The Anatomy of Melancholy

The kings of Calicut, as Ludovico di Varthema relates, will not touch their wives until one of their Brahmins or high priests has first slept with them, to sanctify their wombs. But the Essenes and Montanists, two strange sects of antiquity, went to the opposite extreme: they would not marry at all, or have any dealings with women, “because of their lack of restraint: they considered them all unchaste.”

Nevizzano the lawyer, in The Marriage Wood, book 4, number 33, would have a man prone to this malady marry a prostitute to forestall the worst. “In taking a prostitute, he has at least this advantage: he is not deceived, because he knows what she is, which is not the case with other men.” A fornicator in Seneca raped two young women in one night; as redress, one wanted him hanged, the other wanted to marry him.

Hieronymus, king of Syracuse in Sicily, married Pitho, a keeper of brothels; and Ptolemy took Thais, a common prostitute, as his wife, and had two sons by her, Leontiscus and Lagus, and a daughter, Irene. It is therefore no such unlikely thing. A citizen of Gubbio castrated himself to test his wife’s chastity and free himself from jealousy; so did a baker at Basel, with the same purpose.

But among all examples of this kind, that of Combalus is the most memorable. He was a beautiful young man, sent by Seleucus, his lord and king, to accompany Queen Stratonice and escort her into Syria. To prevent his master’s suspicion, and fearing the worst, he castrated himself before leaving and left his genitals behind in a sealed box.

On the way his mistress fell in love with him. When he would not yield to her, she herself accused him to Seleucus of sexual misconduct—just as Bellerophon, in a similar case, was falsely denounced by Sthenoboea to her husband King Proetus “when she could not induce him to have intercourse.” Consequently, on his return he was thrown into prison. On the appointed day of the hearing, he was fully cleared and acquitted by displaying the genitals he had cut off beforehand, to the astonishment of those present.

The Lydians used to castrate women whom they suspected, says Leonicus in his Various Histories, book 3, chapter 59, as well as men. For this purpose St Francis, because he heard women’s confessions in private, stripped himself before the bishop of Assisi and others, to forestall suspicion and prove himself a virgin; and Friar Leonard, for the same reason, went through Viterbo in Italy without any clothes.

Our false Catholics, to remedy these troubles arising from jealousy and keep themselves and their wives chaste, make severe laws: immediate death for adultery, while treating fornication as a venial sin. As a drain to carry off that fierce, swift stream of lust, they establish and permit brothels, those prostitutes and pleasure-loving sinners, the better to safeguard their wives in all populous cities. They consider them as necessary as churches; and, however unlawful, they are to be tolerated as a matter of policy, like usury, to avoid a greater evil, because of the hardness of human hearts. To this end they have whole communities of courtesans in their towns and cities.