By the twelfth century written literature was increasing rapidly, and early in the thirteenth we find incorporated in a medieval romance the first known variant episode since Alciphron’s light-hearted and bawdy tale. Its appearance did not, however, herald any sustained use of variance as a literary theme, and to appreciate its significance and that of the few subsequent examples prior to the eighteenth century, one needs for background some over-all view of the status of woman in medieval society. To put it briefly, woman was regarded in two antithetical lights: as angel and as devil. We have already noted that from the outset Christian theology saw her as responsible for the fall of man and, therefore, as the root of all sexual evil. This derogatory opinion was reinforced after the third century by infiltrations from the dualistic religion of Persia. Manicheism divided the universe into God’s divine and incorporeal kingdom of light and the souls of men, and a realm of darkness comprising the material world and men’s bodies, the province of the Devil. Since woman’s reproductive function bound her closer to the flesh than man was bound, her burden of original sin was so much the greater. In the later Middle Ages serious philosophical debate arose as to whether she was a complete human being possessed of a soul, or merely a breeder for the superior race of men. If today such views seem incredible, they gain reality when one remembers the outbreaks of witchcraft from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries and the dreadful measures taken to suppress witches as followers of Satan. Modern psychologists tend to diagnose those epidemics as hysteria on the part of the bewitched and of the culprits themselves, who frequently confessed to intimacy with the Devil. Certain historians of the occult, however, offer convincing evidence that organized witchcraft was a survival from ancient fertility cults widespread in Europe, of Druidic or even earlier origin; cults which had worshipped a god in the semblance of an animal—most often a goat—and whose rites, as in all known fertility cults, were sexual.[1]