucault. "The individual driven, in spite of himself, by the somber madness of sex. Underneath the Libertine, the perfect." So, Don Giovanni, understood in the 18th Century as a Libertine. When we put him on stage today, there's some tendency to represent him as the pervert, as in this particular Czech production. 
	One of the ways one can think about the Franceschini case, is in the relation to the birth of the modern pervert. That is to say, the person whose sexuality can be used to define his character. Let me go back to Casinova. Casinova, the classic Libertine, his name is the byword for Libertinism. He has sex with so many women, and even a few mew, all during the course of the 18th Century. Are they women, though, the women with whom he has sex? Are they sometimes girls? The question that I posed, when I went to the memoirs of Casanova, was a question that as far as I knew no one had ever asked before, which was how young was too young for Casanova? It's one seduction after another.
	I first got interested in Casanova when I was working on Eastern Europe, my book, "Inventing Eastern Europe," that Pieter mentioned, and I was interested in the fact that he buys a 13 year old girl in Russia as a sexual slave. I thought wow, 13. Then I looked at it closer, and I wondered was she actually 12? Franceschini was 60 years old in 1785, when he was charged in court in Venice. Casanova was born in 1725, so he would have been 60 in 1785 also. These guys are exact contemporaries, Casanova and Franceschini. Both Venetian. Franceschini from a little further away in Vicenza, but really shaped by the same cultural force. 
	I felt that if I asked the question about Casanova's Libertinism, would that say something to me about Franceschini's Libertinism as well? I don't really have, I think, enough time to go into this without answering, you know, in detail, but the answer to the question is that if you look closely at Casanova's memoirs, he goes down to 12, and even to 11, feeling pretty comfortable about it, without asking a lot of questions about whether it's wrong. With the 11 year old, who's the youngest person he describes in his 12 volumes of memoirs, he says to her at first, [foreign language 00:37:54], you're too much of a child, he says to her, but then he changes his mind and decides she's not too much of a child, and has sex with her anyway. 
	On the last page of the memoirs, he's fingering a 9 year old, but he decides to leave her alone, and he's not interested in her yet. He stops the memoirs when he's 50 years old, so we don't know what Casanova was doing at 50 when he was Franceschini's age. Casanova writing about his youth says, "I began to live truly independent of everything that could place limits on my inclinations. As long as I respected the laws, it seemed to me that I could ignore all prejudices." In the 1780's the laws have still not caught up with Casanova, or with Franceschini, who argues that he wasn't breaking any laws, and that therefor he was free to live his private life as he saw fit. 
	In Don Giovanni, it was produced in Prague in 1787, Mozart and Da Ponte, together, explore the question of what it means to be free in the sense that Casanova felt you could be free from prejudice, and Franceschini felt that he was free to pursue his private life as he saw fit. There is a famous chorus led by Don Giovanni, at the end of the first act, which is all about freedom. It's called Viva La Liberta, long live liberty, and we would ask what kind of liberty is Don Giovanni celebrating, if not precisely the liberty that Casanova was talking about. 
	[singing 00:39:30]
	Okay. I think we're stuck in an endless loop. Let me talk to you about Da Ponte, who, I mean, the endless loops is sort of purposely expressive of the Libertinism of the 18th Century, but we don't have that much time. Here's the librettist, who has composed the Viva La Liberta lyric for Mozart, but Ponte, who is as Venetian as Casanova, as Venetian as Franceschini, what I want to talk about as Da Ponte's contribution to this opera, for a little bit, is the famous aria that's composed for Don Giovanni's servant, Leporella. It's an aria that's called, "Madamina," and in it Don Giovanni's love life is described by his servant, with reference to a catalog that the servant keeps. It's called, "The Catalog Aria," in which he describes all of the women who Don Giovanni has seduced. 
	It's Casanova's memoirs condensed into one aria. Most famously, they're divided by nationality, that is to say Leporella sings [singing 00:40:58]. In Italy there were 640 [singing 00:41:03], in Germany 231, and then eventually in Spain 1003 [singing 00:41:10], becomes the punctuation of the aria, 1003. I don't want to talk about the national break down, I want to talk about the age break down in this aria of Don Giovanni's conquests. We're told that [foreign language 00:41:32], women of every degree, every form, and every age, and I'm interested in what every age means. 
