SOURCE: Correll, Barbara. “Malleable Material, Models of Power: Woman in Erasmus's ‘Marriage Group’ and Civility in Boys.” ELH 57, no. 2 (summer 1990): 241-262.

[In the essay below, Correll reads some of Erasmus's Colloquies to illuminate how discourse about women serves to address cultural concerns about the masculine self. Correll includes consideration of Erasmus's writings about boys as an example of both symbolically feminine roles and weakened masculinity.]

Dic, Eutrapele: uter infirmior, qui cedit alteri, an cui ceditur?¹

I

Renaissance studies in English literature have often looked to the figure of Elizabeth I as an unsettling force in sixteenth-century England, using investigations of her style of rule and the structure of the court to develop theories of power and subject formation in early modernity. In two notable examples of such studies, Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Montrose argue that, as monarch and as woman, Elizabeth exploited and provoked psychological anxieties in her male subjects, anxieties of male selfhood which reflected the political tensions of a society in transition; and that those tensions are dramatized, contained and preserved in works such as Spenser's Faerie Queene and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.²

When, however, we look to Erasmus's writings on pedagogy, and to his more popular Colloquies as pedagogical works as well, we see on the European continent, too, and certainly earlier in the century, signs of a kind of psycho-political crisis of masculine identity and authority among members of a rising intellectual bourgeoisie who sought to negotiate positions of authority in a power structure still largely determined by the hereditary nobility and the institution of the Church. That Erasmus enjoyed considerable influence among English readers of Latin, and that the pedagogical writings, as well as many of the Colloquies, were available in English translation before Elizabeth came to the throne, should, at the very least, serve to complicate regiocentric interpretations.³ Here we cannot speak of the provocation of a female monarch; yet, as in the case of Elizabeth I, this crisis of the subject also contains sexual-political tensions and to a great extent revolves around questions of gender.

The suggestion here is that Erasmus's discourse on civility and the fashioning of secular male selfhood, far from constituting the (Burckhardtian) rebirth of individualism and the transcendent self, discloses an insistent concern for beleaguered masculine identity.⁴ As a topic frequently embedded in or echoed in early modern discourses on the self, women became a cause of concern, not because, as in Montrose's more regiocentric discussion of Elizabethan England, “authority is everywhere invested in men—everywhere, that is, except at the top” (61) but because the conflict between hereditary and intellectual or bourgeois claims to power reveals sexual anxiety in shifting notions of subordination and superiority and calls attention to women as designated subordinates who—because in the ascribed and increasingly codified roles they reflect—might threaten the uneasy dynamics of power. In this ambivalent negotiation, too, it does not seem surprising that women and conflicts of the sexual-political order would become (open or embedded) topics of concern in humanist writings.⁵ Some authors, such as Castiglione in Il Cortegiano, might make it a convenient vehicle with which to introduce the commonplace battle of the sexes topos,⁶ while others, of a more particularly peace-loving character, might address it as still another project for their conciliatory efforts. In any event, both strategies disclose evidence of projected threats to early modern manhood; and, although the concern here will be with the latter, neither strategy successfully contains them.

The question here is, what is the function of woman in humanist discourses of early modern civility, devoted, as they are, to the formation of cultural masculinity? In order to provide some answer to it, I would like to focus on Erasmus as that irenic personality who, against a historical backdrop of conflict and instability, concerned himself with the formation of civil subjects as the precondition for a project of establishing social, domestic and religious harmony. Toward this end I have chosen those selections from Erasmus's Colloquia Familiaria [Colloquies] which present a behavioral model for women: the “Marriage Group.” These pleasant and useful conversations develop a theory of power and a model of reconceptualized cultural manhood in the early modern period, and their concerns carry over into one of Erasmus's most influential works, De Civilitate Morum Puerilium [On Civility in Boys] (1530).

Interestingly enough, like De Civilitate, these dialogues and proto-novels of manners, composed over decades (between 1496 and 1529) by Erasmus to teach his readers a double lesson in Latin grammar and moral precepts, present Erasmus grappling with two important issues and relating them to a mutable text of identity in the early modern civil subject: the dangerous problems of women's power and the instability of adolescence as the treacherous, liminal period when the boy appropriates his sexual identity as the prerequisite for entering the civic realm.⁷ In the stabilizing gestures which Erasmus makes to deal with the problem of power in the spheres of courtship and marriage, the “Marriage Group” anticipates Erasmus's model of the male bourgeois student of civility, who in learning to govern himself sets the best example for his superiors to follow in governing themselves and their subjects. But, read with De Civilitate, there is evidence here of a profoundly personal investment as well: these texts also bear an interesting relationship to Erasmus's own strategies for exercising and manipulating power—as teacher, humanist and intellectual deeply involved in a personal politics of conciliation, living in a changing and often threatening world which did not hesitate to oversee and scrutinize his success (and that of other humanists as well), to question his texts for their potentially disruptive meanings. In this unstable environment, Erasmus's dedication to the topic of manners reveals an interest in inscribing identity formation with the structures of power.

In posing the question of the function of woman, I want to depart from traditional studies of images of women, or studies of notable Renaissance women, and suggest that although Erasmus's work on pedagogy and civility is concerned primarily with boys, there may be some displacement or substitution at work, some maneuvering which would signal us to ask some probing and productive questions about the position of women and the structuring of feminine and masculine identity in discursive practices of the Renaissance period.⁸ That is, Erasmus may both explicitly exclude or dismissively close women off from his pedagogical theories, while his texts themselves reveal that he implicitly includes woman or a version of woman (woman as constructed by discourse or a “woman function”—e.g., effeminacy, weakness, insufficient reason or control, signifiers of feminine gender but much more signifiers of a failing of masculinity) in the construction of the young male student, and the texts themselves may provide us with important disclosures of this double action as a strategy absolutely essential in his pedagogical project. In other words, if we are looking at a new discourse on identity in early modern society in order to establish a critical interpretation of power and the role of the subject in larger social and political structures, we shall want not only to observe domestic relations as indicative of a kind of social structure, but also to look at pedagogical practices and grammar lessons as making use of sexual relations and gendered references. Rather than identifying the domestic and pedagogical realms as two distinct cultural spheres, we may find an overarching concern with the structuring of identity and power in which youths and women play a determining role.⁹ A careful reading here may allow us to look beyond the myths of the monumental figures in Erasmus studies and focus a critical eye on his pivotal and symptomatic contributions to conflicted areas of early modernity. In being critically appreciative of the ambiguities and consequences of gender discourse, by scrutinizing the text of power in the early modern formation of cultural masculinity, we may learn “in excess” of Erasmian pedagogy and discover some things, both historical and theoretical, about the social construction of men and women.

