No tongue can adequately tell it. Every history is full of the insatiable lust of men and women—Nero, Elagabalus, Bonosus and the rest. “Caelius was desperately in love with Amphilenus, but Quintius with Amphilena,” and so forth. They neigh after other men’s wives like well-fed horses, as Jeremiah 5.8 complains, or roam like communal breeding bulls, “ravishers of virgins and widows,” as many of our great men do.

Solomon’s wisdom was extinguished in this fire of lust; Samson’s strength was weakened; piety was entirely forgotten by Lot’s daughters, priestly dignity by Eli’s sons, the reverence due to old age by the elders who wanted to violate Susanna, filial duty by Absalom towards his stepmother, and brotherly love by Amnon towards his sister.

Human and divine laws, commandments, exhortations, fear of God and men, fair means or foul, reputation, wealth, shame, disgrace and honour cannot oppose, ward off or withstand its fury: “Love conquers all,” and so forth.

No cord or cable can pull so powerfully or hold so firmly as love can with a twisted thread. The scorching rays beneath the equator, or the extreme cold within the Arctic Circle, where the very seas freeze—neither the cold nor the torrid zone can avert or expel this heat, fury and rage of mortal men.

Where are you fleeing, madman? There is no escape. Though you flee As far as the Tanais, Love will follow you all the way.

What country, what village does not complain of women’s unnatural, insatiable lust? Mother and daughter sometimes dote on the same man; father and son, master and servant, on one woman.

But love, but unbridled lust— What chaste thing on earth has it left unassailed?

What broken vows and oaths, what fury, infatuation and madness might I list? Yet this is more tolerable in the young and those whose blood is still hot and vigorous. But for an old fool to dote—to see an old lecher—what is more hateful, what can be more absurd? And yet what is more common? Who is so frenzied?

If they begin to fall in love at that age, their madness is far more violent,

Some become more infatuated then than they ever did in youth. How many decrepit, grey-haired, rough, wrinkled, ruptured, crooked, toothless, bald, bleary-eyed, impotent, decayed old men will you see still flirting everywhere?

One gets himself a young wife, another a courtesan. He can scarcely lift his leg over a threshold and already has one foot in Charon’s boat; his joints tremble, his feet are gouty; he has a perpetual catarrh in his head and a persistent cough. His sight fails; he is hard of hearing; his breath stinks; all his moisture has dried up and vanished, and he cannot even spit. A child again, unable to dress himself or cut his own food, he will still dream of and pine for girls. What could be more unseemly?

It is worse in women than in men, when she is “advanced in years, long widowed, a mother long ago: she seems to pursue marriage with little propriety.” An old widow, a mother so long since—in Pliny’s opinion—seeks marriage very unbecomingly,

Yet though she is such an old crone, a hag, unable to see or hear, walk or stand, a mere corpse, a witch, scarcely able to feel, she caterwauls and must have a stallion, a champion. She must and will marry again, pledging herself to some young man who hates to look at her except for her wealth, who abhors the sight of her—all to the damage of her reputation, her own undoing, her friends’ grief and her children’s ruin.

But to expand on or illustrate this power of love and its effects is to set a candle in the sunlight. It rages among people of every rank and condition, yet is most apparent in the young and vigorous, in the flower of their years, nobly born, richly fed, living idly and at ease.

For that reason this “wild, mad love,” this mad and beastly passion which our theologians call burning lust, is, as I have said, called heroic love by our physicians. They give it a more honourable title, “noble love,” as Savonarola styles it, because noble men and women commonly practise it and are so frequently affected by it.

Avicenna, book 3, fen 1, treatise 4, chapter 23, calls this passion Ilishi and defines it as “a disease, or melancholic distress, or anguish of mind, in which a man continually dwells on the beauty, bearing and manners of his mistress and torments himself about them,” longing, as Savonarola adds, with all his concentration and eagerness “to win or enjoy her.” “As hunters commonly concern themselves with their sport, and the covetous with their gold and possessions, so he is continually tormented about his mistress.”

Arnald of Villanova, in his book on heroic love, defines it as “continual thought of what one desires, with confidence or hope of obtaining it”—a definition his commentator disputes.

For continual thought is not love’s general class but a symptom of it. We continually think of what we hate and abhor as well as what we love; and we covet and desire many things without any hope of attaining them.

Charles de Lorme, in his Questions, raises the issue “whether love is a disease”—whether this heroic love is an illness. Julius Pollux, Onomasticon, book 6, chapter 44, settles it: those who are in love are also sick; “the lustful, the lecherous, those behaving wantonly and those mad for sex are truly ill.” Arnald considers disease an improper name for it, and regards it as a disorder of the body rather than the mind.

Cicero, in his Tusculan Disputations, defines it as a raging disease of the mind; Plato as madness itself; and his commentator Ficino, chapter 12, as a species of madness: “For many have gone mad for women,” Esdras 4.26. But Rhazes calls it “a melancholic passion,” and most physicians make it a species or kind of melancholy, as will appear from the symptoms, and treat it separately.

I intend to follow them: to discuss it in all its forms, examine its various causes, and explain its symptoms, indications, prognoses and effect, so that it may more readily be cured.