All you ladies wishing to lose weight or return your shape to lost perfection should forget faddish diets and punishing visits to the gym. What you need is a poultice.

This 300-year-old sovereign remedy for unwanted fatty bits and for breasts that are beginning to suffer from southern drift appears in a rare 1694 encyclopaedia of advice for women and is easily made at home.

“Take an ounce and a half of oyl of foxes, oyl of lillies, and capons grease, and goose grease, each two ounces; pine, rosin Greek pitch and turpentine, of each two ounces.” Boil the brew in an earthenware pot, adding an ounce of oil of elder and “a quantity of virgins wax, as much as will stiffen the mass”. Wrap it in a cloth and let it cool before applying it as a plaster “to the place that languishes, or does not equally thrive”.

What, Boots clean out of oyl of foxes? Never mind. A simpler remedy for the overweight is to bathe in claret containing wormwood, chamomile, sage and something called “squinath”.

The Ladies Dictionary; Being a General Entertainment for the Fair Sex was found in the library of the late Tony Hattersley, a Yorkshire book dealer, and is a veritable Cosmopolitan of its time, when William and Mary were on the throne. The author, identified only as “HN”, has pronounced views on diet, fashion, courtship, adultery and even prostitution.

Today’s skinny models would not have earned HN’s approval, given that he (or possibly she) thought being underweight as bad as being fat. Thin women are dismissed as scragged, sad-looking and not comely. “It is a contrary extream to corpulency and the party’s face always seems to carry Lent in it.”

HN has a simple view on make-up: don’t wear it. “A painted face is enough to destroy the reputation of her that uses it.”

Dietary advice includes taking vigorous exercise before meals. “Chase your body as much as you can, that the blood may be stirred in the veins and the skin sit more loose.” The author recommends “new eggs, veal, mutton, capon, etc”. None of your five daily portions of fruit and veg, then.

HN discusses the age-old question of how far to go on a first date, or, as he says: “Is it proper for a woman to yield at the first address, though to a man she love?”

He entangles himself in military metaphor. “There’s no such want of man yet that thanks to our French and Irish enemies, that you ladies should be in such a great haste to yield at the first appearance of a foe. Besides, you’ll get better conditions if the enemy does not know how weak you are within.”

On the subject of prostitution, HN says that it “causes a man to spend his flesh for silver, till be becomes so lank and lean that his legs are scarce able to support their late portly master . . . his eyes so hollow . . . and his cheeks, denting in as if he were still sucking at a bottle”.

A whore, he says, “opens her shop windows when all other trades are about to shut them”.

The dictionary is expected to fetch a modest £2,000 when auctioned by Bonhams at a two-day sale on September 11 and October 9. Also included in the auction is a volume published in 1661 entitled The Academy Of Complements (sic) Wherein Ladies, G e n t l e w o m e n ,

Schollers and Strangers may Accomodate their Courtly Practice With Gentile Ceremonies, Complemental amorous high expressions, and Forms of Speaking or Writing of Letters most in Fashion. John Gough, the author, suggests the best way to compliment a woman on her bosom. “Her breasts are a pair of maiden-unconquered worlds”, or, “Her breasts are twins where lillies grow”.

That, of course, would be only after a stiff application of oyl of foxes.

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