Erasmus remains the darling of humanist studies, enjoying an unparalleled status as sympathetic figure of early modern cultural history. McConica's essay on the central importance of peace and consensus in Erasmus's writings, on the dread of conflict which caused him to declare that he “would endure anything rather than provoke dissension,” has its equivalence in a kind of irenic contract between Erasmus scholars and their privileged object of study.¹⁰ Efforts to work beyond the hagiographical and to apply a critical eye to this influential central figure have for the most part remained limited to psychopathological and clinical analyses.¹¹ For the most part, that is, despite the exertions of German pathologists, the “bones” of Erasmus remain undisturbed, the terms of the contract respected;¹² and the continuing investment in Erasmus as the peace-mongering spokesman for Christian humanism is clearly linked to the humanist project itself, which manages to project Erasmus as model from its aspirations to retain an essentialist humanist framework in the face of critical and post-humanist challenges.

Discussions of Erasmus's position on women extend, organically, from these humanist investments and projections. J. K. Sowards's essay, “Erasmus and the Education of Women” is typical here.¹³ On the negative side, Sowards notes the absence of women from the pedagogical writings, such as De Civilitate, where “feminine civility is never mentioned” (78). He identifies Erasmus's conformity to civic humanism's notion of education as preparation for the vita activa, to which women are systemically denied access. Furthermore, women are directed, in humanist writings like those of Erasmus and Vives, toward domestic duties, in which their education would make them better companions to their husbands and better mothers of their offspring. Yet though Sowards does not see in Erasmus “a powerful advocate for the education of women,” he claims him as “one of the most important champions of women's rights in his century” (77) and uses the (by now) familiar arguments of structural functionalism and historical relativism to perpetuate a circular and apologetic logic: Erasmus was progressive for his times, but his ideas were culturally determined, circumscribed by historical conditions.

To take a more contemporary, more theoretical direction, there is an underlying and clearly post-structuralist premise operating here, and it is one developed in recent work by feminist cinema scholar Teresa de Lauretis and the theoretical context out of which she writes (semiotics, psychoanalysis, neo-Marxism) and to which she responds critically:¹⁴ “Woman” is constructed, appropriated and reproduced by the early modern civilizing process (as is man); we are speaking here not of a transcendental human subject but of the cultural construction of masculinity and femininity. Gender, then, like “the subject,” appears as an “aggregate of effects,” a “text” written by discursive negotiations—albeit one with concrete consequences. We can use the tools of discourse analysis and critical theory to go beyond traditional progressive-evolutionary notions of history and civilization—as the forces which continue to marginalize the questions of women's history—while not succumbing to any essentialist or compensatory positions in which categories of gender (or the notion of gender itself) remain still privileged and unscrutinized. On the one hand, then, when we look at woman in early modernity we must say, with Jacques Lacan and French feminists, that there is no woman here, but rather a discourse on women, a representation, expressing ideological investments in the form of what we might call “woman effects.”

On the other hand, post-structuralist critiques of the unified subject, and theories of woman's textuality and representation are not the end of the story. As de Lauretis suggests, rather than remain arrested at the level of textuality, we must also insist on concern for the things that happen to bodies, the material consequences of those discourses on gender which construct, maintain, enforce cultural masculinity and cultural femininity:

The discrepancy, the tension, and the constant slippage between Woman as representation, as the object and very condition of representation, and, on the other hand, women as historical beings, subjects of “real relations,” are motivated and sustained by a logical contradiction in our culture and an irreconcilable one: women are both inside and outside gender, at once within and without representation.

(10)

With this in mind we can address the function of woman for Erasmus as an author whose pedagogical writings, devoted to constructing the male subject of humanism, contributed to the discursive formation of woman and thus to the material effects of such gendering discursive practices on historical subjects—women and men—as well.¹⁵

To examine the role of women in Erasmus, without arresting the investigation with a thesis of historical circumstance, is to introduce feminist questions. Here awareness of Erasmus's discriminatory attitudes toward women becomes not a site of accusation but rather one for investigations of subject and gender formation in early modernity. Though women are seldom explicitly addressed in his pedagogical works, there are implicit references to women: women function as an essential negative, to be overcome by civilizing labors and the education process, a constructed threat—and the uncanny echo from the machinery of changing power relations—that motivates male students to inscribe themselves in cultural masculine structures of civility.

II

Many of Erasmus's Colloquies take up the topics of manners, behavior, relations with superiors, but two of these from the eight dialogues that are known as the “Marriage Group,” “Courtship” [“Proci et puellae”] and “Marriage” [“Coniugium”], particularly speak to the issues of our discussion and create a strange model of substitute power:¹⁶ power to create the conditions of your own subordination. Both have as their dramatic and narrative settings crisis situations in sexual and power relations, centered around the heterosexual couple. In the 1523 dialogue “Courtship,” Pamphilus, a suitor who describes himself as “a lifeless corpse” (88) accuses Maria, the object of his affection—and also, as she is quick to point out, the product of his psychic projections—of “slaying” men (“You slay men for sport as the god does. Except that you're more pitiless than Mars: you kill even a lover” [88]) by not sufficiently returning his interest and agreeing to marry him. Erasmus constructs a male suitor who is no less conscious of the phallic symbolic order than Maria, and the dialogue achieves much of its liveliness by their consistently sustaining double entendre (much to the delight, one must assume, of the young Latin students) in which each character is more than willing to mistake the sign for the thing. When she protests that she is “a girl, not a stone” (89), he seizes upon the trope and calls her “harder than adamant” (89). The danger of her usurping and subverting sexual power is underlined when, having exhausted the argument, and clearly showing that she has the intellectual upper hand, Maria places her own earned position in question and asks the outwitted Pamphilus, “Do I really have so much power?” (91) Whether as plea or as acknowledgment (or in an effort to contain the threat of the possibility of what would happen if she retained that position), he replies that she “can bring a dead man back to life” (91).