	[foreign language 00:41:42], the old ones he makes a conquest for the pleasure, [foreign language 00:41:46], for the pleasure of putting them on the list. [foreign language 00:41:51], but his predominant passion is the young beginner. Listen to the way we sing young beginner. [singing 00:42:01]
	He's excited about [foreign language 00:42:29], and one might reasonably ask, how young is the young beginner for Don Giovanni? Da Ponte doesn't specify, but if Don Giovanni's Libertinism is related to Casanova's, then the young beginner could be 15, 14, 13, 12, or 11, following Casanova's memoirs. He goes on to specify, in the aria, that in the winter, Don Giovanni likes a fat one [foreign language 00:42:59], but in summer he likes a thin one. [foreign language 00:43:04], the big one is really majestic [foreign language 00:43:09], and the little one is really charming, he says. 
	Mozart then goes crazy, if you know the aria, on the word pacina. La pacina. Repeats it nine times. The musical setting becoming more and more arch each time. Clearly the thing in the libretto of this aria that Mozart finds most interesting. [singing 00:43:37]
	Mozart's really invested in that particular word in the libretto. Very playful setting. A pacina's already a diminutive, right? It's smaller than picolla, so we're taking a diminutive and suggesting that it's getting littler and littler every time we repeat it. Driven repetition, sixteenth notes, staccato, dotted rhythm, and almost complete collapse of articulation, so it becomes one word, la pacina, la pacina, la pacina. The words themselves are no longer distinct, and the musical effect is ironic, comic, knowing, dirty minded, suggestive, as if the little beginner is getting littler, and littler, and littler every time you repeat the word, so that Don Giovanni's la pacina could be considered to be his child victim, as young as you would dare to imagine. [singing 00:45:18]
	I'd never thought about this until I began working on this project, what that meant, the la pacina in that aria, but I have to admit, it's changed the way I feel about this opera, and sort of complicated and weird ways, my feelings about Don Giovanni. If I had more time I would talk to you about Jean Jacques Rousseau, who was in Venice in the 1740's as Secretary to the French Ambassador, and bought an 11 year old girl as a sex slave, and was heavily invested in raising her to be a sex slave for himself and for a colleague. I say they invested in her together. He gives up on the project, doesn't carry it through, but write about it in the confessions. Ironic, because it is Rousseau, who in the book, "Emile," really creates the whole 18th Century ideology, or articulate best the whole 18th Century ideology of children's innocence, creating an education to [foreign language 00:46:36], to preserve children's innocence. 
	I wish I had more time to talk to you about it, but I want to spend a little bit of time talking about the girl herself, and then to talk about this particular image for a few minutes still, over the next five minutes. So, the girl herself. Paolina Lozaro, one of the thing that is weird and interesting about this case, is that in the history of childhood, we usually never have the child's perspective. It's usually only adults writing about children. One of the things about this case is that the child actually speaks. They summon the eight year old. They ask her really uncomfortable questions, and she answers them before the tribunal in 1785. 
	The law is not prepared to articulate what the charges are. The neighborhood understands that there's something wrong with what's happened in Franceschini's apartments. They go to the girl in order to try to figure out what it is exactly, and this is what her testimony looks like when transcribed. It's very weird. We very rarely have this, a child speaking directly to us from the world of the 18th Century. It's transcribed in Venetian dialect, as a kind of guarantee of authenticity, that is to say that we're transcribing exactly what she said. It hasn't been fixed up and in Italian, in standard Italian. 
	[foreign language 00:48:01], he made me get into the bed. [foreign language 00:48:02], and after Eden [foreign language 00:48:07] he put is hands [foreign language 00:48:11] under the robe [foreign language 00:48:12] he gave me a kiss. [foreign language 00:48:15] would be the Venetian for Italian [foreign language 00:48:15]. Speak of learning new languages later in life, Venetian is a mess. [foreign language 00:48:24], but I never slept. [foreign language 00:48:27] that night when he came to the bed [foreign language 00:48:33] he woke me up [foreign language 00:48:36] he touched me everywhere [foreign language 00:48:39] he pinched me everywhere [foreign language 00:48:43] he took me in his arms [foreign language 00:48:45] and he pinched me between the legs. 
