The Anatomy of Melancholy

As bulls’ horns are bound with ropes, so men’s hearts are bound with pleasant words. “Her words burn like fire,” Eccles. 9:10. Roxolana bewitched Suleiman the Magnificent, and Shore’s wife overcame Edward IV by this means.

She alone stole all the charms from all the others.

Chaucer’s Wife of Bath admits all this from her own experience.

Some people desire us for wealth, Some for our figure, some for beauty, Some because a woman can sing or dance, Some for good breeding, or for flirtation.

Pietro Aretino’s Lucretia says as much, and more, about herself: “I feigned virtue as though I were the most virginal of virgins, more than a Vestal virgin. I looked like a married woman, so demure and chaste. On every occasion I added such gestures, tones, speeches, signs and movements that those who saw and heard me were stupefied, enchanted, rooted to the spot like so many blocks of wood and stones.”

Many foolish gentlewomen are similarly taken in by a set of gulls and swaggering fellows who constantly boast falsely of noblemen’s favour: rhyming Corybantic madmen, Thraso-like Rhadamants or Bombomachideses, with nothing in them but a few scraps from plays and polite phrases; empty braggarts and impudent intruders who can talk at table about the combats of knights and lords, like Lucian’s Leontiscus, about other people’s travels, daring adventures and such commonplace, trivial news; who can ride, dance, sing old ballad tunes and wear fashionable clothes with a good air. What a fine, delightful gentleman, what a handsome man—who could fail to love him! She will have him even if all her friends object, even if she must beg with him.

Others are inflamed by reading amorous trifles—Amadis of Gaul, Palmerin of Oliva, The Knight of the Sun, and so on—or by hearing such tales of lovers, descriptions of their persons and lascivious accounts, such as Astyanassa, Helen’s waiting woman, wrote long ago, according to the Suda, “on the various ways of sexual intercourse,” followed by Philenis and Elephantine. Or those frivolous tales of Aristides of Miletus, mentioned by Plutarch and found by the Persians among the spoils of Crassus’s army, Aretino’s Dialogues, ditties, love songs and the like must set them on fire, together with such pictures as Aretino’s, or provocative sights of any kind. “There is no stronger device than hearing or reading amorous trifles, fables and stories,” says one writer, “and many are driven quite mad in this way.”