The Anatomy of Melancholy

If idleness joins melancholy, such people are especially prone to jealousy. Nevisanus observes: “An idle woman is presumed to be lustful, and often jealous.” “When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.” And this is not unlikely, for they have no other business to occupy their minds.

The more particular causes are these. First, impotence: when a man cannot perform the duties he owes his wife. Though he may live honestly and harm no one, Trebius the lawyer may still ask “whether he gives each person their due”—whether he gives everyone what belongs to them. When he recognizes his shortcomings and finds her more demanding, clamorous, insatiable and lustful than is proper, he immediately begins to suspect that she will satisfy herself where he falls short, and obtain her pleasure by other means.

Cornelius Gallus has elegantly expressed this state of mind in an epigram to his Lycoris.

And now she seeks other young men and other loves; She calls me a feeble, decrepit old man, and so on.

For this cause is most evident in old men, who are naturally cold and dry and married to women “full of sap”—young, lustful wives. Like old, doting January in Chaucer, they begin to suspect that all is not well.

She was young and he was old, And so he feared being made a cuckold.

And how could it be otherwise? Old age is a disease in itself, loathsome, full of suspicion and fear; even at its best it is incapable and unfit for such matters. “As suited to marriage as winter to harvest”: as welcome to a young woman as snow at harvest, says Nevisanus. “And if you take a young girl, she will give you horns”: marry a vigorous young woman and she will certainly graft horns onto your head.

“All women are unreliable, often unfaithful to their husbands”—as Aeneas Sylvius supports him in letter 38—“but most treacherous to old men.” They would rather “embrace death,” lie with a corpse, than with such a man: “Boys hate him; women despise him.”

On the other hand, many men, says Jerome, are suspicious of their wives if they are sexually unrestrained, but old men most of all. So the woman in Apuleius did not complain without reason about the old, bald, bedridden scoundrel she had for a husband.

“Poor woman that I am, what shall I do? I have a grim old fellow for a husband, as bald as a coot, as small and as incapable as a child”—a bedful of bones—“he keeps every door barred and locked against me. Woe is me! What shall I do?” He was jealous, and she made him a cuckold for keeping her confined. Groundless suspicion and harsh treatment can themselves make a woman stray who would otherwise have remained faithful.

Treatment makes many good women Become bad.

Mistreatment makes matters worse. “For when women realize their husband is paying attention to this, they sin more freely,” as Nevisanus maintains: when a woman thinks her husband is watching her, she is more likely to offend. “They sin more freely, and all shame is gone.” Rough handling makes them worse, as Chaucer’s good Wife of Bath boasts.