In the argument over virginity and marriage which ensues, an argument she must lose in order to win, Maria demonstrates that her wisdom extends to the field of cultural anthropology. She understands virginity as the withholding of power from the man—a way of deferring the moment of full initiation into the symbolic contract (motherhood)—but knows its position in a cultural context as well: i.e., in a society where women circulate as objects of exchange, and where the market of the libidinal economy may be manipulated by withholding sexual gratification or mediated desire, virginity's power can have value only as temporary withholding: timing counts for everything. She begins to give ground gradually and cautiously, until it is Pamphilus who sees revival appearing, like the magical enactment of his will and without the agency of a magician, on the horizon. Thus after intellectually outmaneuvering an impatient lover for most of the dialogue, she follows the circular model of the ideal woman—smart enough to pose danger, smart enough to contain it—and assures him (with irony that takes one's breath away) that he has “tractable material. See that you form and fashion me” (97).

In “Coniugium” / “Marriage” a troubled young wife named (most appropriate to Erasmus's purposes) “Xantippe” learns how to get her husband to stop abusing her by cultivating subordination instead of defiance; advice summed up, significantly, in the name of the friend giving it—Eulalia [“sweet speaking”]. In the ideal figure of Eulalia, Erasmus offers the exemplar of a woman intelligent enough and sublimely skilled in navigating the dualities and double binds of gendered power structures, to educate her husband to rule her well. She demonstrates, at a later stage of a sexual—and civil-political—relationship, the wisdom and strategic pliancy of the young woman in “Courtship,” and recommends to Xantippe the techniques of behavioral modification, rewarding good conduct and ignoring the bad. A character constructed to work hard to protect the mystification of power in marital politics, to accommodate herself to the structural demands of this elementary socio-political unit, she offers as advice: “Mark the good in him, rather, and by this means take him where he can be held” (125). Whereas in the colloquy “The Godly Feast” husbands are held responsible for controlling the conduct of their wives (just as rulers would be accountable for controlling their subjects, or for maintaining a structure of power at court), here the wife confronts a far more complicated situation.¹⁷ She is responsible for instructing her superior to rule her in the best way, obliging her to demonstrate superior understanding and truly sophisticated techniques of self-control and psychic doubling; to have the power to instruct, on the one hand, matched by the control to invert that power into her own subordination, on the other.¹⁸ Unlike the male administrative underling or the court intellectual, for whom inverted power will be exchanged for social mobility and professional success (favor, patronage), what Eulalia seems to derive from this master-slave dialectic in the way of satisfaction or compensatory experience (aside from the act of instructing other women to follow her lesson) amounts to a kind of pleasure at giving a virtuoso performance in which, much like Castiglione's sprezzatura, the art appears spontaneous. Satisfied she is. When she informs Xantippe that divorce is no longer permitted and Xantippe exclaims, “May heaven punish whoever robbed us of this right!” she invokes the authority of Christianity. Alluding to Circe and offering as compensation an appropriated, much civilized form of witchcraft, she sets an assignment in self-authorization: “You determine whether you have a husband or a swine.” At every stage of the conversation where Xantippe rages against the injustice of the domestic structure and storms the walls of the civil-symbolic edifice, Eulalia comes forward confidently to domesticate and, like the man-made Athena who placates the Erinyes in Aeschylus's ancient civic drama of the world-historical defeat of the female, to “defeminate.”¹⁹

Like Sowards and many others, Jacques Chomorat argues that Erasmus speaks for the dignity of women (looking to the model women of his acquaintance, such as Margaret Roper, or the daughters of Pirkheimer and Thomas Blaurer), while Craig Thompson sees the “Marriage Group” colloquies as significant contributions to Renaissance “feminism.”²⁰ In marriage, according to Erasmus, subordination does not mean inferiority; he exempts the relationship of husband and wife from the taint of any notion of power or domination. Instead, faithfully following Pauline thought, it represents a natural fulfillment of a divinely ordained law.²¹ Interestingly for our discussion, however, Chomorat also sees in this domestic arrangement—which plays on illusions of power so often exploited in ideologies of separate spheres, real versus virtual power, and the position of women in the home—the laying out of the defense strategy of the humanist himself in religious controversy (897), a situation in which the humanist might come across as a strident, irrational and power-hungry Xantippe in need of “eulalic,” taming gestures. The “eulalic” model suggests that if you can fashion your behavior, you can control the behavior of others. But that does not mean such power, unless demonically inverted in the manner of a Iago or a Lady Macbeth, will extend beyond the devious and indirect, that it could ever become more than a power that folds upon itself in a decisive moment of self-subordination. We do not have to know much political science to see that what is at work here reaches beyond the primary social arrangements of the marital sphere and into larger social units; but also, on a third level, that it suggests a particularly personal investment on the part of Erasmus, whose published defense of the Colloquies sought to placate critical Church authorities by trying to assure them that the pieces supported institutional goals and doctrinal structures in every way.²²

But there is much that we can read in Erasmus's relationship to power that strongly suggests that his treatment of women has more to it than a merely conventional mouthing of Pauline doctrine, that, in the overlapping of concerns with the domestic and pedagogical spheres, Erasmus's constructed woman may function to conflate issues of sexuality and class in a way which could conveniently also serve to contain and pacify anxieties stemming from social change and negotiations of power.

Nowhere is this more evident than in “Puerpera” [“The New Mother”], the third colloquy of the “Marriage Group.” Written in 1525-1526, the time of the most violent Reformation struggles and the Peasant Wars in Germany, the text opens in a setting both remarkable and elaborately constructed. Against a background of dismembered order, the context of domestic and national violence, there emerges the icon of organic wholeness: the mother suckling her infant. Organicized order is at stake here: when introduced in the text, Fabulla, the new mother, has hired a nurse and is not breast feeding her infant. Through a debate with her older male friend, Eutrapelus, the icon must be (re)constructed as a symbolic restoration of order in the larger sphere.

