Adventurer : the life and times of Giacomo Casanova / Leo Damrosch.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Damrosch, Leopold, author.

Contributor:

Rosengarten Family Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Casanova, Giacomo, 1725-1798.

Casanova, Giacomo.

Adventure and adventurers--Europe--Biography.

Adventure and adventurers.

Europe--History--18th century--Biography.

Europe.

Genre:

Biographies.

History.

Physical Description:

vii, 422 pages, 24 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color), map ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

New Haven ; London : Yale University Press, [2022]

Summary:

The iconic libertine Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798) was a storied adventurer through the Enlightenment's shadowy underside. Known as a serial seducer, he was also an aspiring priest, an army officer, a fortune teller, a con man, a violinist, a mathematician, a Masonic master, an entrepreneur, a diplomat, a gambler, and a spy. The first to tell his own story, in his massive autobiography Histoire de Ma Vie, he recorded at least a hundred and twenty love affairs, as well as dramatic sagas of duels, swindles, arrests, and escapes. He knew kings and an empress, Catherine the Great, and most of the famous writers of the time, including Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin. Drawing on seldom used materials, Leo Damrosch situates Casanova fully in the multiple subcultures he inhabited. Reading Casanova's memoir with a critical eye and engaging extensively with his non-autobiographical writings, he brings alive this extraordinary figure and the eighteenth-century world that Casanova knew so intimately. Casanova aspired to a life of freedom from restraints, but, Damrosch asks, freedom at whose expense?

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: 1. City of Masks and Mirrors

2. Awakenings

3. An Erotic Education

4. A Career in the Church

5. The Mysterious Castrato

6. Casanova's Children

7. Corfu and Constantinople

8. Metamorphosis

9. Playboy

10. Libertinism

11. "You Will Also Forget Henriette"

12. Paris at Last

13. Nuns and Lovers

14. The Great Escape

15. In Search of the Blind Goddess

16. Manon

17. Rolling Stone

18. Jousting with Voltaire

19. Still Rolling

20. Magus

21. The End of Act I

22. At the Courts of Frederick and Catherine

23. The Duel

24. "This Phantom Liberty"

25. Spain

26. Whiling Away the Years in Italy

27. Trieste, and Venice at Last

28. The Gathering Gloom

29. A Pink Louis XV Armchair.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 379-406) and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Rosengarten Family Fund.

ISBN:

0300248288

9780300248289

OCLC:

1267751629