Although Renan (Marc-Aurele, Ch.  XV) briefly called attention to the existence of this copious early Christian literature setting forth the romance of chastity, it seems as yet to have received little or no study.  It is, however, of considerable importance, not merely for its own sake, but on account of its psychological significance in making clear the nature of the motive forces which made chastity easy and charming to the people of the early Christian world, even when it involved complete abstinence from sexual intercourse.  The early Church anathematized the eroticism of the Pagan world, and exorcized it in the most effectual way by setting up a new and more exquisite eroticism of its own.

During the Middle Ages the primitive freshness of Christian chastity began to lose its charm.  No more romances of chastity were written, and in actual life men no longer sought daring adventures in the field of chastity.  So far as the old ideals survived at all it was in the secular field of chivalry.  The last notable figure to emulate the achievements of the early Christians was Robert of Arbrissel in Normandy.

Robert of Arbrissel, who founded, in the eleventh century, the famous and distinguished Order of Fontevrault for women, was a Breton.  This Celtic origin is doubtless significant, for it may explain his unfailing ardor and gaiety, and his enthusiastic veneration for womanhood.  Even those of his friends who deprecated what they considered his scandalous conduct bear testimony to his unfailing and cheerful temperament, his alertness in action, his readiness for any deed of humanity, and his entire freedom from severity.  He attracted immense crowds of people of all conditions, especially women, including prostitutes, and his influence over women was great.  Once he went into a brothel to warm his feet, and, incidentally, converted all the women there.  “Who are you?” asked one of them, “I have been here twenty-five years and nobody has ever come here to talk about God.”  Robert’s relation with his nuns at Fontevrault was very intimate, and he would often sleep with them.  This is set forth precisely in letters written by friends of his, bishops and abbots, one of whom remarks that Robert had “discovered a new but fruitless form of martyrdom.”  A royal abbess of Fontevrault in the seventeenth century, pretending that the venerated founder of the order could not possibly have been guilty of such scandalous conduct, and that the letters must therefore be spurious, had the originals destroyed, so far as possible.  The Bollandists, in an unscholarly and incomplete account of the matter (Acta Sanctorum, Feb. 25), adopted this view.  J. von Walter, however, in a recent and thorough study of Robert of Arbrissel (Die Ersten Wanderprediger Frankreichs, Theil I), shows that there is no reason whatever to doubt the authentic and reliable