Menacing images of disorder appear throughout the dialogue. Eutrapelus greets Fabulla with an anecdote about Polygamus, a man (appropriately named) who

recently buried his tenth wife. When I asked him what the news was, “In this house,” says he, “a woman's body was cut in two.” “For what crime?” “If the common gossip is true,” says he, “a wife tried to skin her husband,” and off he went with a laugh.

(269)

Fabulla's recent pregnancy and the deceased woman's severed body reappear as motifs for Eutrapelus's report on the violence and disorder of the times:

The commons are bent on anarchy; the Church is shaken to its very foundations by menacing factions; on every side the seamless coat of Jesus is torn to shreds. … [C]onfession totters; vows reel; pontifical ordinances crumble away; … Antichrist is awaited; the whole earth is pregnant with I know not what calamity.

(269-270)

In this scheme of calamitous versus fortunate pregnancies, monstrous versus blessed births, mutilated and whole bodies, Fabulla attempts to defend and legitimize the position she has fashioned for herself. Against the objections of Eutrapelus, she sees no need to question the custom of hiring a wet nurse and indeed seems to make use of a good humanist education which enables her to lay out the mind-body dualism of humanist thought and insert her maternal concerns within its values, values which would have her to express greater concern for her son's intellectual and moral development, for his mature future than for his infantile present: “Congratulate me on a safe delivery if you like, Eutrapelus; on a happy one when you see my offspring prove himself an honest man” (269). Eutrapelus praises her for her correct foresight but works to make clear that Fabulla is also “out of order,” her values disordered and disordering. In one sense Fabulla's concern already indicates what will soon undermine her confident combining of knowledge and maternal authority: she sees the immature child still in utero, which is what the household signifies. But it is this most maternal site which betrays her error in thinking that her speech corresponds to language, or that she has access to it. In attempting to assert what can only be a paradoxical hybrid of paternal and humanist authority, she takes on the attitude toward education that belongs to a later stage of the child's development, and then one more properly belonging to another guardian: the father. Fabulla thus reveals the flaw in her otherwise exemplary reasoning: the tendency to cross boundaries and to cross-dress in roles which, as new mother, could never belong to her. This transgression and confusion reflect the disunity of the conflicted historical context, not the timelessness of the maternal signifier, and mark her downfall in the argument.

Eutrapelus accuses her of “transfer[ring] more than half the name of mother” (727) by conceding to the custom of a hired nurse, of alienating natural functions by hiring a woman whose interest is in money, not nurturing/education/rearing. The child, he argues, needs the mother's “good and serviceable bodily organs” (282) and the mother provides hers, but no one should mistake this action as in any way analogous to the alienation or instrumentalization involved in the action of the wet nurse. The mother is urged to answer the call of nature (“listen to your own body,” [282]), for “of their own accord” her breasts speak the organic principle of unity in which, like husband and wife, ruler and ruled, sexual division of duties does not mean alienation of duties. To keep the peace, to maintain organic unity against dismembering and alienating forces, there should be no usurping.²³ Thus chastised and instructed, Fabulla gives every indication of her intention and ability both to adhere to the rules of the micropolitical game, as well as to be an articulate spokesperson for its enforcement and perpetuation. Yet Fabulla's dualism is countered with dualism: As mother the woman nourishes the body of her (male) child until she transfers “nurturing” responsibilities to the father, who (when the child reaches age seven) looks to education and “harder lessons, which are the father's responsibility rather than the mother's” (273). It is the mother, grounded in the maternal body, who nurtures the infant's body as the “instrument of the mind,” until formal and manly education takes over. No amount of organic imagery can cover up the division of her labor, and the structure of divided authority that this colloquy discloses.

III

De te fabul[l]a narratur. I have chosen On Civility in Boys as an example of a work which gathers together Erasmus's pedagogical and social interests in a grammar and rhetoric of civility. Perhaps more than the earlier and more eloquently styled De Pueris instituendis of 1509 (but not published until 1529)—Civility in Boys has an explicit or more developed concern with the instabilities of social mobility. Yet it could also be claimed that even De Pueris instituendis makes evident the conciliatory agenda for Civility in Boys.

In his preface of 1529 to De Pueris, Erasmus refers to a “method of education” which “is especially appropriate for children of rulers; they, more than anyone else, need a sound education.” To his dedicatee, Prince William of Cleves, whose own tutor (Konrad Heresbach) has encouraged Erasmus to compose the treatise in the first place, Erasmus has final encouragement:

Persevere in your glorious struggle, so that your instructor may illumine your lofty position with his teaching and you may surround his learning with the radiant aura of your good fortune and position.²⁴

[emphasis added]

The teacher as the motivating light, destined to be encompassed and outshone by aristocratic aura, recalls the recurring figuration of power and cultivated subordination from Erasmus's colloquies on domestic relations where a wife like Eulalia educates her spouse to eclipse her manipulative efforts with the aura of masculine domination.

In Civility in Boys, Erasmus highlights the class distinctions between nobility and mobile, aspiring, other classes in his attempt to create a notion of manners as universal civil discourse. His work, written for the family of his patron in Freiburg and dedicated to the young Prince of Burgundy, takes care both to distinguish the two levels of audience and the two kind of needs, at the same time that it indicates the common interest in the goals of power and ambition. Playing with the insecurities of noble and common members of his audience alike, he calls his noble reader into service:

For it will be a considerable additional spur to all the young to observe that children of illustrious descent are dedicated to learning right from their earliest years, and are competing in the same race as themselves.²⁵

Obviously, the participants may not all be in the fast lane of this race, but Erasmus plays power with nobility—and himself shows the political utility of learning, when he plays with the commonplace argument on vera nobilitas by ambiguously describing technical-legal and ethical—or Second Nature—nobility:

Now everyone who cultivates the mind in liberal studies must be taken to be noble. Let others paint lions, eagles, bulls, and leopards on their escutcheons; those who can display “devices” [insigne] of the intellect commensurate with their grasp of the liberal arts have a truer nobility.²⁶

Indeed, the ten-year-old Prince may have no need of Erasmus's instruction in this “meager” philosophy;²⁷ but the author's concern is with signs less self-evident, signs of a meritocracy of learning in which the student acquires nobility in a new-fashioned way: he earns it (and, I might add, inscribes the signs on his body). The devices (strategies) Erasmus focuses on in the text are techniques of the body, techniques which constitute the devices (signs) of “nobility” as acquired goodness. Thus Erasmus presents his readers with the knowledge of both the signifier of nobility and production of nobility through good manners.