	It goes on and it becomes more graphic from there, but I give you this as an example of how detailed the discussion was in this case. What follows is the surgeons report. The description, what it's like looking at the girl, basically then two days later. [foreign language 00:49:09] I visited today [foreign language 00:49:11] the girl [foreign language 00:49:12] of tender age [foreign language 00:49:15] of about nine years, he thinks [foreign language 00:49:18] I gave her a most diligent exam [foreign language 00:49:25] of the female parts, and he goes on to describe here what he sees. 
	Very detailed indeed, the account of, you know, her voice and of her body, which is made to speak in the courtroom, and gives us some sense of in the process of trying to figure out what happened, they actually go to the girl herself, and try to get a handle on this experience from her point of view. Her point of view is sadly familiar to us from child abuse cases in our own times. What's bizarre and unusual is to have material like this from 1785. The very last thing I want to do with you is talk to you a little bit about this image, which I've been showing you nonstop from the beginning with the little girl and the guys hands over here. It's on the poster for this talk. 
	This is a print made in 18th Century Venice by Giovanni Catini. It's made from a painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York by Pietro Longhi. It's from the 1740's by Longhi, and the Venetian painter. Great Venetian painter who tells us a lot about domestic life and everyday life in 18th Century Venice. This is called either "The Milliner" or "The Letter." She's the pretty milliner, right there. We can see that there's a shop. There's a bust. There's clothes that are being prepared in this shop, and she's reading a letter. The letter is presumed to come from this guy here, and that it's some kind of proposition, and he's holding a little bag of money in his hands. That's the conventional understanding of this painting. 
	I, when I looked at this closely, kind of flipped out, because looking at it closely, it's clear he's not looking at the milliner at all. He's totally focused on the little girl, who you initially think is just a sideline in this picture, a totally separate piece of the story. Not in the story at all, and in fact, looked at closely, I've spent a lot of time at the Met, as close to this picture as the guards will let me get, trying to figure out the direction of his gaze, but I'm afraid there's no doubt about it. He's focused on her. 
	So, you find it in all over 18th Century culture, actually. You find it in Casanova, you find it in Rousseau, you find it in Don Giovanni, you find it in Pietro Longhi in Venetian painting. You find child abuse in all of these places. What you don't find, except in the case file that I'm talking to you about, is a substance of discussion of the presence and meaning and abuse in 18th Century communities. There's nothing quite like it, as far as I know. It's a very fascinating 18th Century moment in which many of the elements of modern European history are already present. Modern history on the verge of happening, and modern phenomena, like child abuse, can be almost, but not quite articulate in a recognizably modern way. Thank you. 
	I'd be totally happy to answer questions. 
Speaker 3:	Who's that?
Larry Wolff:	This woman here?
Speaker 3:	No, the woman who's sitting and doing the labor. 
Larry Wolff:	It's usually understood that this is the procuress standing here.
Speaker 3:	Right, she's the procuress, but isn't the woman reading the letter selling the girl?
Larry Wolff:	We have to wonder that. All the conventional literature on this painting is that the object of his sexual interest, is the pretty young milliner, and after all, she's the total center of the painting. There's not the slightest doubt about it. The way that Longhi has designed the painting, your eye is totally focused on her, not on the child. Therefor the assumption is that the rest of the drama of the painting, which Longhi didn't leave an account of, of course, must be about her and that the letter she receives as in many other famous letter paintings, must be addressed to her, and concern her. But, you're quite right. Once you begin to think about it differently, then you have to wonder about what her role might be. 
Speaker 3:	Right. In that case [inaudible 00:53:53]
Larry Wolff:	That is what is almost immediately supposed by everyone who comes into contact with this story. That is to say, what actually happens in this story is that the mother hires the girl out to him to become his chamber maid, and sends the girl to live in his apartment. 
Speaker 3:	[inaudible 00:54:15]
Larry Wolff:	Except that I have to tell you, first of all, that although the coffee house is theoretically male, the Venetians pass one regulation after another, issue one regulation after another, insisting that the women must be kept out of the coffee houses, and the reason they keep reissuing it, is because the women keep coming into the coffee houses. 
Speaker 3:	And what women are they?
Larry Wolff:	Pardon?
