In the aftermath of these lecheries there arose perplexities, complications in erotic directions, incapacity through perversions and excesses: and a consequent hungry, voracious quest for remedial measures: drugs and drinks devised by itinerant traders, nostrums compounded by wily serfs and jongleurs, alchemical elixirs distilled in secret dens by putative adepts. * * * * * Women, in an amatory sense, were far from neglected in the Middle Ages. Many handbooks appeared that offered hints and guidance on dress, deportment, osculation and its limitations, social behavior, cleanliness, bathing and washing. And if the object of the woman’s passion was preoccupied elsewhere, or hesitant, or indifferent to her insistence or her personal charms, there was always recourse to the potion, by means of which she could have her way. * * * * * In France, in the Middle Ages, prostitution was so rampant and seeped into the life of the people and the nobility to such an alarming extent that the pious King Saint Louis, who flourished in the thirteenth century, promulgated a series of stringent decrees against prostitutes. 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.