Here Erasmus begins to replace the idea of noble birth with a new notion of acculturation: the accumulation of formal knowledge and social techniques of the body and of the labor necessary to acquire them, as a substitute for, even something to be regarded above, social station. Yet in redefining “nobility” to make place in the social order for the non-noble (but innately noble), Erasmus speaks to the constructed need of both groups to reevaluate manners in a changing world in which the chivalric ideals of a medieval warrior aristocracy no longer apply as before; and one in which the administrative and intellectual talents of a rising bourgeois class are recognized but do not yet constitute a power. The old presumption—that the noble are good—takes a new turn: now because well-behaved, commoners can be nobler: learning manners is ennobling. On the other hand, Erasmus later cautions readers not to think that just because someone—of whatever class—should err in his behavior he is not bonus (noble). Erasmus's apparent magnanimity and flexibility seem aimed at sparing the spontaneous gaffes of the upwardly mobile, as well as, importantly, the hereditary aristocracy who may be less obsessed with outward signs of refinement than their more anxious competitors. The ambiguity here becomes a deliberate attempt to balance the aristocratic model with a reconciliation and unification of noble and bourgeois standards, but the result is the creation of a standard which, with its notions of fair labor, exchange, merit, mobility, acquisition, we must finally call bourgeois.²⁸ Such a civilizing model constructs a relationship which, mirroring the domestic relationship of wife to husband, challenges no standard of superiority and subordination, yet retains the anxiety that it is singularly dedicated to contain and control. In the model of civil behavior and its detailed techniques of bodily control and psychic repression, the unsettling textual resolution of patriarchal crisis sees the middle class ruling over the instincts, itself, its sons, and placing a “good” ruler, molded like this boy addressed in Erasmus's text, by bourgeois humanist standards and served by competent administrators and stewards. With such a standard ruling both groups, good manners also become a kind of substitute experience of power, the initiation to which is constituted by accumulating hygienic and mechanical techniques based upon a perception formed by and forming modern cultural manhood. They, too, learn to maneuver their masters to rule them benevolently, to treat them well, as “wives.”

Yet how complicated a negotiation this is, for lest the arguments for what must be intended to be two distinct spheres—domestic order, civil order—resonate too closely, Erasmus, in the scheme of gestural stereotyping which follows, retains the horror of “effeminacy” as boundary:

The eyes should be calm … not grim, which is a mark of truculence; not shameless, the hallmark of insolence; not darting and rolling, a feature of insanity; nor furtive, like those of suspects and plotters of treachery. … Puffing out the cheeks is a sign of arrogance, while deflating them is a sign of mental despair: the former is the characteristic of Cain, the latter of Judas the betrayer.²⁹

We find that many of these “devices” have to do with striking the right balance between the extremes of bestiality and effeminacy.

The gait should be neither mincing nor headlong, the former being a sign of effeminacy, the latter of rage. … It is boorish to go about with one's hair uncombed: it should be neat, but not as elaborate as a girl's coiffure.

(274-275)

Attention must be paid to the care of the teeth, but to whiten them with fine powder is for girls, while brushing with salt or alum harms the gums. To brush them with urine is a custom of the Spaniards.

(276)

To drag long trains after one is ridiculous in women, reprehensible in men;. … It was once held to be somewhat effeminate not to wear a belt, but nowadays nobody is faulted for this, because with the invention of underwear, shirts, and hose, the private parts are concealed even if the tunic fly open.

(279)

Perhaps the strongest insistence on gender boundaries appears in De Pueris, where Erasmus—some would say in an uncharacteristically harsh manner—invokes strict Pauline thought in condemning female teachers in schools, including them with his horror stories of the most sadistic male teachers and referring to the “tyranny of women” as a form of “unnatural domination.”³⁰ The key term here is “molding” or “fashioning,” the explicit goal of the humanist education, explicitly identified in De Civilitate: “We are concerned in moulding a boy” (275). But the duties of “moulding” are both gendered and gendering. In “Puerpera” Erasmus's Eutrapelus instructs Fabulla in her moulding duties, gently nurturing the child as is appropriate for the first years of life, but in De Pueris Erasmus singles out for especially strong condemnation those women who coddle the child excessively or too long in his life (331), and puts them on a scale with the danger of “constant exposure to beatings” (331). And he warns as well against the indecent “moulding” of nursemaids (308) and female servants. His caution takes in not only physical and sexual fondling but comparable indecent intellectual “fondling”: ballads, “wives'” tales, and gossip (338). At age seven, as we have already learned, the father appropriates the moulding duties, as befits his parental role: “To be a true father, you must take absolute control of your son's entire being” (299-300).

Like other humanists, Erasmus supported the education of girls, and saw it as a lifelong project, but, like Vives and Luther, he insisted also on steering the female student toward the domestic and marital sphere.³¹ That an educated girl would be better prepared for raising children and for meeting the expectations of her husband for suitable and stimulating companionship is familiar to readers of Erasmus; but the strategy of confining them to distinctly gendered (and thus gendering) spheres also allows Erasmus to create a more comfortable distance between the oxymoronic kind of superior subordination he constructs for his civilizing project, his pedagogical goals, and their analogies to sexual politics.

Although De Civilitate reflects the deep commitment of Erasmus and of humanism in general to grounding the social changes surrounding them in a thoroughly patriarchal value structure, a regulatory domain in which virility is defined by its stronger opposition to “effeminacy,” and by the ability to contain “thy other self” through self-governance; the effort creates the circular mechanism of self-governance as preparation for a system in which the subordinate exercises the power to educate his superior to rule him well.

