During the Italian Renaissance the women of Italy played a dominant and sometimes sinister part in both social and political life. Courtesans, particularly in Rome, had a position somewhat analogous to that of the Greek hetairae. One such courtesan, Imperia, had skill in composing sonnets. Most of them were literate and interested in intellectual pursuits as well as in erotic interludes. Caterina di San Celso played and sang. Many women of this type are described by Giraldi in the novels of the _Hecatommithi_ and by Pietro Aretino in his _Ragionamenti_. The Italian Renaissance was marked by both literary and social indecencies and lewd lubricities and all kinds of scatological productions and performances. In the lavish public entertainments, in the Carnivals and Masques, apart from contests, reviews, pantomimic presentations, the emphasis was consistently on scandalous songs, with lascivious undertones, innuendoes, suggestions. In literature, the moral atmosphere of this period is reflected in the depiction of the most common Renaissance features—adultery and cuckoldry, all kinds of illicit amours, lusts resulting in secrecies, gallantries, murder. To satisfy her lusts, a woman poisons her husband. An adulteress has her lover kill her husband, without hesitation, without compunction. Love and lust, poison and death, infidelities and vengeance followed each other in an abandoned, frenzied, amoral sequence. The Italian strega or witch was a powerful intermediary in amatory affairs of all sorts. With her preparations, her thaumaturgic skills, her secret concoctions, she aided men and women in consummating erotic urges, arousing lustful sensualities, securing the love of hesitant objects of passion, promoting vigor and virility, arranging furtive amatory assignations: acting, in short, as an amatory midwife, an empirical guide in debauchery. By her magical skill the strega was able to aid men and women bent on amatory consummations. Some of these skills were transferred to the prostitutes. Acquiring these techniques, and discovering the secrets of preparing potions, they were able to retain a lover, to lure a new admirer. For their concoctions and brews they used human teeth and the eyes of dead men, skulls and ribs, scraps of the flesh of corpses, hair and nails boiled in oil. They made a fire of burning ashes, in the form of a heart. Piercing the heart, they chanted their goetic invocation, anticipating the surrender of the hesitant lover by this means of sympathetic magic. In this sphere, in fact, the Italian Renaissance had taken over, as it were, the entire corpus of ancient magic rites, love brews, and concomitant procedures in the art of erotic control. * * * * *