The Anatomy of Melancholy

Whether for himself, to satisfy his own lust, for someone else who hires him, or for both at once, he has such excellent opportunities. Under cover of visitation, private confession, consolation and penance, they may come and go freely, corrupting God knows how many. Some of them know these trades: they practise medicine, perform exorcisms and so on.

Where an elf once used to walk, Now walks the begging friar himself; In every bush and under every tree, No other incubus is needed but he.

In the mountains between Dauphiné and Savoy, the friars persuaded married women to pretend they were possessed, so that their husbands would allow them free access. In those days they were so intimate with some of them that, as one writer observes, “girls could not sleep in their beds for necromantic friars.” The good abbess in Boccaccio may serve as a witness of sorts: rising early, she mistakenly put on the friar’s breeches instead of her veil or hat.

You have presumably heard the story in Hegesippus of Paulina, a chaste married woman, whom one of Isis’s priests delivered up to a young knight named Mundus, making her believe he was their god Anubis.

Our Jesuits play many such tricks, sometimes in their own dress, sometimes in that of others: soldiers, courtiers, townsmen, scholars, fashionable gentlemen and even women. Like Proteus, they assume every shape and disguise, going out at night to bait and deceive young women or take their pleasure with other men’s wives. If certain reports are to be believed, they keep wardrobes of different costumes in their colleges for this purpose.

However much zeal they profess in public, however holy they seem, and however fiercely they preach against adultery and fornication, there are no more thoroughgoing bawds or whoremongers in the country. “The souls they ought to win for God, they sacrifice to the Devil.” But I spare these men for the present.

Their last siege engines are love potions, amulets, spells, charms, images and other unlawful means. If they cannot succeed by themselves, with the help of bawds, procurers and their associates, they will seek assistance from the Devil himself.

I know that some deny the Devil can do any such thing—Crato, in the second letter of his medical collection, and many theologians—and hold that there is no enchantment except what comes through the eyes, of which I have already spoken. For fuller information, read Camerarius’s Leisure Hours, second century, chapter 5. In ancient times it was said that a Thessalian girl had bewitched King Philip into doting on her and had forced his love with potions. But when Queen Olympia saw that the girl was exceptionally beautiful, well brought up and accomplished, she said these were the potions that had captivated Philip: these were the real charms. As Henry says to Rosamond:

One syllable from your lips warms the blood more Than all their love potions, incantations and charms.