A brief comparison with Thomas Elyot's The Book Named the Governor, an English pedagogical-political handbook published in 1531, highlights the distinctive character of Erasmus's De Civilitate.³² Elyot follows classical precepts on beginning the study of Latin when the boy is seven, and removing the child “from all company of women,” in response to sexual threats (19); but his notions of class are significantly more rigid. Even in insisting that nobility is not only lineage, he retains the traditional notion of nobility in which birth is the determining prerequisite (105). Most importantly, Elyot's “magistrates” are trained to serve the “sovereign governor,” not as illuminating inspirations but “inferiors” who receive orders and execute them, following Aristotle, as appendages (“his eyes, ears, hands, and legs”) of the sovereign (13).

In contrast with such rigid distinctions, in which women are written out, Erasmus's concern for enlightened pacification—the construction of a realm modelled after the happy home—is echoed here and points to complicated strategies for containing the conflicts of an irenic personality. We might also observe that constructing and maintaining the mystification of the public/private distinction—private control, public submission; private governance of the individual subject, public subjugation—allow questions of authority always to collapse back onto the figure of the officially ruling authority, privileged to recognize no alienating separation of these realms, to invoke its own traditional, more organic legitimacy. (One could also suggest, looking back to Montrose's concerns, that in a monarchy, like Elizabeth's, where public/private distinctions are deliberately blurred, perhaps the attraction to and popularity of monarchical forms lies precisely in the vicarious enjoyment of such privileged integration.) Yet the scheme of tutoring and nurturing one's superiors retains connections to notions of feminine decorum and duty, and discloses the uneasy presence of the socially constructed feminine, threatening to erupt from its place within the new cultural manhood.

That threat is spelled out most clearly in the colloquy, “The Abbot and the Learned Lady,” where Atronius, a clerical straw man erected to represent the sordid state of learning in the Church, confronts the intellectual skills of Magdalia, who ably and eloquently defends learned women from his empty and unreflected opinions. When she warns him of the consequences of his ignorant pleasure seeking—“If you're not careful, the net result will be that we'll preside in the theological schools, preach in the churches, and wear your miters” (223)—and invokes the names of historical learned women (the Pirkheimer daughters, More) as evidence of a more broadly based movement, potentially threatening to male power unless it can prove its competence. Natalie Zemon Davis reads this colloquy as evidence of Erasmus's singular sensitivity to the resentment of the marginalized,³³ but read in the context of other colloquies on power and sexuality, we might also see here Erasmus's own urgent plea to retain control. To Magdalia's threat Atronius protests, “God forbid!” and Magdalia replies with specific instructions:

No it will be up to you to forbid. But if you keep on as you've begun, geese may do the preaching sooner than put up with you tongue-tied pastors. The world's a stage that's topsy-turvy now, as you see. Every man must play his part or—exit.

(223)

“See that you form and fashion me. …” Geese may preach or women may enter theological schools in a world that can only be set right when superiors get the right instructions from their subordinates.

IV

Andrew MacLean's review of the essay collection Rewriting the Renaissance praises the work as one which “obliges the specialist to reconsider Renaissance literary and historical texts in light of women's position.”³⁴ He identifies the need to restore “her story to history” and calls for the recovery from obscurity of marginal female figures. To be sure, the need to open Renaissance studies to non-canonical texts, to produce non-canonical readings of canonical texts, to broaden the object of study to include the full range of historical participants, the full range of questions, is more pressing than ever. Yet this “let's add women” approach (which often arrests itself at the level of a belated sense of guilt) constitutes a circular process which only collapses back on patriarchal authority. No one, we must assert, should introduce feminist concerns simply as a site of accusation but rather as an opportunity for self-reflexive scrutiny. Women, we might now suggest, have no “real” position from which to speak and to counter conventional historical and literary historical approaches. To claim that they do risks reinscribing gender ideology, to reproduce the very mechanism, the “technology of gender” which works to exclude women from historical inquiry. Speak they must, then, to challenge imperatives of silence; yet there is another consideration here, still more important: Woman, marginalized or mystified or demonized, has never been excluded from the humanist Renaissance writings. On the contrary, as the repository of an ideology of identity constructing the sex-gender system of a patriarchal society, woman is everywhere in these texts, constructed to motivate the civilizing process, to further the projects of civic and Christian humanism. As the case of Erasmus shows, especially in humanism's discussions of civility, woman has an essential function, projected as the horror of effeminacy which must be contained. In that structural and functionally efficacious horror, de Lauretis points out, lies also that which exceeds representation:

For gender, like the real, is not only the effect of representation but also its excess, what remains outside discourse as a potential trauma which can rupture or destabilize, if not contained, any representation.

(3)

Erasmus's underlings who illuminate their rulers only to have their light surpassed by the aura of aristocratic power, who nurture and cultivate subordination, who attempt to contain even as they preserve the Woman function, show the signs of that unsettling, perhaps promising, excess.

Notes

1. “Tell me, Eutrapelus, who is weaker, the one who submits to the other or the one to whom submission is made?” Erasmus, “Puerpera” [“The New Mother”], Opera Omnia. Ordinis Primi. Tomus Tertius (Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Co., 1972), 455; Craig Thompson, trans. and ed., The Colloquies (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1965), 271. Quotations from The Colloquies will be given in English translation from this edition and will be cited in the text, followed by page numbers.

2. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), ch. 4, “To Fashion a Gentleman: Spenser and the Destruction of the Bower of Bliss,” 157-192. Louis Adrian Montrose, “‘Shaping Fantasies’: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture,” Representations 1 (1983): 61-94. Further references will appear in the text. Montrose notes that the cult of Elizabeth also functioned as containment of masculine anxiety (63).

3. J. K. Sowards, ed. Literary and Educational Writings 3 and 4 (vols. 25 and 26 of Collected Works of Erasmus) (Toronto, Buffalo, London: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1985), De Civilitate (Sowards, ed., 3, 272) was first translated into English in 1532. De pueris instituendis (Sowards, ed., 4, 294) in 1551; “Coniugium,” for example, was published before 1557. Cf. H. de Vocht, The Earliest English Translations of Erasmus's Colloquia (Louvain, 1928). Cf. also T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespeare's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1944), J. A. K. Thompson, Shakespeare and the Classics (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1952).

