It was not unusual for the philtres and preparations to contain animal testes, genitalia, human excremental matter, even fragments and shreds of human corpses, torn from graveyards and charnel-houses.
An extreme type of potion, administered in febrile cases, was actual blood, drunk by both man and woman.
The Middle Ages, particularly the eleventh century, was noted for its loose morality, its amorous diversions, its disregard of the old rigid domestic or social prohibitions and restraints. Achievement followed on desire, and sensuous and sensual whims met with ready acquiescence. Returning warriors, home from the Crusades in Palestine, or the campaigns in Spain, had, during the course of their embattled activities, come in contact with disturbing exotic women, so different, in both physical appearance and temperament, from the wives and women they had left in the châteaux and manors. These exotic women were brought back by the returning victors as captives. Once returned, the warriors looked back with something of nostalgia to their colorful days in foreign regions and in novel circumstances. Hence the captive women became a kind of live substitute for such meditations. The women consoled the warriors with murmurous love songs of their own country, sorrowful and prideful and exotic. And often the wives of these lords of the manor were unpleasantly surprised when these strange women were invited to domesticity as concubines. So that the medieval nobility became, in the course of time, a complicated series of relationships, tainted with harlotries and illegitimacies.
In these libidinous and licentious conditions, when exhaustion or age began to make perceptible appearance, amatory aids were sought, and philtres and brews were hopefully measured out by the furtive creatures, male and female, peripatetic vendors, sorceresses, quacks and occultists, who were always equipped, always prepared, to supply the passionate clamor.
The medieval passion for love aroused complications. Particularly, it aroused jealousy in the husband himself, however gallant or wayward he might be. Lovers or husbands, discovering the indiscretions and sportiveness of a mistress, a concubine, or a wife, exacted the utmost and not rarely the most barbaric penalties. A wife was compelled to eat her dead lover’s heart. Another wife was forced to congregate with lepers because her conduct enraged her lawful spouse. One husband served up the heart of the slain adulterer in the form of a stew for his wife.
Yet the husband appeared to be exempt from any penalties inflicted for divergent amorous experiences in which he himself might be involved. For the man was dominant. The husband was equated with the ineluctable law. And the husband imposed that law upon his womankind. The male might consequently indulge with more than a fair chance of impunity in adultery, fornication, excessive lust.
And when these excitements seemed ultimately to approach physiological impairment, there was always the nostrum, and the extended hand of the aged crone, offering her mystic potion, her amatory panacea.