564 guido ruggiero
cunning women, midwives, and healers—were assumed to have knowl-
edge of such magic, and the records of the courts dealing with these mat-
ters indicate that they were regularly prosecuted for such practices. love
magic often focused on sex, either by forcing victims to practice it or by
blocking their ability to do so, and so was an important part of the arsenal
of prostitutes and a less well known but significant aspect of the illicit
worlds of sex in the city. But at the same time it was also a tool frequently
called upon to find mates, encourage sex in marriage, and at times even to
win back from prostitutes or concubines the sexual attentions of spouses.
Thus such magic inhabits a richly revealing gray area that shares aspects
of the illicit and licit like many other formally illicit activities. To briefly
summarize a very complex practice, such magic suggests that love was a
strong and dangerous passion rather different from the generally tamer
emotion celebrated today—again it is a term that takes us beyond the
looking glass and into a strangely familiar but slightly off-kilter world—
and it was an emotion closely aligned for many with powerful sexual
passions.47
Much of this magic was designed to make someone fall so completely in
love with another that they could not eat, drink, sleep, or find repose until
they acted on that passion, and the action that was assumed to fulfill that
need was sexual intercourse. Prostitutes used such magic to attract and
hold clients, wives used it to regain the affections of their husbands, and
match-makers used it to make difficult matches. significantly, the latter
two uses suggest that there was some ideal of sexual passion and attrac-
tion in marriage, especially at levels below the social elite. it also implies,
as the case of andriana seemed to prove to the dandolo clan, that such
magic could be used to short-circuit more important family calculations
for marriage at upper class levels. of course, magic could also be used to
block marriages or disrupt them, both at the level of blocking males from
being able to function sexually and thus consummate them and at the
level of sowing hate and discord between couples.
Perhaps even more interesting and certainly more complex is what
such magic suggests about the passions and parts of the body associated
with sex. More systematic study needs to be done, but it seems clear that
for much of this magic sex, passion, and pleasure were closely associated
and that the passions involved were deemed to be strong and potentially
47 ibid., pp. 66–129 for this and the discussion that follows.