4. On the phenomenon of self-fashioning, cf. especially Greenblatt (note 2), 9. Greenblatt does not sufficiently reflect on the gender specificity of self-fashioning. Nor does another remarkable and now well known text on early modern civilization, Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (New York: Urizen, 1978; 1st edition, Berne, 1939).

5. Cf. Montrose (note 2), where A Midsummer Night's Dream “discloses … that patriarchal norms are compensatory for the [projected? representational?] vulnerability of men to the powers of women” (75). As we shall learn, this is complicated by class issues in Erasmus's civility lessons.

6. Cf. the conclusion to book two of Il Cortegiano, where the characters Gaspare and Otaviano serve as stalkinghorses for an excessive misogyny, structurally counter-weighted by an idealistically chivalrous Bernardo, setting up the discussion of the female courtier. This is not to suggest that either the gender conflict topos or the irenic strategy is univocal or, above all, successfully and coherently constructed in the texts.

7. That the dialogues were proto-novels of manners was pointed out quite early in George Saintesbury's “Zeitgeist” account in The Earlier Renaissance: “Erasmus, though choosing to speak ‘by personages,’ writes what are really finished novel-scenes … Colloquy after colloquy, in whole or part, gives example to the fit artist how to manage original matter in the same way. A batch of four running, the Procus et Puella, the Virgo Misogamos, the Virgo Poenitens, and the Conjugium, are simply novel-chapters; the clumsiest novelist could hardly spoil them in turning them into the narrative form, while any practitioner of spirit and gift could not but have been guided by them, if the novel-writing spirit had been at all abroad” (1901; New York: Howard Fertig, 1968), 82-83. For a provocative and more general discussion of this linking of technical grammar and moral/cultural grammar in Renaissance pedagogy, see Walter Ong, “Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite,” Studies in Philology, 56 (1959): 93-110. Cf. Erasmus on the virtues of silence in women but “especially in boys,” in Sowards, ed., De Civilitate, 284.

8. For examples of traditional studies of images of women, see Elsbeth Schneider, Das Bild der Frau im Werk des Erasmus von Rotterdam, in Baseler Beiträge für Geschichtswissenshaft 55 (Stuttgart, 1955); Aloys Bömer, “Die deutsche Humanisten und das weihliche Geschlecht,” Zeitschrift für Kulturgeschichte 4 (1987): 94-112; 177-197; D. Schmidt, “Die Frau in den ‘Gesprächen’ des Erasmus,” Basler Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Altertumskunde, vol. 44, 11-36 (Basle, 1945). For examples of studies concerning notable Renaissance women, see Susan Groag Bell, “Christine de Pisan or the Plight of the Learned Woman,” Feminist Studies 3 (1976): 173-86; Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986), esp. ch. two: “Women Humanists: Education for What?” 29-57, which discusses the function of the virilis animi idea as strategy for encouraging women's learning while, ultimately, containing the more public or active aspirations of intellectual women. And for works on Renaissance pedagogy concentrating on boys, see W. H. Woodward, Desiderius Erasmus Concerning the Aim and Method of Education (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1964).

9. One study which would emphasize other important aspects of the relations between cultural representations of boys and women would be Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men's Press, 1982). Cf. also Stephen Orgel, “Nobody's Perfect: Or Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women?,” and Jonathan Goldberg, “Colin to Hobbinol: Spenser's Familiar Letters,” in the recent special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly, “Displacing Homophobia,” 88 (1989): 7-29 and 107-147.

10. J. K. McConica, “Erasmus and the Grammar of Consent,” in J. Coppens Scrinum Erasmianum, vol. 2 of 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1969): 80.

11. V. W. D. Schenk, “Erasmus' Karakter en Ziekten” [Erasmus's Character and Diseases], Nederlandsch tijdschrift voor geneeskunde 91 (1947): 702-708. Studies such as Nelson Minnich and W. W. Meissner's classical Freudian—ergo homophobic—psychobiographical essay, which painted a tragic picture of an Erasmus with homoerotic tendencies (the consequence of being abandoned by his father and searching for father substitutes), and Joseph Mangan's divided Erasmus—sickly, neuraesthenic, morbidly sensitive, unfortunate possessor of a “moral strabismus,” but a genius—seek to leave us with an essential bottom line, both a sum and a guarded boundary: the judgment that Erasmus's works transcend any character flaw or psychopathological symptom. Nelson H. Minnich and W. W. Meissner, American Historical Review 83 (1978): 598-624; Joseph Mangan, Life, Character and Influence of Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam: Derived from a Study of His Works and Correspondence, 2 vols. (1927; New York: AMS, 1971).

12. Andreas Werthemann, in Über Schädel und Gebeine des Erasmus von Rotterdam (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1930), reports on the team of pathologists who actually exhumed the remains of Erasmus and discovered the symptoms of syphilis.

13. J. K. Sowards, “Erasmus and the Education of Women,” Sixteenth Century Journal 13 (1982): 77-89. Further references will appear in the text.

14. Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1987). Further references appear in the text.

15. In a relatively recent article in the Sixteenth Century Journal, historian Merry Wiesner urges readers to think in new ways about gender questions in the Reformation as a means for achieving new perspectives on the early modern period. Noting that Reformation studies have been marked by ignorance and/or neglect of gender issues, she criticizes ghettoizing studies which replicate historical marginalization in pitting “real” history (as the account of monumental political events) against marginal studies (the agenda of social history, microhistorical concerns), by circumscribing women's history in automatically equating it with—and thereby limiting it to—the history of family and sexuality. Wiesner's suggestion goes back at least to Joan Kelly's “double vision” thesis, but Wiesner takes on the issue of contemporary feminist theory in a more self-conscious way, suggesting, circumspectly, that scholars of women's history “ask the large questions, the ones that make us rethink all that has been learned until now, the ones that, perhaps, cannot be answered” (321); but elsewhere, more directly, “We [historians] must overcome our resistance to theory” (317). Merry E. Wiesner, “Beyond Women and the Family: Towards a Gender Analysis of the Reformation,” Sixteenth Century Journal 18 (1987): 311-321; and Joan Kelly, “The Doubled Vision of Feminist Theory,” in Women, History and Theory. The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984), 51-64.

