SOURCE: Stevens, Forrest Tyler. “Erasmus's ‘Tigress’: The Language of Friendship, Pleasure, and the Renaissance Letter.” In Queering the Renaissance, edited by Jonathan Goldberg, pp. 124-40. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994.

[In the following essay, Stevens focuses on Erasmus's letters to his friend Servatius in order to highlight the sexual rhetoric that has more often been interpreted as a nonsexual literary convention. Stevens reads those letters alongside Erasmus's manual on letter writing, De conscribendis epistolis, to show how gender conventions influence whether or not a letter with sexual or amatory language would have been considered inappropriate.]

Shortly after Desiderius Erasmus entered the monastery of Steyn in 1487, he met a young man, Servatius Rogerus, to whom he became particularly attached. Erasmus explains to his brother, Pieter Gerard, “He is, believe me, a youth of beautiful disposition and very agreeable personality and a devoted student … This young man is very anxious to meet you, and if you make your way here soon, as I hope you will, I am quite sure that you will not only think he deserves your friendship but readily prefer him to me, your brother, for I well know both your warmheartedness and his goodness.”¹ We do not know whether Pieter Gerard got to know Servatius's goodness (or Servatius, Gerard's warm heart), nor do we know if Gerard preferred Servatius to Erasmus, but we do know that Erasmus himself became quite enamored of Servatius, and wrote a series of letters to him detailing the depth of his affection and attachment. Servatius seems to have responded to Erasmus's advances with equal ardor, then gradually pulled back from the relationship. Erasmus countered the withdrawal with rage and despair:

So impossible is it, dear Servatius, that anything should suffice to wash away the cares of my spirit and cheer my heart when I am deprived of you, and you alone … But you, crueller than any tigress, can easily dissemble all this as if you had no care for your friend's well-being at all. Ah, heartless spirit! Alas, unnatural man! … But you yourself are surely aware what it is I beg of you, inasmuch as it was not for the sake of reward or out of a desire for any favour that I have wooed you both unhappily and relentlessly. What is it then? Why, that you love him who loves you.

(CWE 1 12, emphasis added)

Though Servatius seems to have known what it was that Erasmus begged of him—and Erasmus states it rather bluntly as “that you love him who loves you”—subsequent scholars have been embroiled in what has become a rather vehement controversy. Exactly what conclusions should we draw from the letters? Was Erasmus a homosexual? Worse still, was he a jilted homosexual pursuing an unwilling, straight acolyte? Were the monasteries refuge for those pleasures one dare not name among Christians? Most Erasmus scholars maintain an embarrassed silence about the letters, refusing to speculate about either Erasmus or the monasteries; a vocal minority maintain that letters are only epistolary exercises; and a small number talk of the love letters written by Erasmus as either a key to his latent homosexuality or another example of hidden homosexual history.

I realize that to frame the debate in terms of the “homosexual love letter” begs the question that, firstly, the letters to Servatius are love letters, and that, secondly, Erasmus was a homosexual. Even those who advocate a reading of the letters as epistolary exercises scrupulously avoid the word “homosexual”; of course, they also work doubly hard to let the reader know that “homosexuality” is precisely what is being avoided, not simply a conception of sentimental friendship. The operative assumption is that there was (and is) a blanket condemnation of same-sex sexual acts “among Christians,” acts which at least since the nineteenth century are said to belong to a person called a “homosexual.” Fingering Erasmus—Desiderius Erasmus, foremost humanist and church reformer of the Renaissance—as a practitioner of the crime which cannot be named among Christians is something little short of heresy. But deeper still, the controversy is about the nature of letters and literature as evidence. The first assumption, that the letters are “love” letters, is a question of genre, or perhaps a question of their status as literary artifacts: given that Erasmus was a master at what might be called with some trepidation “form letters,” might it not be the case that the letters to Servatius Rogerus are, all in all, “simply” conventional? Erasmus wrote an important book on letter writing, De conscribendis epistolis, a book which is often cited to support the notion that all the letters are simply “epistolary exercises on simple themes.”² The letters are certainly stylized, and perhaps more importantly, the words, expressions, sentences, quoted authors, and sentiments are similar to those of many, many letters written between men during the Renaissance. We might assume that Erasmus's letters to Servatius are only an instance of this wider category—a type of epistle which everyone wrote—and therefore could not properly be said to be evidence of anything, especially not sexuality.³ To indict one letter would be, to one degree or another, to indict them all.

