One of the most significant treatises on love, applicable in its essential features to every age, although produced in the Middle Ages, is Le Roman de la Rose. It is an erotic allegory, begun in 1240 by Guillaume de Lorris, and completed in 1280 by Jean de Meun: a remote partnership that was nevertheless so effective as to make the book continuously popular for several centuries.
There are numberless precepts and suggestions regarding the material phases of love: personal appearance, social accomplishments, and in a more general way the requisite mode of behavior for the amatory suppliant. Above all, insistence is on giving free rein to passion and on indulging in every conceivable variety of erotic voluptuousness and sensual pleasure. And women, the treatise reminds one, are essentially as free as men in this respect. So that, when the passions subside and require increased fuel, the potion could be sought equally by men and women.
The philtre appears in imaginative literature no less than in actuality. The Wagnerian opera based on the Tristan and Yseult legend presents a heroine who is far from the submissive and dutiful medieval female, subservient to her amorous lord and master. She is highly selfish in her ways, and her love for Tristan is conditioned by the administration of a love-potion.
Medieval mortality distinguished between conjugal love and sexual love that extended, on the part of both husband and wife, beyond the domestic frontiers. Hence in many instances an insistent lover would resort to some provocative potion in order to bring the amatory objective into submission.
One of the most ravishing women in all history was Diane de Poitiers, who for some three decades was the mistress of the French king Henri II. Her beauty remained untarnished far beyond the usually allotted span. She was imitated by every woman: in her manner of walking, her hair styles, her general behavior. All society, all France was at her feet as the unattainable ideal woman. And she remained so long after her death.
Those who were particularly inquisitive about Diane de Poitiers’ method of prolonged beauty, whispered, and general gossip supported the belief, that the continuance of her appealing and attractive charms was due to certain potent love philtres that she had regularly used.
Before her death, Diane de Poitiers revealed what was evidently the composition of the potion. Every morning, she declared, she had been in the habit of drinking a liquid consisting of molten gold and certain unrevealed drugs that had been recommended by alchemists.