If it is objected:

“The meaning is merely that you should seek marriage with your wealth, not fornication: you give her the dowry on the understanding that she will be your wife, with no one else having any right to her. This differs from giving her money on the understanding that she will fornicate with whomever she wishes, or that she will be your mistress, having illicit relations with you alone. That is forbidden.”

The answer is:

“If the purpose of marriage is that she should be yours alone, and no one else’s, yet she has not repented of fornication, would she not be failing to fulfil the requirements of the contract?”

If it is objected:

“He can safeguard her chastity against her will by housing her somewhere she cannot commit fornication.”

The answer is:

“If he safeguards her chastity by force, he is indeed unlike someone who allows her to go out to men and allows men to come in to her. Yet common experience has shown that when a woman desires someone other than her husband, she devises many ways to achieve this without her husband knowing. She may even impair her husband’s reason through what she feeds him, and she may also cast spells on him. This happens frequently: men have been fed such things by their wives and bewitched by them so that the woman can do as she pleases. Alongside this, her intention may be to keep him from going to other women. She thus seeks to prevent him from lawful relations, or from both unlawful and lawful relations. She may also intend to make him let her do whatever she wishes, so that he no longer safeguards her chastity or exercises his responsibility over her; rather, she becomes the one who rules him.

“If this happens with women who married without having been prostitutes, what, then, of a woman who was a prostitute? Accounts of such things are numerous. If only, once she repented, this necessarily entailed