Adventurer

A fast-paced narrative about the world-famous libertine Giacomo Casanova, from celebrated biographer Leo Damrosch

“The excellence of Leo Damrosch’s energetic biography is that it reveals so many other dimensions of this remarkable man: pioneering autobiographer, questioner of received ideas, traveller through high culture and low.”—Jonathan Bate, author of Radical Wordsworth

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 magus, a violinist, a mathematician, a Masonic master, an entrepreneur, a diplomat, a gambler, a spy—and the first to tell his own story. In his vivid autobiography Histoire de Ma Vie, he recorded at least a hundred and twenty 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 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?