scene 2, extolling an elixir that has remarkable medicinal and amatory

properties:

You that would last long, list to my song, Make no more coil, but buy of this oil. Would you be ever fair and young? Stout of teeth, and strong of tongue? Tart of palate? quick of ear? Sharp of sight? of nostril clear? Moist of hand? and light of foot? Or, I will come nearer to ’t, Would you live free from all diseases? Do the act your mistress pleases, Yet fright all aches from your bones? Here’s a med’cine for the nones.

* * * * *

An amatory appeal is made in a scene from _Bussy D’Ambois_, a drama by the English playwright George Chapman (c. 1559–c. 1634). Monsieur, brother of King Henry III of France, addresses the Countess Tamyra:

Monsieur: And wherefore do you this? To please your husband? ’Tis gross and fulsome: if your husband’s pleasure Be all your object, and you aim at honor In living close to him, get you from Court; You may have him at home; these common put-offs For common women serve: “My honor! Husband!” Dames maritorious ne’er were meritorious. Speak plain, and say, “I do not like you, sir, Y’are an ill-favor’d fellow in my eye;” And I am answer’d.

Tamyra: Then, I pray, be answer’d: For in good faith, my lord, I do not like you In that sort you like.

* * * * *

The love charm in the form of a spell was a belief current in the Elizabethan age. In the drama _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_, by Robert Greene, Bacon, conceived as a thaumaturgist, declares:

Thou com’st in post from merry Fressingfield, Fast-fancied to the Keeper’s bonny lass.

Fast-fancied is an Elizabethan expression meaning bound by love.

* * * * *

The Elizabethan Fair, and all such traditional occasions for barter, commercial interchange, and public gossip were also and always an opportunity for amorous interludes. This is the view expressed in _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_, by Robert Greene (c. 1560–1592). Margaret, the fair maid of Fressingfield, enters:

Margaret: Thomas, maids when they come to see the fair Count not to make a cope for dearth of hay; When we have turn’d our butter to the salt, And set our cheese safely upon the racks, Then let our fathers price it as they please. We country sluts of merry Fressingfield Come to buy needless naughts to make us fine, And look that young men should be frank this day, And court us with such fairings as they can. Phoebus is blithe, and frolic looks from heaven.

* * * * *

In a scene from the Elizabethan dramatist George Peele’s _The Old Wives Tale_, Zantippa is in search of a husband. She and her ugly sister Celanta go to a well for water. A Head, speaking from the well, promises her a love charm, ‘some cockell-bread’:

Zantippa: Now for a husband, house, and home: God send a good one or none, I pray God! My father hath sent me to the well for the water of life, and tells me, if I give fair words, I shall have a husband. But here comes Celanta, my sweet sister. I’ll stand by and hear what she says.

Enter Celanta, the foul wench, to the well for water with a pot in her hand.

Celanta: My father hath sent me to the well for water, and he tells me, if I speak fair, I shall have a husband and none of the worst. Well, though I am black, I am sure all the world will not forsake me; and, as the old proverb is, though I am black, I am not the devil.

Zantippa: Marry-gup with a murrain. I know wherefore thou speakest that: but go thy ways home as wise as thou camest, or I’ll set thee home with a wanion.

Here she strikes her pitcher against her sister’s, and breaks them both, and then exit.

Celanta: I think this be the curstest quean in the world. You see what she is, a little fair, but as proud as the devil, and the veriest vixen that lives upon God’s earth. Well, I’ll let her alone, and go home and get another pitcher, and, for all this, get me to the well for water. Exit.

Enter two Furies out of the Conjurer’s cell and lay Huanebango by the Well of Life and then exeunt.

Re-enter Zantippa with a pitcher to the well.

Zantippa: Once again for a husband; and, in faith, Celanta, I have got the start of you; belike husbands grow by the well-side. Now my father says I must rule my tongue. Why, alas, what am I, then? A woman without a tongue is as a soldier without his weapon. But I’ll have my water, and be gone.

Here she offers to dip her pitcher in, and a Head speaks in the well.

Head: Gently dip, but not too deep, For fear you make the golden beard to weep. Fair maiden, white and red, Stroke me smooth, and comb my head, And thou shalt have some cockell-bread.

