The Anatomy of Melancholy

There are also those who dearly love, admire and pursue women all their lives: “Penelope’s suitors,” never content except in their company, gazing intently at their beauty, attending them closely, trailing after them, constantly flirting with them—and yet they dare not, will not marry.

Many poor people and those of lower rank are too distrustful of God’s providence. They will not, dare not marry for such worldly reasons: fear of want, suffering and misery, or fear, as Lemnius says, of ending up with a scold, a slattern or a bad wife. And so “they pass a sorrowful youth, forsaking love”; they are resolved to live single, as Epaminondas did.

He says nothing comes before it, nothing is better than single life.

And they are ready, with Hippolytus, to renounce all women: “I detest them all; I shudder at them, flee them and curse them,” and so on. But “Hippolytus, you do not know what blessing of life you are fleeing.”

“Hippolytus, you do not know”—alas, poor Hippolytus, you do not know what you are saying. It is otherwise, Hippolytus.

Some question “whether a learned man should take a wife”—whether a scholar should marry. If she is beautiful, she will take him back from his grammar to his hornbook, or else hinder his studies with kisses and caresses; if ugly, with scolding. He cannot properly attend to both, as Filippo Beroaldo, that great Bolognese scholar, once wrote: “For literary studies are hindered,” and so on.

But at last he recanted, and solemnly, in sincerely meant words, asked the world and all women to forgive him. Yet you shall have the story as he tells it himself, in his commentary on the sixth book of Apuleius: “For a long time I lived a single life, and I always shrank from taking a wife, judging nothing more pleasant than a bed free of marriage.” I could not endure marriage;

but as a wanderer—“a roving and inconstant lover,” to use his own words—“I ran through many love affairs.” I snatched what pleasure I could get. More than that, I openly railed against marriage, and when I expounded Juvenal’s sixth satire before a public audience, I heaped up every jibe against women that I could find in Plutarch and Seneca.

But now, with Stesichorus, I recant: “I sing a recantation, and do not regret being numbered among husbands.” I approve of marriage; I am glad to be a married man. I am heartily glad to have a wife: so sweet a wife, so nobly born a wife, so young, so chaste a wife, so loving a wife.

And I wish and urge all other men to marry, especially scholars, so that, just as Marcia in old times held the candle for Hortensius, Terentia for Cicero, Calpurnia for Pliny, and Pudentilla for Apuleius while their husbands reflected and wrote, their wives may do the same for them, as my dear Camilla does for me.

Let other men be opposed; let them rail and jeer at women, and say whatever they can against them: “A man without a wife is free from troubles,” and so on; a single man is a happy man, and so forth. But this is nonsense.

Do not scorn sweet love, young man, nor dancing.

These men are too distrustful, and greatly to blame for speaking in this way: