Prostitution reached such a social importance, and the practitioners acquired such influence in various directions, that, in Paris, a kind of trade union was formed, to which the practicing prostitutes prescribed. They established their own procedures, their working hours, and similar regulations. At many royal banquets, public entertainments, and processional ceremonials, in Italy and in France, prostitutes were prominent participants, some half-naked, often entirely so. There were, of course, fulminations against such and similar indecencies, but without much immediate or effective results. Preachers thundered, to no avail, against the erotic provocations to adultery and fornication engendered by the sight of women who, by the subtlety of their dress, exposed various parts of their person. There was public debauchery. There were genesiac performances in the presence of the children in a household. There were poems and tales, called fabliaux, that, reflecting the mores of the age, dealt with nothing but cuckoldry and fornication, adultery, sodomy, bestiality, and all the multiple varieties of physiological perversions. Furthermore, houses, manors, large estates were decorated with tapestries, paintings, sculpture, all depicting the greatest obscenities. Even churches and chapels and abbeys contained scenes, figures, statues of the utmost lewdness in posture, presentation, and implication. * * * * * Among the barbarities of the medieval centuries, many performances, processions, and rites contained an amazing mingling of ecclesiastical elements and dissolute blasphemies and libertinage: just as the Greek satyr plays and the comedies of fifth century Athens were composites of functional representations by human actors of the libidinous and irreverent actions of the deities themselves. The medieval scene contained secular and monastic lubricity, and processions and rites in which the performers, under the guise of nuns and prelates, presented shameless and unspeakable obscenities. In addition, flagellation was inflicted on penitents. In Germany, France, England, and Italy, all ranks, of all ages, underwent phallic castigation as an act of devotion. * * * * * In Girolamo Folengo’s _Maccaronea_, published in 1519, there is mention of manuals that provide magic instruction and prescriptions favorable in inducing or diverting erotic urges: He opens the manuals, or reads all that are open: How to write arcane spells: How to compel love; How a husband can find out his wife’s adultery; How virginal maidens can be forced to love; How to make a hated husband impotent. * * * * *