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. * * * * * 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. * * * * *