ReviewCasanova: world’s greatest lover or debauched sexual predator? Harvard professor puts legendary libertine’s conquests in context
- In popular imagination Giacomo Casanova was a likeable ladies man, but the reality of his travels around 18th century Europe could not be more different
- Harvard professor Leo Damrosch sets the record straight in a new biography that puts the adventurer’s sexual exploits in the context of his time
Adventurer – The Life and Times of Giacomo Casanova by Leo Damrosch, pub. Yale University Press
Giacomo Casanova (1725-98) must rival Karl Marx as one of the most-mentioned yet least-read of historical figures, although they certainly have little else in common.
The vague but popular notion of Casanova as a likeable ladies man getting into assorted scrapes as he bounces his way from boudoir to boudoir is unable to survive the reading of more than a few pages of his memoirs.
It’s his account of 18th century European society that makes those a valuable historical resource. But if the background is courtiers, balls, nights at the opera, and much dressing up and banqueting, the foreground of Casanova’s life is less attractive.
It features seduction, rape, incest, paedophilia, child trafficking, prostitution, repeated bouts of gonorrhoea, abandoned offspring, vast sums lost to gambling, imprisonment, murder, participation in an assortment of scams and banishment from some of Europe’s major cities. Yet readers and academics alike continue to be charmed.
Casanova was of very modest origins yet lived as a deep-pocketed dandy, travelling around Europe applying his wits to making the most of the remarkable good fortune that often came his way.