The Anatomy of Melancholy

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.