This book is a serious academic attempt to document the history of love potions or other substances meant to enchant another individual into becoming enamored with another party. Some examples provided include sap of mallows during the times of Ancient Greek and several potions featured in the Kama Sutra.

The spiritualist and author of Dictionary of Aphrodisiacs presents an in-depth study of love potions and charms through the centuries. Love and sexuality are perhaps some of the most essential, eternal, and universal concerns of humankind. Since before recorded history, societies have sought ways to improve their physiological potency, attract mates amorously, and—in some instances—prevent such attraction or divert it elsewhere. Over time, these means have taken many forms: love elixirs, spells, and rites have been part of virtually every civilization through the ages. This survey explores the evolution of love potion practices over the centuries and across the world. Separate chapters focus on ancient Greece, Rome, India, and the Orient, as well as the Middle Ages and modern times. Author Harry E. Wedeck relays the spiritual aspects of these concoctions as well as historical anecdotes about them. Recipes are also included, though Wedeck cautions that they are exclusively for academic purposes and not intended for personal use.

This book takes you on a journey through our sensual and erotic past, beginning in the ancient Middle East and Greece and ending in the Renaissance period and beyond.

Deserts appear very fascinating during our short visits. However, the lives of plants and animals are very dif?cult under the harsh climatic conditions of high tempe- ture and scant water supply in deserts, sometimes associated with high concent- tions of salt. The editor of this book was born and brought up in the Great Indian Desert, and has spent much of his life studying the growth and metabolism of desert plants. It is very charming on a cool summer evening to sit at the top of a sand dune listening only to blowing air and nothing else. It has been my dream to prepare a volume on desert plants encompassing various aspects of desert plant biology. In this book, I have tried to present functional and useful aspects of the vegetation resources of deserts along with scienti?c input aimed at understanding and impr- ing the utility of these plants. The scant vegetation of deserts supports animal life and provides many useful medicines, timber and fuel wood for humans. Therefore, there are chapters devoted to medicinal plants (Chap. 1), halophytes (Chaps. 13, 14), and fruit plants (Chaps. 17, 20). Desert plants have a unique reproductive biology (Chaps. 9–11), well-adapted eco-physiological and anatomical charact- istics (Chap. 7), and specialised metabolism and survival abilities. These plants are dif?cult to propagate and pose many problems to researchers developing biote- nological approaches for their amelioration (Chaps. 18–20).

This title, first published in 1979, is a glossary of the bawdy vocabulary that was used in Renaissance Drama. One of the primary functions of this gloss of literary bawdy is to interpret imaginative uses of the language rather than simply record the generally accepted uses and meanings, with its principal task to make the dialogue of the plays more intelligible to the reader. With examples of bawdy language used in the works of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and John Webster amongst many others, this title will be of great interest to students of literature and performance studies.