And Ovid had already advised: Banish every evil, be lovable, in order to be loved. Paracelsus, the medieval scholar and alchemist, is quoted in relation to the philtre and its content. Or, as Clauder suggests, the amatory inducement may take the form of a magic inscription on a key, or a ring, or a necklace, or an armlet. As for herbs, the Romans preferred the laurel and the olive, in infusions. Vegetable and mineral and organic matter is also in use; perspiration, urine, spittle. But there is a sinister and hazardous element in such practices. Prostitutes in particular, Clauder threatens, use philtres that rob the victim of mind and soul and leave him a shallow husk. So corroborates Paracelsus. There is one potion, however, called Charisia, that may be innocuous. It has not been identified. But possibly the name may have been invented etymologically on the basis of the Greek _charis_, which means grace or gratitude: and hence the nomenclature is wishfully proleptic in significance. With respect to a variety of lustful and amatory circumstances, the Middle Ages were marked by strange social mores, by monstrous obscenities and erotic barbarities. There were practices designed primarily to preserve chastity and marital and domestic purity, but they actually resulted in greater indecencies than the circumstances that induced these inventive prophylaxes. There was, first of all, the girdle of chastity, a mechanical device to prevent indiscriminate and unlawful lustful consummations in the absence of the husband. The putative inventor of the device was Francesco da Carrara, Provost of Padua, who belongs in the latter part of the fourteenth century. He himself, it was said, met with a miserable death, being strangled on the scaffold for his many cruelties, in 1405, by order of the Senate of Venice. There was, too, the Congress, a kind of judicial body that determined marital questions, quarrels, incompatibility, by viewing the two participants _in actu sexuali_. Men and women taken in adultery were compelled to march through the public streets naked, sometimes mounted on an ass, for centuries the bestial symbol of lust. There was the libidinous _ius primae noctis_, the _droit de cuisse_, exercised by the lord of the manor, and on occasion by monks and prelates, in the case of a newly wedded couple. In France, in the city of Toulouse, there was a notorious brothel called The Great Abbey. There were, dispersed through France, many such pseudo-abbeys, the madame of which, in each case, was called Abbess. Such terms and such practices, of course, heightened the lewd obscenity. There was a similar type of dissolute haven that had an infamous reputation in England. This perversion, in which devout elements are linked with the extremes of lust, to heighten the amatory impulse, is described in abundant and salacious detail in the novels of the Marquis de Sade and in other instances of erotic literature.