The Anatomy of Melancholy

Must you marry a youth again? And yet “they love to marry after two hundred deaths.” However that may be, as Apuleius says of his Meroe, “a coupling with an old woman, pestilent and abhorrent”: a pestilent match, abominable and intolerable. In such a case, how can they avoid jealousy? How should they agree with one another? This inequality concerns not only years, but birth, wealth, dispositions and all good qualities.

If you wish to marry fittingly, marry your equal.

“It is my advice,” says Antonio de Guevara, “to choose such a person. Let a citizen marry a citizen, a noble a noble”: let a citizen marry a citizen, a gentleman a gentlewoman. Whoever neglects this rule, he says, “will have at home not a son-in-law but an evil spirit, not a daughter-in-law but a Fury, not a companion for life but fuel for quarrels.” Instead of a fair wife he will have a fury, and instead of a suitable son-in-law a downright fiend, and so on. Examples are all too common.

Another important caution is that, though they are equal in age, birth, wealth and other circumstances, they should not neglect virtue and a good upbringing, which Musonius and Antipater so insist upon in Stobaeus.

A great dowry is the parents’ Virtue, and chastity which, bound by a firm covenant, Shrinks from another man.

If, as Plutarch advises, one must eat “a bushel of salt” with a man before choosing him as a friend, how much care should a man take in choosing a wife, his second self! How anxious he should be to know her qualities and behaviour, and, once he is sure of them, to avoid preferring birth, wealth and beauty to upbringing and good character.

Coquage, the god of cuckolds, as someone jokingly said, accompanies the goddess Jealousy. By Jupiter’s appointment both follow the fairest women, and people sacrifice to them together. Beauty and chastity seldom agree: straight bodies often have crooked manners; fair faces, foul vices; good complexions, bad dispositions. “It is a thing full of suspicion and snares”: beauty, says Chrysostom, is full of treachery and suspicion. A man with a beautiful wife can have no worse trouble; yet most men desire one, as if nothing but beauty and wealth mattered in marriage.

Francesco Sforza, duke of Milan, was so particular about this that he would not marry the duke of Mantua’s daughter unless he could first see her naked—a practice Lycurgus prescribed in his laws and More approves in his Utopian commonwealth. In Italy, a traveller observes, if a man has three or four daughters, or more, and they turn out beautiful, they are married at once. If unattractive, their pretty names—Lucia, Cynthia, Camena—are changed: they are called Dorothy, Ursula or Bridget and put into convents, as if only outstandingly beautiful women were fit for marriage. But these are mistaken opinions: a modest virgin of good character is much to be preferred to such a pretty-faced creature.