It will no longer be slanderous to impute unchastity to a woman, or to say someone suffers from "venereal disease, leprosy or the plague".More important are the proposed new statutory defences against libel claims: truth, public interest and honest opinion.
They concluded that "it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from unchastity" (Acts 15:28).
In 1536, convinced by the dubious evidence of Anne's alleged adulteries, he in turn invalidated that marriage; in 1540 he assisted in the freeing of Henry VIII from his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves; and in 1542 he was forced to be prominent in the proceedings that resulted in Catherine Howard's execution for treasonable unchastity.
In the story of Susanna and the Elders (also 2nd century bce), a charge of unchastity levelled against a beautiful woman is refuted when a clever youngster ("Daniel come to judgment") points out discrepancies in the testimony of her accusers.
From this time onward Gentile Christians were not bound by the Levitical ceremonial regulations of the Jews, except for the provisions of the so-called apostolic decree: abstention "from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from unchastity" (Acts 15:29).
But she was loved by Zeus and, in several variations of the legend, was turned into a she-bear either by Zeus (to conceal his deed from Hera) or by Artemis or Hera (who were enraged at her unchastity).
Cluniac monks lived strictly canonical lives, opposing simony and clerical unchastity.
The first words are Anna Maria's spoken prayer to a crucifix on the wall: "Beloved Jesus, please accept my sacrifice today for the grave sin of unchastity.
"Public" women were prostitutes, whose sexual availability was presumed to be virtually unlimited, and whose unchastity meant they had no legal right to be free of sexual assault.
Two days before Paul's death he gave Pascal a book to remember him by - a William Morris book about how Queen Guenevere had defended herself against the lies of Sir Gauwaine and a charge of unchastity.
But at the same time it is known that the sculptor and architect enjoyed a life of enthusiastic unchastity.