* * * * *

In an old Elizabethan play there is reference to lunary or moonwort as a contributory factor in amatory thoughts:

I have heard of an herb called Lunary that being bound to the pulse of the sick causes nothing but dreams of weddings and dances.

* * * * *

In _Endymion_, a drama by the Elizabethan playwright John Lyly (c. 1554–c. 1606), Endymion soliloquizes:

As ebony, which no fire can scorch, is yet consumed with sweet savors, so my heart which cannot be bent by the hardness of fortune, may be bruised by amorous desires.

* * * * *

In the drama _The Old Wives Tale_, by George Peele, the Elizabethan playwright, Frolic and Fantastic sing an erotic chant:

Whenas the rye reach to the chin, And chopcherry, chopcherry ripe within, Strawberries swimming in the cream, And school-boys playing in the stream; Then, O then, O then, O my true-love said, Till that time come again She could not live a maid.

* * * * *

In _Endymion_, the Elizabethan drama by John Lyly, Sir Tophas describes a desirable woman:

Sir Tophas: I love no grissels; they are so brittle they will crack like glass, or so dainty that if they be touched they are straight of the fashion of wax: animus maioribus instat. I desire old matrons. What a sight would it be to embrace one whose hair were as orient as the pearl, whose teeth shall be so pure a watchet that they shall stain the truest turquoise, whose nose shall throw more beams from it than the fiery carbuncle, whose eyes shall be environ’d about with redness exceeding the deepest coral, and whose lips might compare with silver for the paleness! Such a one if you can help me to, I will by piecemeal curtail my affections towards Dipsas, and walk my swelling thoughts till they be cold.

* * * * *

In _Philaster_, a drama by Francis Beaumont (1584–1616) and John Fletcher (1579–1625), Megra, a Lascivious Lady, is thus described:

Dion: Faith, I think she is one whom the state keeps for the agents of our confederate princes; she’ll cog and lie with a whole army, before the league shall break. Her name is common through the kingdom, and the trophies of her dishonor advanced beyond Hercules’ Pillars. She loves to try the several constitutions of men’s bodies; and, indeed, has destroyed the worth of her own body by making experiment upon it for the good of the commonwealth.

* * * * *

In _Endymion_, John Lyly’s drama, Epiton and Sir Tophas have a verbal bout on love:

Epiton: Sir, will you give over wars and play with that bauble called love?

Tophas: Give over wars? No, Epi, Militat omnis amans, et habet sua castra Cupido.

Epiton: Love hate made you very eloquent, but your face is nothing fair.

Tophas: Non formosus erat, sed erat facundus Ulysses.

Epiton: Nay, I must seek a new master if you can speak nothing but verses.

Tophas: Quicquid conabar dicere, versus erat. Epi, I feel all Ovid De Arte Amandi lie as heavy at my heart as a load of logs.

* * * * *

In _The Lady of Pleasure_, a play by the English dramatist James Shirley, Lady Bornwell is rebuked for her amorous diversions by her husband Sir Thomas:

Another game you have, which consumes more Your fame than purse; your revels in the night, Your meetings called the “Ball,” to which repair As to the Court of Pleasure, all your gallants And ladies, whither bound by a subpoena Of Venus, and small Cupid’s high displeasure; ’Tis but the Family of Love translated Into more costly sin!

* * * * *

Amatory enticement is illustrated in a scene in _The Lady of Pleasure_, by James Shirley:

Lord: Have you business, madam, with me?

Madam Decoy: And such, I hope, as will not be Offensive to your lordship.

Lord: I pray speak it.

Madam Decoy: I would desire your lordship’s ear more private.

Lord: Wait i’ th’ next chamber till I call.— Now, madam.

Exit Haircut.

Madam Decoy: Although I am a stranger to your lordship, I would not lose a fair occasion offer’d To show how much I honor, and would serve you.

Lord: Please you to give me the particular, That I may know the extent of my engagement. I am ignorant by what desert you should Be encourag’d to have care of me.

Madam Decoy: My lord, I will take boldness to be plain; beside Your other excellent parts, you have much fame For your sweet inclination to our sex.

Lord: How d’ye mean, madam?

