The Anatomy of Melancholy

He also tells how, when he was an ambassador in England, he heard Mendoza, the Spanish envoy, condemn as a filthy custom the practice of men and women sitting together indiscriminately in church. But Dr Dale, Master of Requests, replied that it was indeed a filthy custom in Spain, where people could not keep themselves from lustful thoughts in holy places, but not among us.

Baronius, drawing on Eusebius in his Annals, censures the emperor Licinius for a decree to this effect, “ordering that men should not attend church together with women.” Being monstrously immoral himself, “he judged other people’s nature by his own corrupt mind”: that was how he assessed them.

But we are far from such strange notions. We allow our wives and daughters to go to the tavern with a friend, as Aubanus says, “provided there is no indecency,” and suspect nothing; we allow kisses on arrival and departure, which, as Erasmus writes in one of his letters, they cannot tolerate. England is a paradise for women and a hell for horses; Italy a paradise for horses and a hell for women, as the proverb goes.

Some, such as Montaigne in book 3, ask whether this headstrong passion rages more fiercely in women than in men. But surely it is more outrageous in women, as all other melancholy is, because of the weakness of their sex. Scaliger, in his Poetics, book unspecified, chapter 13, decides against women. “Besides their inconstancy, treachery, suspicion, deceit, superstition and pride”—for all women are proud by nature—“and their desire to rule, if they are powerful women”—he gives Juno as an example—“bitterness and jealousy are their most conspicuous emotions.”

But neither is the tawny boar so fierce in the midst of rage, When with his lightning mouth he tosses the rushing hounds, Nor the lion, and so on.

Tiger, boar, bear, viper, lioness Cannot express a woman’s fury.

Some say that red-haired women, pale women, those with black eyes and those with shrill voices are most subject to jealousy.

A woman’s high colour shows an angry temperament; They are wicked, ill-tempered, proud and malicious; But worst of all are the red-haired, shrill and jealous.

Comparisons are odious. I shall neither compare them with others nor disparage them further: men and women are both bad, and all too subject to this pernicious infirmity. For the most part it is both a symptom and a cause of melancholy, as Platter and Valescus teach us: melancholy people are prone to jealousy, and jealous people to melancholy.

Pale jealousy, child of insatiable love, Of heartsick thoughts that melancholy bred, A hellishly tormenting fear no assurance can change, Fed by discontent with deadly poison, Vainly led by reckless youth and error: A deadly plague, a flood that drowns virtue, A hellish fire extinguished only by blood.