The Anatomy of Melancholy

“She would much rather have had another passage put right, which he did not recognize as corrupt.” So he stayed late at his studies, and she at her pleasures—“for elsewhere the merry fellow was spending his nights”—hating all scholars because of him. At last he began to suspect something and turned a little yellow, as well he might: it was his own fault.

If men become jealous in such cases, as often happens, the remedy is in their own hands: they have only themselves to thank. Who will pity them, says Neander, or be very angry with such wives, “if, having first been deceived, they deceive their husbands and make them cuckolds”—if they deceive those who cheated them first?

A lawyer’s wife in Aristaenetus threatened to make him a cuckold because he neglected his business “when attention should be given to bed.” She did not hesitate to tell Philinna, one of her women friends, as much—and loudly enough for him to hear: “If he pursues other men’s affairs and leaves his own unattended, I shall have an advocate to plead my case. I do not care whether he knows it.”

A fourth major cause of jealousy may be this: when a man who is misshapen and, as Pindar says of Vulcan, “born without the Graces,” shaggy and rough, though virtuous in character, marries some beautiful, fastidious creature or flighty woman, he begins to suspect, as well he may, that she does not love him.

“Chastity has a great quarrel with beauty”: beauty and chastity have always been at odds. Abraham was jealous over his wife because she was beautiful; so was Vulcan over his Venus when, as Philostratus says, he made her creaking shoes “to prevent her committing adultery, the sandal informing against her”—so that he could hear whenever she moved. Mars “took offence at this”: he was not at all pleased.

Vulcan had good reason to act as he did, for she was none too chaste. Your pretty faces commonly have this fault, and it is hard to find, says Francesco Filelfo in a letter to his friend Saxola, an honest rich man or a handsome woman who is neither proud nor unchaste. “Can she be beautiful and chaste as well?”

For often a serpent has hidden itself beneath bright grass; Under the appearance of beauty, to an unwary husband A wicked soul often sells itself.

A man who marries a wife for her facial beauty alone should expect, says Barbaro, no better success than Vulcan had with Venus or Claudius with Messalina.

In such cases it is almost impossible for the wife to restrain herself or for her husband not to be jealous. When he is so deficient, weak, ill-proportioned and unattractive in the qualities women most desire, while she, on the other hand, is perfectly beautiful and vigorous, how can she love him unless she is exceptionally virtuous?

Even if she is not beautiful, if he admires her and thinks she is, she is perfect in his imagination. He believes it impossible for any man alive not to dote on her as he does—to look at her without lusting or coveting, or to be in her company without laying siege to her chastity.