'What Love Is in the Stews'

A sentence in the section titled “Causes of Love-Melancholy” in Burton stopped me: “In Italie and Spaine they have their stewes in every great Cittie.” Stewes? Or stews, as we would write it. I heard a fading echo but couldn’t quite grab it. From its context in The Anatomy of Melancholy, I knew Burton didn’t have dinner in mind. A few phrases later he assures us that “fornications, adulteries, are nowhere so common . . . how should a man live honest among so many provocations?” So, off to the OED, where I discovered a wonderful old, discarded meaning for a familiar word. In a word: brothel.

The lexicographers tell us it earlier had meant “a heated room used for hot air or vapour baths: hence, a hot bath.” From this came the bordello sense, “on account of the frequent use of the public hot-air bath-houses for immoral purposes.” Nashe, Steele, Boswell, Dickens (Oliver Twist) – all used it in the whorehouse sense. I felt grateful yet again to have been born into a language so profligate it could pack dozens of discrete senses into a single four-letter word, without fear of redundancy.  

 

A brief search lead to an interesting use of the word, by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762). Among her acquaintances was Alexander Pope, who apparently was smitten with her. See William Frith’s painting of Lady Montagu’s reaction to Pope’s declaration of love in 1722. Pope replied with attacks on her in The Dunciad and elsewhere. In “Verses Addressed to the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace,” Lady Montagu replied in kind:

 

“Satire shoud, like a polish’d Razor keen,

Wound with a Touch, that’s scarcely felt or seen.

Thine is an Oyster-Knife, that hacks and hews;

The Rage, but not the Talent of Abuse;

And is in Hate, what Love is in the Stews.”