Madam Decoy: I’ that way your lordship Hath honorably practis’d upon some Not to be nam’d. Your noble constancy To a mistress hath deserv’d our general vote; And I, a part of womankind, have thought How to express my duty.

Lord: In what, madam?

Madam Decoy: Be not so strange, my lord. I know the beauty And pleasures of your eyes; that handsome creature With whose fair life all your delight took leave, And to whose memory you have paid too much sad Tribute.

Lord: What’s all this?

Madam Decoy: This: if your lordship Accept my service, in pure zeal to cure Your melancholy, I could point where you might Repair your loss.

Lord: Your ladyship, I conceive, Doth traffic in flesh merchandize.

Madam Decoy: To men Of honor, like yourself. I am well known To some in court, and come not with ambition Now to supplant your officer.

Lord: What is The lady of pleasure you prefer?

Madam Decoy: A lady Of birth and fortune, one upon whose virtue I may presume, the lady Aretina.

Lord: Wife to Sir Thomas Bornwell?

Madam Decoy: The same, sir.

Lord: Have you prepar’d her?

Madam Decoy: Not for your lordship, till I have found your pulse. I am acquainted with her disposition, She has a very appliable nature.

Lord: And, madam, when expect you to be whipt For doing these fine favors?

Madam Decoy: How, my lord? Your lordship does but jest, I hope; you make A difference between a lady that Does honorable offices, and one They call a bawd. Your lordship was not wont To have such coarse opinion of our practice.

Lord: The Lady Aretina is my kinswoman.

Madam Decoy: What if she be, my lord? The nearer blood The nearer sympathy.

* * * * *

In _A New Way to Pay Old Debts_, by the English dramatist Philip Massinger (1583–1640), there appears a description of a love philtre:

Furnace: Here, drink it off; the ingredients are cordial, And this the true elixir; it hath boil’d Since midnight for you. ’Tis the quintessence Of five cocks of the game, ten dozen of sparrows, Knuckles of veal, potato-roots and marrow, Coral and ambergris. Were you two years older And I had a wife, or gamesome mistress, I durst trust you with neither. You need not bait After this, I warrant you, though your journey’s long; You may ride on the strength of this till tomorrow morning.

Allworth: Your courtesies overwhelm me: I much grieve To part from such good friends.

Later, in Act 3 of the same play, Allworth, the young page, describes the amatory lure of Margaret:

Allworth: My much-lov’d lord, were Margaret only fair, The cannon of her more than earthly form, Though mounted high, commanding all beneath it, And ramm’d with bullets of her sparkling eyes, Of all the bulwarks that defend your senses Could batter none, but that which guards your sight. But when the well-tun’d accents of her tongue Make music to you, and with numerous sounds Assault your hearing, (such as if Ulysses Now liv’d again, howe’er he stood the Syrens, Could not resist,) the combat must grow doubtful Between your reason and rebellious passions. And this too; when you feel her touch, and breath Like a swift western wind when it glides o’er Arabia, creating gums and spices; And, in the van, the nectar of her lips, Which you must taste, bring the battalia on, Well arm’d, and strongly lin’d with her discourse, And knowing manners, to give entertainment;— Hippolytus himself would leave Diana, To follow such a Venus.

Lord Lovell: Love hath made you poetical, Allworth.

In another scene, between Sir Giles Overreach, an extortioner, and his daughter Margaret, the father gives his daughter amatory but sinister advice that is tantamount to the prescriptions of the _Kama Sutra_ and similar manuals:

Margaret: There’s too much disparity between his quality and mine, to hope it.

Overreach: I more than hope’t, and doubt not to effect it. Be thou no enemy to thyself, my wealth Shall weigh his titles down, and make you equals. Now for the means to assure him thine, observe me: Remember he’s a courtier and a soldier, And not to be trifled with; and therefore, when He comes to woo you, see you do not coy it: This mincing modesty has spoil’d many a match By a first refusal, in vain after hop’d for.

Margaret: You’ll have me, sir, preserve the distance that Confines a virgin?