    As an example of the kind of audience Merry Wiesner might have in mind, see Marilyn J. Boxer and Jean H. Quataert, eds., Connecting Spheres: Women in the Western World, 1500 to the Present (New York, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987). This important and informative work (to which Wiesner herself contributes an essay) seeks to “integrate women's experiences into the overall pattern of historical development in the West” (22), a description composed in language of significant and unreflected conceptual density. Thus, for example, the editors speak descriptively of the “Argument about Women” (20-25 and 45-48) as the record of misconceptions about women (originating with Aristotle), always implying that legitimacy for women and “the feminine” might be established, equality between the sexes restored, if only one had sufficient information. In contrast, see two recent examples of feminist historical work drawing heavily from conceptual categories of continental theory: Denise Riley, “Am I That Name?” Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1988); and Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1988).

16. “Marriage Group” is discussed in Craig Thompson (note 3), 86-87.

17. Cf. Timothy in “The Godly Feast”: “Often it's our own fault that our wives are bad, either because we choose bad ones or make them such, or don't train and control them as we should” (60).

18. Cf. 122: In stories of male infidelity, instructs Eulalia, women must follow the behavioral modification model, rewarding the good and ignoring the bad; husbands, on the other hand, need no such sophisticated methods and have legitimate access to [threats of] brute force.

19. I borrow this term from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's discussion of another scene of domestication through language, Athena's judgment of the Erinyes in Aeschylus's Oresteia, which she calls “her defeminating of the Furies, pursuing Orestes the matricide, and bidding them be ‘sweet-voiced’ (Eumenides) by the stroke [!] of a word.” “Displacement and the Discourse of Woman,” in Mark Krupnick, ed., Displacement: Derrida and After (Bloomington: Univ. of Indiana Press, 1983), 191.

20. Jacques Chomorat, Grammaire et Rhetorique chez Erasme, vol. 2 of 2 (Paris: Societe d'edition “Le Belles Lettres,” 1981). Further references will appear in the text.

    The result, or perhaps as well the source, of this attitude is that woman finds herself enhanced with the greatest dignity …, a subtle analysis which tends to place the real superiority where there is the greatest self-mastery, which is to say where it seems—deceptively—to be inferiority; this analysis is amply developed in the colloquy “Vxor mempsigamos” where Eulalia teaches Xantippe how to dominate and educate her husband through patience and sweetness, while seeming to give in to him.

    (896-897, author's translation)

    Thus by a compensatory master-slave logic, woman attains the moral high ground of “une dignité plus grande,” while the civic ground is cut out from under her feet. This argument, which creates a positionless position, is standard, of course, for much of modern Western political thought. Cf. Susan Moller Okin, Woman in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979).

    Cf. also Thompson: “When taken together, these three colloquies constitute a brilliant and entertaining addition to the vast literature of Renaissance feminism.” He adds praise to the author for providing a “sufficiently light touch” (87).

21. Cf. Erasmus in De Matrimonii Christiani [On Christian Matrimony]: “We shall divide our functions. You will take care of the domestic, I of the professional, and we shall have nothing, save in common. … The authority which nature and the apostle give to the husband I hope you will not resent and mutual love will sweeten all things. You will sit on the eggs, and I shall fly around and bring in the worms. We are one and, as the Scripture says, God rejoices when we dwell together in unity.” Cited in Roland Bainton, Erasmus of Christendom (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969), 229.

22. In his 1529 defense of the Colloquies, “On the Utility of the Colloquies,” Erasmus defends himself with a tone of righteous indignation, claiming, “I don't think I should be reproached for attracting youth with like zeal to refinement of Latin speech and to godliness.” In Thompson (note 3), 626.

23. For a compelling treatment of what we might well identify as the consequences of Erasmus's Western organicism in the Third World, cf. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's translation and discussion of Mahasveta Devi's “Breast Giver.” In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London: Methuen, 1987), 241-68.

24. Collected Works, vol. 26, 296.

25. Collected Works, 273.

26. Cf. J. K. Sowards' “Notes” to Civility in Boys (note 3), in which he discusses the topos vera nobilitas and suggests that Erasmus may have been influenced by More. Vol. 26, Collected Works (273).

27. Erasmus apologizes for his work as crassissima philosophiae pars, and exempts the young prince of Burgundy from its lessons since, as he says, the prince's manners are inbred. Cf. also Bude's objection to Civility in Boys as a “work devoted to that trivial task; as if so many little books do not risk tarnishing your reputation.” Cited by Franz Bierlaire, “Erasmus in School: the De Civilitate Morum Puerilium,” in Richard L. DeMolen, Essays on the Works of Erasmus (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1978), 239.

28. Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Bourgeois(ie) as Concept and Reality,” New Left Review 167 (Jan./Feb. 1988): 91-106.

29. Civility in Boys, 274, 275; hereafter, page numbers will be cited in the text.

30. De Pueris instituendis, Sowards (note 3), vol. 26 of Collected Works, 564.

31. For the notion of a woman's education as a lifelong project, see Roland Bainton's comments on Erasmian views of the education of women in Erasmus of Christendom (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969), 231-233. Treatments of Juan Vives, De institutione christianae foeminae [On the Education of a Christian Woman (1529)], have become numerous in the past years; but cf. especially Valerie Wayne, “Some Sad Sentence: Vives's Instruction of a Christian Woman,” in Margaret P. Hannay, ed., Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works (Kent, Ohio: Kent State, 1985).

32. Sir Thomas Elyot, The Book named the Governor, S. E. Lehmberg, ed. and introd. (New York, Dutton, 1975). References will appear in the text.

33. Natalie Zemon Davis, “City Women and Religious Change,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1975): “The Christian humanist Erasmus was one of the few men of his time who sensed the depths of resentment accumulating in women whose efforts to think about doctrine were not taken seriously by the clergy” (77).

34. Andrew MacLean, Moreana 24 (1987): 59.