ne at home,
sent messages that if their husbands failed to return speedily
they would take new ones. The celibacy of the clergy was only
established with the very greatest difficulty, and when it was
established, priests became unchaste. Archbishop Odo of Rouen, in
the thirteenth century, recorded in the diary of his diocesan
visitations that there was one unchaste priest in every five
parishes, and even as regards the Italy of the same period the
friar Salimbene in his remarkable autobiography shows how little
chastity was regarded in the religious life. Chastity could now
only be maintained by force, usually the moral force of
ecclesiastical authority, which was itself undermined by
unchastity, but sometimes even physical force. It was in the
thirteenth century, in the opinion of some, that the girdle of
chastity (_cingula castitatis_) first begins to appear, but the
chief authority, Caufeynon (_La Ceinture de Chastete_, 1904)
believes it only dates from the Renaissance (Schultz, _Das
Hoefische Leben zur Zeit der Minnesaenger_, vol. i, p. 595; Dufour,
_Histoire de la Prostitution_, vol. v, p. 272; Krauss,
_Anthropophyteia_, vol. iii, p. 247). In the sixteenth century
convents were liable to become almost brothels, as we learn on
the unimpeachable authority of Burchard, a Pope's secretary, in
his _Diarium_, edited by Thuasne who brings together additional
authorities for this statement in a footnote (vol. ii, p. 79);
that they remained so in the eighteenth century we see clearly in
the pages of Casanova's _Memoires_, and in many other documents
of the period.

The Renaissance and the rise of humanism undoubtedly affected the feeling
towards asceticism and chastity. On the one hand a new and ancient
sanction was found for the disregard of virtues which men began to look
upon as merely monkish, and on the other hand the finer spirits affected
by the new movement began to realize that chastity might be better
cultivated and observed by those who were free to do as they would than by
those who were under the compulsion of priestly authority. That is the
feeling that prevails in Montaigne, and that is the idea of Rabelais when
he made it the only rule of his Abbey of Theleme: "Fay ce que vouldras."

A little later this doctrine was repeated in varying tones by
many writers more or less tinged by the culture brou