Overreach: Virgin me no virgins! I must have you lose that name, or you lose me. I will have you private—start not—I say, private; If thou art my true daughter, not a bastard, Thou wilt venture alone with one man, though he came Like Jupiter to Semele, and come off, too; And therefore, when he kisses you, kiss close.

Margaret: I have heard this is the strumpet’s fashion, sir, Which I must never learn.

Overreach: Learn any thing, And from any creature that may make thee great; From the devil himself.

Margaret (aside): This is but devilish doctrine!

Overreach: Or, if his blood grows hot, suppose he offer Beyond this, do not you stay till it cool, But meet his ardor; if a couch be near, Sit down on’t, and invite him.

Margaret: In your house, Your own house, sir! For Heaven’s sake, what are you then? Or what shall I be, sir?

Overreach: Stand not on form; Words are no substances.

Margaret: Though you could dispense With your own honor, cast aside religion, The hopes of Heaven, or fear of hell, excuse me, In worldly policy this is not the way To make me his wife; his whore, I grant it may do. My maiden honor so soon yielded up, Nay, prostituted, cannot but assure him I, that am light to him, will not hold weight Whene’er tempted by others; so, in judgment, When to his lust I have given up my honor, He must and will forsake me.

Overreach: How! I forsake thee! Do I wear a sword for fashion? or is this arm Shrunk up or wither’d? Does there live a man Of that large list I have encounter’d with Can truly say I e’er gave inch of ground Not purchas’d with his blood that did oppose me? Forsake thee when the thing is done! He dares not. Give me but proof he has enjoy’d thy person, Though all his captains, echoes to his will, Stood arm’d by his side to justify the wrong, And he himself in the head of his bold troop, Spite of his lordship, and his colonelship, Or the judge’s favor, I will make him render A bloody and a strict account, and force him, By marrying thee, to cure thy wounded honor! I have said it.

* * * * *

As late as the eighteenth century, in Italy, phallic amulets, in the form of the fascinum itself and the obscene digital gesture called in French _la figue_, were in common use. They were worn by children as protective periapts. Chapels too were decorated with wax images of phalli, dedicated by devout women worshippers.

* * * * *

An esoteric club existed in England in the eighteenth century that was associated with the British Navy. It was called _The Very Ancient and Very Powerful Order of Beggars Benison and Merryland_. On the seal of this Society, among other and naval designs, was a phallic symbol. The intent of the Society is still obscure, especially the relation between naval matters and the phallus.

* * * * *

Amulets in the form of the male mandrake came into vogue in the Middle Ages, especially in Central Europe, for apotropaic and amatory purposes. These charms were associated with incantations and magic formulas and recitatives.

The phallus or fascinum, too, especially in France, was used, as a meaningful protective agent, on buildings and even on churches.

Phallic and other genital forms were also used for cakes and breads: and are still so used, especially in Germany and France.

* * * * *

In the Middle Ages Priapus assumed Christian characteristics and in time was even endowed with sanctity, although he still retained his functional properties. In many cities of Southern France, for instance, Saint Foutin was virtually a transferred Priapus. He aided sterile women and renewed the amatory vigor of men. Images of genitalia were included among the sacrificial objects dedicated to this saint.

* * * * *

In medieval France a certain Saint Greluchon was a cryptic Priapus, venerated among the members of the saintly canon. When women made supplication to this saint, they scraped off minute particles from the stone genitalia and compounded these scrapings into an amatory potion, and also as an aid to counteract sterility.

Other saints to whom were attributed the virtues and functions of Priapus were: Saint Guignolet, Saint Regnaud, Saint Gilles.

In Belgium, Priapus became Ters, equally venerated by women. Ters, in Antwerp, was actually a synonym for fascinum.

* * * * *

Among the gods of Northern Europe was Frikko, who may be equated with Priapus, the phallic deity. The Saxons had a similar god, called Frisco, endowed with the same functions. An analogous deity was Frigga, goddess of voluptuousness. Before the worship of this symbolic or actual phallus was the worship of the sun, represented by the phallus as the creator of cosmic and human fecundity.

* * * * *

_Clauder_

A German medieval scholar presented for his doctoral thesis a brief monograph on Philtres, their essential characteristics, the dangers involved in their use, the contents, the purpose of their employment. The thesis, in Latin, is entitled De Philtris, and was published in Leipzig in 1661. The author is Johannes Clauder.