Speaker 3:	[inaudible 00:54:44]
Larry Wolff:	All kinds of women, at every level, and often masked so that you don't know who they are in the case of Venice. Yes, there are bad women who hang around the edges of the coffee house. The other thing I want to say about this is it's not entirely what you'd expect. If you read the case file, women have an enormous amount of agency in this particular case. It's not just men defining the issues and bringing him down. It is, say his housekeeper, who is the first person who tips off the priest. The mother turns out to have been wet nurse for a middle class woman in Venice, and that middle class woman actually is the one pushing the priest to go in there and get the girl out of the apartment. 
	Dozens of women are summoned to testify about this, and are clearly engaged by it as a case, but also actually engaged in it. One of the weird things about the Priest's story is that he makes the denunciation and he starts the whole case, but he's very reluctant to get involved. He's very reluctant to get involved first, because just as you said, he suspects the mother of having set the whole thing up herself, and second, because if the little girl is living in this guy's house as his servant, is it really any of his business to be removing the girl from the apartment? He's actually concerned that he'll be charged with robbing them, by removing the servant, and he makes the girl remove a pair of silver buckles that she had been given as a gift by the man in apartment. Just to be sure that he wouldn't be accused of stealing any property. 
	There are women pushing him to make this intervention. As I say, the women in the neighborhood, and this other woman who's a patron of the mother. So, it's quite unexpected how much agency women had in this case. 
Speaker 3:	[inaudible 00:56:43] coffee shop? Were they absent, because you were defining public speakers being in the coffee shop [crosstalk 00:56:53]
Larry Wolff:	It's not clear. I would say that on the whole they're not in the coffee shop, but there are two circuits here. There's a male circuit of discussion in the coffee shop, and a women's circuit of gossip that is generated on the fourth floor and that involves all the women in the neighborhood, and that they clearly intersect. That is to say, the men downstairs know what the women are saying, and the women upstairs know what the men are saying in the coffee shop, but it's not clear that it's exactly the same circuit, that men and women discuss these things on exactly the same level. Does that answer your question?
Speaker 3:	Yeah, it just, it's enticing [crosstalk 00:57:29]
Larry Wolff:	Totally fascinating. 
Speaker 3:	[inaudible 00:57:31]
Speaker 4:	[inaudible 00:57:38]
Larry Wolff:	Great question. Casa, with all its connotations of home, can also have a much more routine meaning in Italian, of just meaning apartment, which in this case is probably closer to the sense that it has, in this case. Franceschini himself, argues that everything that happens inside the threshold of his apartment, is entirely his business, does not concern the law in any fashion. The lawyers who help him draw his defense, make precisely that argument, that everything that happens on the inside of the threshold of his casa, is his domain, and the domain with in which he is free libra, to do as he wants as long as he is not breaking the laws.
	He then challenges them, challenges the court, on the grounds that they have no idea what happens on the inside of the threshold of his apartment, and what he doesn't know is that his housekeeper and [inaudible 00:58:35] have all been summoned to testify about what happens on the inside of the threshold of his apartment, because the testimony's kept secret. The other testimony that they use to actually penetrate the apartment, is the testimony of the delivery boys of the coffee house. 
	I don't know if you know this, in Italy you can actually have the coffee sent to you. You sometimes see kids in the street carrying sort of trays of coffees, so Franceschini, every now and then, sends for a coffee from the coffee house downstairs. [foreign language 00:59:13] the boy of the coffee house that's summoned to testify, and testifies about who he sees in the apartment, whether he brings one coffee or two, whether he had a glimpse over the threshold, whether he had a glimpse into the bedroom, which is closed off in the entry way. The coffee house, with the delivery system, actually becomes a means of penetrating his private world, and reporting back to the tribunal on who he is entertaining within the walls of his apartment. 
	They take that very seriously, the tribunal. The problem, how to obtain information about what's going on on the other side of the threshold of the casa. You were going to ask me a question?
Speaker 5:	[inaudible 01:00:02]
Larry Wolff:	You could see his story as being a story that's about failure of patriarch duty, not a phase, as to say his father, who I spent some time researching as well, is a very well known silk manufacturer in Vicenza. Probably the biggest silk manufacturer in Venice. There's a huge palace in Vicenza you can still visit, which belongs to the Franceschini family. It was very modern in that it had silk works and residences for the silk workers on the premises around the courtyard. It was a huge family fortune, which he was obviously totally wasting all away, living a life that had nothing to do with commerce and industry, which is what his family is all about. 
