Prognostics of jealousy: despair, madness, killing themselves and others.

Those who are jealous generally, unless otherwise relieved, “proceed from suspicion to hatred, from hatred to frenzy, madness, violence, murder and despair.”

A plague whose most damnable effect Has made many in deep despair seek death, And brings a man close to madness Through groundless as well as justified suspicion.

In their madness, Vives says, they often kill themselves and others. This leads Cyprian to call it “a prolific and manifold source of ruin, a fountain of disasters and a seedbed of crimes”: a fruitful evil, the nursery of offences and fountain of murders.

Tragic examples of this kind are all too common, ancient and recent, in every age: Cephalus and Procris, Phaerus of Egypt, Tereus, Atreus and Thyestes. Alexander of Pherae was murdered by his wife “on suspicion of keeping a mistress,” Cicero says. Antoninus Verus was similarly killed by Lucilla; Demetrius, son of Antigonus, and Nicanor by their wives. Hercules was poisoned by Deianira; Caecinna murdered by Vespasian; and Justina, a Roman lady, by her husband.

Amestris, Xerxes’s wife, because she found her husband’s cloak in Masista’s house, “cut off the breasts of Masista’s wife and gave them to the dogs, flayed her besides, and cut off her ears, lips and tongue, and slit the nose of her daughter Artaynta.” Our recent writers are full of such outrages.

In his History of France, Paulus Aemilius tells a tragic story of the death of Chilperic I, killed through the agency of his queen, Fredegund. In a jealous mood he returned from hunting, crept behind his wife as she was arranging and combing her hair in the sun, and gave her an intimate tap with his rod. Mistaking him for her lover, she said, “Ah, Landre, a good knight should strike from the front, not from behind.” But when she saw that his presence had betrayed her, she immediately arranged to have him killed.

In book 11 of the Deeds of Emanuel, King of Portugal, Jerónimo Osório tells a tragic story to the same effect about a certain Ferdinandus Chalderia. At Goa in the East Indies he wounded Gotherinus, a nobleman from his own country, “and cut off one of his legs because, as he thought, the man looked too familiarly at his wife. This later caused many quarrels and much bloodshed.”

Guainerio, in chapter 36 of On Diseases of the Womb, speaks of a foolish jealous man who, seeing his newborn child enclosed in a caul, was certain “that a Franciscan who used to visit his house was its father, because it looked so like the friar’s cowl; and he therefore threatened to kill the friar.” Fulgosius tells of a woman at Narbonne who cut off her husband’s genitals at night because she thought he was unfaithful to her.

The story of Yunus Pasha and his beautiful wife Manto is well known to those who have read the Turkish History, as is the story of Joan of Spain, which I discussed in the preceding section. Her jealousy, says Gomesius, caused both their deaths: King Philip died of grief shortly afterwards, as Martian, his physician, reported; “and she, for her part, after a melancholy, unhappy life wasted in lurking in holes and corners, brought her miseries to an end.”

Felix Pater, in the first book of his Observations, has many such examples: a physician he knew “who first went mad through jealousy and afterwards fell into despair”; a merchant “who killed his wife in the same state and afterwards threw himself from a height”; a doctor of law who cut off his servant’s nose; and a painter’s wife at Basel in 1600, the mother of nine children and married for twenty-seven years, who nevertheless became jealous afterwards, and so distressed that she fell into despair and would neither eat nor drink in her own house, for fear that her husband would poison her.

This is a common sign: once the humours are disturbed and the imagination affected, it will take different forms, accompanied by many such strange symptoms, even madness itself. Schenck, in his Observations, book 4, in the chapter on the womb, gives an example of a jealous woman who suffered many fits of the mother through this cause; and in his first book he writes of people driven mad by jealousy, and of a baker who castrated himself to test his wife’s chastity, and so on. Such examples are all too common.