Although philtres were frequently used for erotic purposes, the author asserts, the result rarely corresponded to the intention. The reason for this was that the philtre was concocted under evil auspices, without appeal to divine aid and protection. Another reason for the inefficacy of the potions was improper and defective preparation. The result, he declares categorically, was very often madness for the victim, or even death itself.

Some philtres are associated with Satanic and magic practices, and are essentially poisons. Whores and panders resort to such philtres, although some use what might be termed natural remedies.

The best philtre, however, according to Clauder, is love itself. In this regard, he quotes confirmatory statements from the Romans. Seneca the philosopher, in one of his 124 Epistles, advises: I shall show you a love philtre, without medicaments, without herbs, without a witch’s incantations. It is this: If you want to be loved, love. Martial, the Roman epigrammatist, has something similar to say: Marcus, in order to be loved, love.

And Ovid had already advised: Banish every evil, be lovable, in order to be loved.

Paracelsus, the medieval scholar and alchemist, is quoted in relation to the philtre and its content. Or, as Clauder suggests, the amatory inducement may take the form of a magic inscription on a key, or a ring, or a necklace, or an armlet. As for herbs, the Romans preferred the laurel and the olive, in infusions. Vegetable and mineral and organic matter is also in use; perspiration, urine, spittle. But there is a sinister and hazardous element in such practices. Prostitutes in particular, Clauder threatens, use philtres that rob the victim of mind and soul and leave him a shallow husk. So corroborates Paracelsus. There is one potion, however, called Charisia, that may be innocuous. It has not been identified. But possibly the name may have been invented etymologically on the basis of the Greek _charis_, which means grace or gratitude: and hence the nomenclature is wishfully proleptic in significance.

With respect to a variety of lustful and amatory circumstances, the Middle Ages were marked by strange social mores, by monstrous obscenities and erotic barbarities. There were practices designed primarily to preserve chastity and marital and domestic purity, but they actually resulted in greater indecencies than the circumstances that induced these inventive prophylaxes. There was, first of all, the girdle of chastity, a mechanical device to prevent indiscriminate and unlawful lustful consummations in the absence of the husband. The putative inventor of the device was Francesco da Carrara, Provost of Padua, who belongs in the latter part of the fourteenth century. He himself, it was said, met with a miserable death, being strangled on the scaffold for his many cruelties, in 1405, by order of the Senate of Venice.

There was, too, the Congress, a kind of judicial body that determined marital questions, quarrels, incompatibility, by viewing the two participants _in actu sexuali_.

Men and women taken in adultery were compelled to march through the public streets naked, sometimes mounted on an ass, for centuries the bestial symbol of lust.

There was the libidinous _ius primae noctis_, the _droit de cuisse_, exercised by the lord of the manor, and on occasion by monks and prelates, in the case of a newly wedded couple.

In France, in the city of Toulouse, there was a notorious brothel called The Great Abbey. There were, dispersed through France, many such pseudo-abbeys, the madame of which, in each case, was called Abbess. Such terms and such practices, of course, heightened the lewd obscenity. There was a similar type of dissolute haven that had an infamous reputation in England.

This perversion, in which devout elements are linked with the extremes of lust, to heighten the amatory impulse, is described in abundant and salacious detail in the novels of the Marquis de Sade and in other instances of erotic literature.

Prostitution reached such a social importance, and the practitioners acquired such influence in various directions, that, in Paris, a kind of trade union was formed, to which the practicing prostitutes prescribed. They established their own procedures, their working hours, and similar regulations.

At many royal banquets, public entertainments, and processional ceremonials, in Italy and in France, prostitutes were prominent participants, some half-naked, often entirely so.

There were, of course, fulminations against such and similar indecencies, but without much immediate or effective results. Preachers thundered, to no avail, against the erotic provocations to adultery and fornication engendered by the sight of women who, by the subtlety of their dress, exposed various parts of their person. There was public debauchery. There were genesiac performances in the presence of the children in a household. There were poems and tales, called fabliaux, that, reflecting the mores of the age, dealt with nothing but cuckoldry and fornication, adultery, sodomy, bestiality, and all the multiple varieties of physiological perversions.

