Paolina's Innocence: Child Abuse in Casanova's Venice. By Larry Wolff (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. 315 pp.)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".