The third part was the oratory of the married laity, or conjugati, 'living the common life with their sons and daughters and using their wives for the procreation of children rather than for libidinousness'.

IN the summer of 1583, the powerful archbishop Carlo Borromeo delivered a sermon on the alarming rise of popular entertainments in Milan, that "famous school of libidinousness and impudence where comedies are often performed."

The seeds of Julius's courage and compelling energy, of Augustus's prudence, of the libidinousness and cruelty of Tiberius, of Caligula's folly, of Nero's artistic genius and enormous vanity, are all within me.

Annie's lovers, in particular, are written with such slurpy libidinousness and portrayed (by Arthur Aulisi and Nick Phelps) with such focus on caricature that they seem to have ventured onstage from a cartoon - or, worse, an amateur production next door.

As the Protestant Reformation of England highlighted the importance of pious, controlled behaviour in society, it was the tendency of the contemporary Englishman to displace society's undesirable qualities of barbarism, treachery, jealousy and libidinousness onto those who are considered 'other'.

To everyone's credit, the cast has both fully grasped the opportunity for the indulgence of goofy libidinousness and embraced the informal and mutually forgiving bond with the audience that goes with a show so lightly rehearsed that parts of it are necessarily impromptu.

The emphasis on erotically charged material leads Deborah McDowell of the University of Virginia to wonder if the sudden interest of the film industry in Josephine Baker is exploitative, "a revival of the age-old cultural myth of the libidinousness of black women."

The former leaves to the latter to discover for itself the three carnal sins, avarice, gluttony and libidinousness; having already declared the nature of the spiritual sins, pride, envy, anger, and indifference, or lukewarmness in piety, which the Italians call accidia, from the Greek word.

And it is thus, more importantly, that whole regiments of neurotic wives have been convinced that their children are monuments, not to a co-operation in which their own share was innocent and cordial, but to the solitary libidinousness of their swinish and unconscionable husbands.