	The question is whether he disgraced the honor of his family, is one that comes up as well in this case. That's a very good point to raise. One of the things that happens to the girl Paolina Lozaro, after her one night in the apartment, is that Franceschini has ordered the house keeper to powder her hair 18th Century style. Can you picture a 18th Century style powdered hair? What everyone obviously takes form this, is that she's been made into some kind of little courtesan  by him, in having her hair powdered. 
	The first thing they do when they get her out of the apartment, is they wash her hair, and restore her to her original appearance. It's a part of the attempt to recreate her lost innocence, but you're totally right. The era, in this case, could be connected to say the silver buckles that she's given by Franceschini, and the case of which the Priest so carefully detaches from her shoes and makes sure that he leaves behind when he removes her from the apartment. 
	You're right. It's very interesting, because the doll, of course, that she's holding, is the emblem of her childhood qualities, but the pearl drop earing might be something else. I don't know enough about the history of earrings in the 18th Century to tell you for sure, but I would be totally fascinated to know more about them. 
Speaker 6:	[inaudible 01:02:24]
Larry Wolff:	Yeah, that's a great observation. For Casanova, the idea that you can do it in Russia, in a totally different way from the way you can do it in Venice, is very interesting to him. That is to say that the social circumstances of Russian serfdom are such that once you've purchased her, she really is your property. 
Speaker 6:	[inaudible 01:02:48]
Larry Wolff:	Westerners use the term slavery with reference to Russian serfdom, because it's so much harsher and more restrictive than terms of serfdom further west. That's why Casanova actually evokes the term. Rousseau doesn't invoke the term. I actually use it there, and say sexual slave, just because he and this other guy are buying this girl for their exclusive use. It's actually intended as, oh it's so weird, as a way of avoiding venereal disease. The principal is that she will be only for them, and that's what makes it a kind of sexual slavery. This particular case, you could argue that if she actually remained in his house as his chamber maid, and he was actually using her sexually on a regular basis, but that would in fact be, come close to certain terms of slavery as well. 
	The mother was being paid sum of money, a monthly wage for the girl. 
Speaker 7:	Who was the other person in the apartment complex besides [inaudible 01:03:59]
Larry Wolff:	Okay, so on the second floor is a woman named Antonia [inaudible 01:04:05], who is unusual living on the second floor, European this is first floor, of course. European first floor is American's second floor. What's unusual about her is that she's actually uniquely in this story, except for the judges, a member of the patrician class in Venice. Venice is a Republic of nobles, of patricians. Those are the people who serve on its civic institutions, and she is the widow of a patrician nobleman. Therefor, the highest status person in the building, and she is a person who actually got Franceschini the apartment up on the third floor, after sort of weird flirtation with him, that he and she both describe differently. Obtained the apartment for him on the third floor, and once he got the apartment, he then lost all interest in being her friend. 
	He thought she wanted him to be her [foreign language 01:05:05], to be her company in her places. He didn't want to do that, and so she has to watch the [foreign language 01:05:15] coming up and down the stairs, as well past her entryway. When he's arrested, his first supposition is that she did it. That it was her revenge, because he assumes she's the only person in the building powerful enough to have the connections to manipulate the Venetian justice system to bring him into court and have him arrested. 
	He's actually wrong about that. It's actually people of two and three degrees of status below her in this particular case, exercising various kinds of agency, who actually make this happen. But, his immediate assumption is that she's behind it. Thank you for asking that. 
Speaker 8:	[inaudible 01:06:01]
Larry Wolff:	Great question. Yes, they did a full case history on Franceschini. This is testimony of every woman he'd seen in that apartment over the course of the last year while he's been living there, and that's the point of being able to establish his sexual character based on an empirical collection of evidence of all of the people he has seen in that apartment, many of whom are summoned to testify. The women themselves. The [foreign language 01:06:29]. They're all summoned to testify as well in this case. It's a legal profession that they're not hiding from the law, so the key, just as you say, the question of what [foreign language 01:06:43] are, [inaudible 01:06:45] argues that this is all about a question of his intention, and whether we can know what his intention actually was, except God, and therefor the court has no business even speculating about what his intention was, having a girl come to be his chamber maid. 
Pieter:	Let me interrupt by thanking you, Larry, and it's time to have our food reception, for food and drink and people can please ask Larry [crosstalk 01:07:13]