Modern dating looks like a nightmare. They treat you mean to keep you keen. They ghost you, ignoring your messages. Maybe their ex isn’t quite as ex as they implied.
Exasperated, you pour your heart out to a newspaper advice column and the whole country gets to wallow in your relationship woes. Take heart: you’re not the first.
In 1691, the London bookseller John Dunton started a new publication with his two brothers-in-law. Called the Athenian Gazette or Casuistical Mercury, the pitch was that anyone could send a question on any topic at all to the anonymous Athenian Society and have it answered in print.
The paper was a hit – a cheap single sheet hawked around the city’s coffeehouses by Mercury Women – and their postbag soon filled with questions not just on science and theology, but about sex and relationships.
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Mary Beth Norton’s collection of these questions and responses is a cheerful (if sometimes repetitive) dive into the messy realities of courting, sex and marriage in the 1690s. Readers’ problems ranged from the mundane – unhappy marriages, difficult in-laws, broken promises – to the dramatic.
The Athenian inbox bulged with queries from accidental bigamists, adulterers and a man who had mistakenly married his own daughter. One correspondent, struggling with impure thoughts, asked if it would be permissible ‘to castrate himself in order to deliver himself from the most urgent temptations. (The answer: no.)
While even the Athenians thought some of the letters they received were probably made up, they offered pithy and often cutting advice. To someone in the grip of lust outside of marriage, they primly remarked that “fornication is damnable without repentance is believed by all but papists and atheists”.
To a writer who asked, “How may a man reclaim a headstrong or unruly wife?”, they answered, “the surest way of all is being a good husband yourself, for bad husbands are very often the cause that wives are no better”. A young woman mad with love for a forbidden suitor was given some practical advice: “read history (nothing amorous)”.
This collection of amorous histories shows that rubbernecking at the relationship disasters of others is nothing new. It might be useful reading for anyone writing a wedding speech – or contemplating a new relationship – this summer.
