Yet Paris was notoriously populated with prostitutes. They practiced their occupation day and night, except on sacred days, in the most obscure rendez-vous, in inns and bath houses and cellars. François Villon, the poet of the brothel, and one of the chief sources for these days, casts a lurid but realistic light on this phase of the medieval scene.
Philtres were a common commodity in these circumstances, in spite of the spread of disease. For le mal de Naples, as it was virtuously called in France, but which the Italians as virtuously termed le mal français, was ravaging Europe. The disease, to give it its modern name, was syphilis.
Although the Middle Ages were intimately familiar with love and lust in all its lawful as well as its secretive phases, the amatory state itself occasioned such temperamental and physiological and characterial changes in the aspirant or the postulant that the question arose: Was love itself worth while?
This question was specifically asked by Andreas Capellanus, who belongs in the thirteenth century. He produced a handbook on the Art of Courtly Love, in which he listed rules, and gave directions, in connection with the conduct of the lover who is involved in a spiritual passion for the knight’s wife, the queen, or a mistress of a manor.
Yet Andreas Capellanus also gives a sober, solemn warning against the ill effects of love, for of all disastrous results, it makes men old with untimely rapidity. Women, then, the source of this malefic consequence, should be shunned. They are avaricious. They are ruthless. They are faithless. They are dishonorable. This invective recalls a remarkably similar assault on women and their ways, the thunderous, condemnatory, bitter satire on women by the Roman satirist Juvenal.
In the Middle Ages amatory broths were in such demand that the most obscure, the most nauseating, and sometimes actually venomous items were indiscriminately compounded into philtres. Intimate human secretions, blood, animal semen and other discharges, formed the fluid basis for the incorporation of genitalia of animals, macerated sparrow brains, and analogous animal matter.
Such concoctions were designed to correct physiological disorders and natural weaknesses and defects in the person so affected.