Prevention before or after marriage: Plato’s community of wives; marrying a courtesan; love potions; brothels; marrying someone equal in age and fortune, from a good family, well educated and of good standing; treating wives well; and so on.

I have said enough about medicines that help cure this malady. Some good remedies remain in the form of prevention, precautions or warnings, which, properly put into practice, may do much good. Plato, in his commonwealth, apparently to prevent this evil, would have everything held in common, wives and children shared alike.

And Caesar observed in his Commentaries that the ancient Britons who first inhabited this land had ten or twelve wives allotted to a household, or shared indiscriminately by as many men: not one wife to one man, as among us, or four, five or six to one, as in Turkey.

The Nicolaitans, a sect that arose, says Augustine, from Nicholas the deacon, would have women shared without distinction. The cause of this filthy sect was Nicholas the deacon’s jealousy: when he was condemned for it, he sought to clear himself of the offence by advancing his heresy that it was lawful to sleep with one another’s wives, and for any man to sleep with his.

Like those Anabaptists at Münster, who would consort with other men’s wives as the spirit moved them; or Muhammad, the prophet who led people astray, who insisted on having women as he pleased, to beget prophets. Their Alcoran says that 205 women were in love with him, and that he had the sexual capacity of forty men.

Among the ancient Carthaginians, as Boemus relates from Sabellicus, the country’s king slept with the bride on the first night, and once a year they all had intercourse indiscriminately. Münster, in his Cosmography, book 3, chapter 497, unjustly attributes the beginning of this brutish custom to a certain Frenchman, Picardus, who invented a new sect of Adamites: they went naked, as Adam did, and engaged in indiscriminate sexual intercourse at appointed times.

When the priest repeated the words from Genesis, “Increase and multiply,” “out went the candles in their meeting place, and without any regard for age, person or social condition, it was catch as catch can: every man took whichever woman came nearest,” and so on. Some attach this charge to the ancient Bohemians and Russians; others to the inhabitants of Mambrium in the Lucerne valley in Piedmont. And, as I have read, it was practised in Scotland among Christians themselves until King Malcolm’s time: the king or lord of the town took their virginity.

In some parts of India in our own time, and among those islanders, as among the ancient Babylonians, they prostitute their wives and daughters to travellers or seafarers who happen to arrive among them—a practice that Chalcocondylas, a modern Greek writer, for lack of better information, attributes to us Britons—to show how far they were from this savage vice of jealousy, and how little account they took of it.

The kings of Calicut, as Ludovico di Varthema relates, will not touch their wives until one of their Brahmins or high priests has first slept with them, to sanctify their wombs. But the Essenes and Montanists, two strange sects of antiquity, went to the opposite extreme: they would not marry at all, or have any dealings with women, “because of their lack of restraint: they considered them all unchaste.”

Nevizzano the lawyer, in The Marriage Wood, book 4, number 33, would have a man prone to this malady marry a prostitute to forestall the worst. “In taking a prostitute, he has at least this advantage: he is not deceived, because he knows what she is, which is not the case with other men.” A fornicator in Seneca raped two young women in one night; as redress, one wanted him hanged, the other wanted to marry him.

Hieronymus, king of Syracuse in Sicily, married Pitho, a keeper of brothels; and Ptolemy took Thais, a common prostitute, as his wife, and had two sons by her, Leontiscus and Lagus, and a daughter, Irene. It is therefore no such unlikely thing. A citizen of Gubbio castrated himself to test his wife’s chastity and free himself from jealousy; so did a baker at Basel, with the same purpose.

But among all examples of this kind, that of Combalus is the most memorable. He was a beautiful young man, sent by Seleucus, his lord and king, to accompany Queen Stratonice and escort her into Syria. To prevent his master’s suspicion, and fearing the worst, he castrated himself before leaving and left his genitals behind in a sealed box.

On the way his mistress fell in love with him. When he would not yield to her, she herself accused him to Seleucus of sexual misconduct—just as Bellerophon, in a similar case, was falsely denounced by Sthenoboea to her husband King Proetus “when she could not induce him to have intercourse.” Consequently, on his return he was thrown into prison. On the appointed day of the hearing, he was fully cleared and acquitted by displaying the genitals he had cut off beforehand, to the astonishment of those present.

The Lydians used to castrate women whom they suspected, says Leonicus in his Various Histories, book 3, chapter 59, as well as men. For this purpose St Francis, because he heard women’s confessions in private, stripped himself before the bishop of Assisi and others, to forestall suspicion and prove himself a virgin; and Friar Leonard, for the same reason, went through Viterbo in Italy without any clothes.

Our false Catholics, to remedy these troubles arising from jealousy and keep themselves and their wives chaste, make severe laws: immediate death for adultery, while treating fornication as a venial sin. As a drain to carry off that fierce, swift stream of lust, they establish and permit brothels, those prostitutes and pleasure-loving sinners, the better to safeguard their wives in all populous cities. They consider them as necessary as churches; and, however unlawful, they are to be tolerated as a matter of policy, like usury, to avoid a greater evil, because of the hardness of human hearts. To this end they have whole communities of courtesans in their towns and cities.