Whether for himself, to satisfy his own lust, for someone else who hires him, or for both at once, he has such excellent opportunities. Under cover of visitation, private confession, consolation and penance, they may come and go freely, corrupting God knows how many. Some of them know these trades: they practise medicine, perform exorcisms and so on.

Where an elf once used to walk, Now walks the begging friar himself; In every bush and under every tree, No other incubus is needed but he.

In the mountains between Dauphiné and Savoy, the friars persuaded married women to pretend they were possessed, so that their husbands would allow them free access. In those days they were so intimate with some of them that, as one writer observes, “girls could not sleep in their beds for necromantic friars.” The good abbess in Boccaccio may serve as a witness of sorts: rising early, she mistakenly put on the friar’s breeches instead of her veil or hat.

You have presumably heard the story in Hegesippus of Paulina, a chaste married woman, whom one of Isis’s priests delivered up to a young knight named Mundus, making her believe he was their god Anubis.

Our Jesuits play many such tricks, sometimes in their own dress, sometimes in that of others: soldiers, courtiers, townsmen, scholars, fashionable gentlemen and even women. Like Proteus, they assume every shape and disguise, going out at night to bait and deceive young women or take their pleasure with other men’s wives. If certain reports are to be believed, they keep wardrobes of different costumes in their colleges for this purpose.

However much zeal they profess in public, however holy they seem, and however fiercely they preach against adultery and fornication, there are no more thoroughgoing bawds or whoremongers in the country. “The souls they ought to win for God, they sacrifice to the Devil.” But I spare these men for the present.

Their last siege engines are love potions, amulets, spells, charms, images and other unlawful means. If they cannot succeed by themselves, with the help of bawds, procurers and their associates, they will seek assistance from the Devil himself.

I know that some deny the Devil can do any such thing—Crato, in the second letter of his medical collection, and many theologians—and hold that there is no enchantment except what comes through the eyes, of which I have already spoken. For fuller information, read Camerarius’s Leisure Hours, second century, chapter 5. In ancient times it was said that a Thessalian girl had bewitched King Philip into doting on her and had forced his love with potions. But when Queen Olympia saw that the girl was exceptionally beautiful, well brought up and accomplished, she said these were the potions that had captivated Philip: these were the real charms. As Henry says to Rosamond:

One syllable from your lips warms the blood more Than all their love potions, incantations and charms.

With this alone, Lucretia boasts in Aretino, she could accomplish more than all the philosophers, astrologers, alchemists, necromancers, witches and the rest of that crew. “As for herbs and love potions, I never understood them. The only love potion I ever used was kissing and embracing; with that alone I made men rave like stupefied beasts and compelled them to worship me like an idol.”

In our own times, says Erastus in his book On Witches, witches commonly claim to make such love potions: to force men and women to love or hate whomever they choose, to cause storms, diseases and so forth, by charms, spells, magical signs and knots.

Here a Thessalian woman sells love potions.

St Jerome proves that they can do it: in the life of Hilarius, in the third book of his letters, he tells of a young man who used a love potion to make a girl mad with love for him; she was afterwards cured by Hilarion. I find similar examples in Johann Nider’s Ant Hill, book 5, chapter 5. Plutarch records that Lucullus died from a love potion, and that Cleopatra used love potions among her other enticements to captivate Antony. Eusebius reports the same of the poet Lucretius. Panormita, in book 4 of The Deeds of Alfonso, tells of a Neapolitan knight named Stephan who was driven mad with love by a potion.

Most memorable of all, however, is what Petrarch relates of Charlemagne in book 1, letter 5 of his Familiar Letters. For many years he foolishly doted on a woman of ordinary looks and humble standing, taking his entire delight in her company, to the great grief and indignation of his friends and followers. When she died, he embraced her corpse as Apollo embraced the laurel tree for the sake of his Daphne, and had her coffin, richly embalmed and adorned with jewels, carried about with him, continually lamenting over it.

At last a venerable bishop attached to his court, pitying his lord and master’s condition, prayed earnestly to God to discover the true cause and origin of this mad passion. Eventually it was revealed to him that the cause of the emperor’s mad love lay beneath the dead woman’s tongue. The bishop hurried to the corpse and removed a small ring. Once it was removed, the emperor recoiled from the body and instead fell just as passionately in love with the bishop, refusing to let him out of his sight. When the bishop realized this, he threw the ring into the middle of a great lake near where the king was staying.

From that hour the emperor neglected all his other residences and lived at Aachen. At enormous expense he built a fine house in the middle of the marsh, with a church beside it, where he was afterwards buried; and in that city all his successors have since customarily been crowned.

Irenaeus accuses Marcus the heretic of seducing a young woman by this means. Some writers also speak harshly of Lady Katharine Cobham, alleging that she used the same art to trick Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, into marrying her. Sicinius Aemilianus summoned Apuleius before Cneius Maximus, proconsul of Africa, accusing him, a poor man, of using love potions to bewitch Pudentilla, a wealthy older woman worth many thousands of sesterces, into loving and marrying him.