Furthermore, houses, manors, large estates were decorated with tapestries, paintings, sculpture, all depicting the greatest obscenities. Even churches and chapels and abbeys contained scenes, figures, statues of the utmost lewdness in posture, presentation, and implication.

* * * * *

Among the barbarities of the medieval centuries, many performances, processions, and rites contained an amazing mingling of ecclesiastical elements and dissolute blasphemies and libertinage: just as the Greek satyr plays and the comedies of fifth century Athens were composites of functional representations by human actors of the libidinous and irreverent actions of the deities themselves.

The medieval scene contained secular and monastic lubricity, and processions and rites in which the performers, under the guise of nuns and prelates, presented shameless and unspeakable obscenities. In addition, flagellation was inflicted on penitents. In Germany, France, England, and Italy, all ranks, of all ages, underwent phallic castigation as an act of devotion.

* * * * *

In Girolamo Folengo’s _Maccaronea_, published in 1519, there is mention of manuals that provide magic instruction and prescriptions favorable in inducing or diverting erotic urges:

He opens the manuals, or reads all that are open:

How to write arcane spells: How to compel love; How a husband can find out his wife’s adultery; How virginal maidens can be forced to love; How to make a hated husband impotent.

* * * * *

During the Italian Renaissance the women of Italy played a dominant and sometimes sinister part in both social and political life. Courtesans, particularly in Rome, had a position somewhat analogous to that of the Greek hetairae. One such courtesan, Imperia, had skill in composing sonnets. Most of them were literate and interested in intellectual pursuits as well as in erotic interludes. Caterina di San Celso played and sang. Many women of this type are described by Giraldi in the novels of the _Hecatommithi_ and by Pietro Aretino in his _Ragionamenti_.

The Italian Renaissance was marked by both literary and social indecencies and lewd lubricities and all kinds of scatological productions and performances. In the lavish public entertainments, in the Carnivals and Masques, apart from contests, reviews, pantomimic presentations, the emphasis was consistently on scandalous songs, with lascivious undertones, innuendoes, suggestions.

In literature, the moral atmosphere of this period is reflected in the depiction of the most common Renaissance features—adultery and cuckoldry, all kinds of illicit amours, lusts resulting in secrecies, gallantries, murder. To satisfy her lusts, a woman poisons her husband. An adulteress has her lover kill her husband, without hesitation, without compunction. Love and lust, poison and death, infidelities and vengeance followed each other in an abandoned, frenzied, amoral sequence.

The Italian strega or witch was a powerful intermediary in amatory affairs of all sorts. With her preparations, her thaumaturgic skills, her secret concoctions, she aided men and women in consummating erotic urges, arousing lustful sensualities, securing the love of hesitant objects of passion, promoting vigor and virility, arranging furtive amatory assignations: acting, in short, as an amatory midwife, an empirical guide in debauchery.

By her magical skill the strega was able to aid men and women bent on amatory consummations. Some of these skills were transferred to the prostitutes. Acquiring these techniques, and discovering the secrets of preparing potions, they were able to retain a lover, to lure a new admirer. For their concoctions and brews they used human teeth and the eyes of dead men, skulls and ribs, scraps of the flesh of corpses, hair and nails boiled in oil. They made a fire of burning ashes, in the form of a heart. Piercing the heart, they chanted their goetic invocation, anticipating the surrender of the hesitant lover by this means of sympathetic magic. In this sphere, in fact, the Italian Renaissance had taken over, as it were, the entire corpus of ancient magic rites, love brews, and concomitant procedures in the art of erotic control.

* * * * *

A solemn love conjuration appears in a medieval manual called the _True Grimoire_. The invocation itself is preceded by special preparations during the waxing or the waning of the moon. An inscription is written on virgin parchment, by the light of a taper. The supplication runs:

I salute thee and conjure thee, O beautiful Moon, O most beautiful Star, O brilliant light which I have in my hand. By the air that I breathe, by the breath within me, by the earth which I am touching: I conjure thee. By all the names of the spirit princes living in you. By the ineffable Name On, which created everything! By you, O resplendent Angel Gabriel, with the Planet Mercury, Prince, Michiael, and Melchidael.

