Causes of jealousy. Who are most susceptible. Idleness, melancholy, impotence, prolonged absence, beauty, sexual licence, being unfaithful themselves. Temptations arising from time, place and people; mistreatment as a cause.

Astrologers make the stars a cause or sign of this bitter passion. From each man’s horoscope they will offer a probable prediction of whether he will be jealous, and when, by directing the significators towards their respective promissors. Their rules can be read in Albubator, Pontanus, Schöner, Junctinus and others.

Bodin, in chapter 5 of his Method of History, assigns great importance to country or climate, and discusses this subject at length. He says that southern men are more hot-blooded, lustful and jealous than those who live in the north; in those hotter climates they can scarcely restrain themselves and are especially subject to monstrous lusts.

Leo Africanus tells almost incredible things about the lust and jealousy of his African countrymen, especially those living around Carthage; and every geographer says the same about people in Asia and Turkey, Spaniards and Italians. Germany has fewer drunkards, England fewer tobacco smokers, France fewer dancers and Holland fewer sailors than Italy alone has jealous husbands. And within Italy, some consider the people of Piacenza more jealous than the rest.

In Germany, France, Britain, Scandinavia, Poland and Muscovy, people are less troubled by this deadly malady, although Damião de Góis, much to my surprise, in his description of Lapland, and Herberstein in his account of Russia, contradict the general current of other geographers and would pin it on those northern inhabitants.

Antomarius Poggius, and Münster in his description of Baden, report that men and women of every rank commonly enter the baths together without any suspicion: “The very name of jealousy,” says Münster, “is never so much as heard among them.”

In Friesland, women kiss the man they drink to and are kissed in return by those whose toast they answer. In Holland, unmarried young women go away from home hand in hand with young men, skate on the ice—such is their innocent freedom—and lodge together away from home without suspicion. Rash Sansovino, an Italian, regards this as a strong sign of unchastity.

In France, on only slight acquaintance, it is customary to pay court to other men’s wives, visit their houses and accompany them arm in arm through the streets, without reproach. In the northernmost countries young men and women dance freely together, as do men and their wives; Italians, except in Siena, cannot tolerate this.

The Greeks, on the other hand, have separate baths for men and women, where they must not come near or even see one another. As Bodin observes in book 5 of On the Commonwealth, Italians could never tolerate this mixing; nor could a Spaniard—the mere thought would drive him mad. That is why they lock up their women and will not allow them near men, even in church, without a partition between them.

He also tells how, when he was an ambassador in England, he heard Mendoza, the Spanish envoy, condemn as a filthy custom the practice of men and women sitting together indiscriminately in church. But Dr Dale, Master of Requests, replied that it was indeed a filthy custom in Spain, where people could not keep themselves from lustful thoughts in holy places, but not among us.

Baronius, drawing on Eusebius in his Annals, censures the emperor Licinius for a decree to this effect, “ordering that men should not attend church together with women.” Being monstrously immoral himself, “he judged other people’s nature by his own corrupt mind”: that was how he assessed them.

But we are far from such strange notions. We allow our wives and daughters to go to the tavern with a friend, as Aubanus says, “provided there is no indecency,” and suspect nothing; we allow kisses on arrival and departure, which, as Erasmus writes in one of his letters, they cannot tolerate. England is a paradise for women and a hell for horses; Italy a paradise for horses and a hell for women, as the proverb goes.

Some, such as Montaigne in book 3, ask whether this headstrong passion rages more fiercely in women than in men. But surely it is more outrageous in women, as all other melancholy is, because of the weakness of their sex. Scaliger, in his Poetics, book unspecified, chapter 13, decides against women. “Besides their inconstancy, treachery, suspicion, deceit, superstition and pride”—for all women are proud by nature—“and their desire to rule, if they are powerful women”—he gives Juno as an example—“bitterness and jealousy are their most conspicuous emotions.”

But neither is the tawny boar so fierce in the midst of rage, When with his lightning mouth he tosses the rushing hounds, Nor the lion, and so on.

Tiger, boar, bear, viper, lioness Cannot express a woman’s fury.

Some say that red-haired women, pale women, those with black eyes and those with shrill voices are most subject to jealousy.

A woman’s high colour shows an angry temperament; They are wicked, ill-tempered, proud and malicious; But worst of all are the red-haired, shrill and jealous.

Comparisons are odious. I shall neither compare them with others nor disparage them further: men and women are both bad, and all too subject to this pernicious infirmity. For the most part it is both a symptom and a cause of melancholy, as Platter and Valescus teach us: melancholy people are prone to jealousy, and jealous people to melancholy.

Pale jealousy, child of insatiable love, Of heartsick thoughts that melancholy bred, A hellishly tormenting fear no assurance can change, Fed by discontent with deadly poison, Vainly led by reckless youth and error: A deadly plague, a flood that drowns virtue, A hellish fire extinguished only by blood.