The Anatomy of Melancholy

They will deny and accept, firmly refuse what they nevertheless eagerly seek, and repel a suitor to make him return more eagerly. Pursue them and they flee; turn away and they follow you again like a shadow: “it follows the one who flees and flees the one who follows.” With a retreat that wins you back, a gentle reluctance, a smiling threat or a charming little fit of petulance, they will put you off. They have a thousand such different enticements. For, as the poet says,

Beauty is not enough; she who wishes to seem lovely Must not please her admirers in the common way. Sayings, wit, playfulness, conversation, charm and laughter Surpass the work of nature at its fairest.

It is not enough, though she looks fair, For her to offer ordinary courtesies; But pretty trifles, jokes, sayings and smiles Go far beyond what beauty can achieve.

Perhaps for this reason Philostratus, in his Images, represents various Loves: some young, some of one age and some of another; some winged; some of one sex and some of the other; some with torches, golden apples, darts, traps, snares and other devices in their hands, as Propertius has neatly depicted them in book 2, poem 29. Some interpret these figures as the different enticements or affections of lovers, which, if they cannot do so singly, may together batter down and overcome the strongest constitutions.

It is told of Decius and Valerian, those two notorious persecutors of the Church, that, when neither tortures nor promises could force a young Christian to sacrifice to their idols, as Jerome records, they tried another means of tempting him. They placed him in a beautiful garden and sent a young courtesan to caress him. She put her arms about his neck and kissed him, and did what must not be named, “handling him with her hands,” and so on, employing every possible enticement so that love might batter and besiege the man whom torture could not subdue. But his constancy was such that she could not overcome him; and when this last device failed, they left him to his own ways.

At Berkeley in Gloucestershire there was once a nunnery, says Walter Map, an old historian who lived four hundred years ago, “whose abbess was a beautiful lady of noble birth. Godwin, that crafty Earl of Kent, was travelling that way. Seeking not her but her possessions, he left a nephew of his, a handsome young gallant pretending to be ill, in her care until his return. He instructed the young man to keep up the pretence until he had deflowered the abbess and as many other nuns as he could. He also left him rings, jewels, girdles and similar trifles to give them whenever they visited him.”

“The young man willingly undertook the business and played his part so well that he soon made most of them pregnant. When he had finished, he told his lord how he had fared. His lord immediately went to court, told the king that this nunnery had become a brothel, secured an investigation, had the women expelled, and asked for the lands for himself.”