I conjure you again, by all the Holy Names of God, so that you may send down power to oppress, torture, and harass the body and soul and the five senses of her whose name is written here, so that she shall come unto me, and agree to my desires, liking nobody in the world, for so long as she shall remain unmoved by me. Let her then be tortured, made to suffer. Go, then, at once! Go, Melchidael, Baresches, Zazel, Firiel, Malcha, and all those who are with thee! I conjure you by the Great Living God to obey my will, and I promise to satisfy you.

* * * * *

A technique involving the separation of husband and wife, the converse of a love-potion intended to attract or cement passion, appears in the following invocation from a magic grimoire called the _Sword of Moses_:

I conjure you, luminaries of heaven and earth, as the heavens are separated from the earth, so separate and divide N from his wife N, and separate them from one another, as life is separated from death, and sea from dry land, and water from fire, and mountain from vale, and night from day, and light from darkness, and the sun from the moon; thus separate N from N’s wife, and separate them from one another in the name of the twelve hours of the day and the three watches of the night, and the seven days of the week, and the thirty days of the month, and the seven years of Shemittah, and the fifty years of Jubilee, on every day, in the name of the evil angel Imsmael, and in the name of the angel Iabiel, and in the name of the angel Drmiel, and in the name of the angel Zahbuk, and in the name of the angel Ataf, and in the name of the angel Zhsmael, and in the name of the angel Zsniel, who preside over pains, sharp pains, inflammation, and dropsy, and separate N from his wife N, make them depart from one another, and that they should not comfort one another, swift and quickly.

* * * * *

In the middle centuries prostitution as a civic institution had its distinction and its privileges. In Venice, all kinds of secondary favors were granted to these practitioners. They were favored with an indulgent and even eulogistic Latin testimonial: nostrae bene merentes meretrices.

* * * * *

In France, there were orgiastic ceremonies in which the participants performed in the nude. These rituals were associated in a contorted sense with primal creation and were known as Fêtes d’Adam.

In one of Boccaccio’s tales there is an instance of a script intended as an erotic provocation:

Quoth Bruno, ‘Will thy heart serve thee to touch her with a script I shall give thee?’

‘Ay, sure,’ replied Calandrino; and the other, ‘Then do thou make shift to bring me a piece of virgin parchment and a live bat, together with three grains of frankincense and a candle that hath been blessed by the priest, and leave me do.’

Accordingly, Calandrino lay in wait all the next night with his engines to catch a bat and having at last taken one, carried it to Bruno, with the other things required; whereupon the latter, withdrawing to a chamber, scribbled divers toys of his fashion upon the parchment, in characters of his own devising, and brought it to him, saying, ‘Know, Calandrino, that, if thou touch her with this script, she will incontinent follow thee and do what thou wilt.’

* * * * *

In Turkey, under the Sultanate, and notably in the sixteenth century, erotic relations in the seraglio were stimulated by a preparation known as pastilles de sérail.

* * * * *

In the sixteenth century there was a religious-erotic cult in Europe whose members were called Loïstes. Their rituals were marked by sexual orgies and erotic aberrations.

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The corpus of Shakespearean plays contains numberless allusions and comments on sexual and amatory topics. The language, however, in which these references are couched is sometimes figurative, euphemistic, and seemingly innocuous and ingenuous. Sometimes, again, they are so expressed in the contemporary Elizabethan idiom as to have an immediate and illuminating impact on the contemporary audience: but, on a cursory perusal, the context may not spontaneously reveal the underlying currency.

There is, throughout the plays, mention of the functional processes and their media, of the organs of the human body, including what are usually termed pudenda. Shakespeare touches on the normal sexual functions and also on deviations, on tribadism and coprophilia, on lust and cuckoldry, on adultery and eunuchs, on all manner of erotic encounters, embraces, and circumstances.

In _Troilus and Cressida_, to take an example, lust, libido, and potency are illustrated:

Cressida: They say all lovers swear more performance than they are able, and yet reserve an ability that they never perform: vowing more than the performance of ten, and discharging less than the tenth part of one. They that have the voice of lions and the act of hares, are they not monsters?