By way of addressing the complex relationship between literature and the ways in which gender and sexuality are deployed and negotiated in the Renaissance, this essay is a reading of the letters to Servatius alongside Erasmus's theoretical discussion of the purpose, substance, and style of the letter of friendship as expressed in De conscribendis epistolis. In part my essay is an attempt to draw attention to the sexual in a context which has been continually desexualized by a recourse to the “literary-ness” of much Renaissance writing—as if the “literary” were the agent which would police the propriety of sexual content and connotation. While we often think of the letter as having some purchase on the “real”—personal letters are thought to be indices to “history”—Erasmus's letters tend to be buried within the category of “literary” documentation (hence, imaginative or figurative) when the subject is his passionate relationships to other men in Renaissance Europe. By focusing a reading of the status of sexuality and gender within the prescriptions and proscriptions of “conventionality,” I strive to rehistoricize the stories we tell about the sort of evidence “literary” and “historical” documents provide.

In the course of my study of the section of De conscribendis epistolis concerning the writing of “letters of friendship” I also wish to read past (and through) the “conventionality” of the Renaissance, exploring how gender, far from being the proscriber of sexuality and erotic possibility (as it is claimed to be in its modern ideological contexts), is an enabling trope for an early modern Europe in which the dyad of biological sex and the formations of sexuality are disconcertingly decoupled. As such, the understanding of love, friendship, propriety, and sexuality which appears in De conscribendis epistolis's description of the letter of friendship documents a relationship in which the relative position of the sender and receiver of the letter—correspondingly, the wooer and wooed—determines “gender” and potential erotic responses. By now in sexuality studies it is a familiar point that “gender” and “sexuality” are not agents which reside in or make up the body natural; they more accurately describe sociostructural positions the body occupies and “convention” produces. My essay works to thread that observation back onto the grammar of social relations as they are encapsulated in a pedagogical work whose letters of friendship would teach the proper art of love-making and man-making.

Erasmus's handbook on the art of letter writing was published by Froben in 1522, and was among the most popular of all of Erasmus's writings on education, going through some twenty-two editions before his death in the summer of 1536, and exploding into nearly sixty or more editions by the end of the century. De conscribendis epistolis, “On the writing of letters,” started out as a student study book for three pupils Erasmus taught in Paris of the early 1490s: Robert Fisher, William Blount (later Lord Mountjoy), and one Adolph van Veere. When the book was finally released in its definitive form, the positive response was overwhelming: the book was adopted by the supporters of the traditional church, the Jesuit colleges, and Lutheran educators who pushed for moral reform in both the church and its pedagogical institutions. “On the writing of letters” was even used in English grammar schools to teach upper formers the proper methods of “writing sundry epistles to sundry persons, of sundry matters, as of chiding, exhorting, comforting, counselling, praying, lamenting, some to friends, some to foes, some to strangers; of weighty matters or merry, as shooting, hunting, etc., of adversity, of prosperity, of war and peace, divine and profane, of all sciences and occupations, some long and some short” (CWE 25 lii).

Erasmus's “textbook” reworked and rewrote the medieval style of the artes dictaminis, teaching the art of writing in a lively, fluid manner (as opposed to the didactic and at times stodgy style of the popular medieval manuals); which is to say, the book was designed in that particular Erasmian way to hold the attention of the student while maintaining a requisite degree of precision, learnedness, and, above all, morality. Drawing examples from Roman and Greek literature—as well as his own letters to friends, acquaintances, and enemies (as the case required)—Erasmus extolled to the student the virtues of proper form and proper content, while exploring “what is by nature diverse and capable of almost infinite variation” (CWE 25 12).

One would suspect, however, that within a Christian context, the “infinite variation” of proper form and content would not include an amorous letter between men. The lines I quoted at the beginning of this essay are from one of the nine extant letters to Servatius Rogerus, the young acolyte and fellow Hollander at Steyn where Erasmus spent a number of years as an Augustinian canon. Within the confines of what was in institutional form and pedagogical curriculum a medieval monastery, the letters seem unseemly, perhaps compromisingly, passionate. Hardly the proper letter at all. Yet, to write such a letter to one's male friends was precisely proper: the epistles' propriety lay in their conventionality; the not unheard-of and even extremely popular practice of writing to “friends” in an ornate, intense, and passionate manner was encouraged by the monks teaching the acolytes of the monastery. A friend with whom you shared your feelings, prayers, dreams, bed, board, and books was, though in another body, the counterpart to your soul. In the language of the time, to have such a friend was to be “one soul in bodies twain.”⁴ Though the “cult of friendship” was mainly associated with court circles (and to many modern minds, court degeneration), it was found in the cloister as well, as Johan Huizinga explains:

Each court had its pair of friends, who dressed alike, and shared room, bed, and heart. Nor was this cult of fervent friendship restricted to the sphere of aristocratic life. It was among the specific characteristics of the devotio moderna, as, for the rest, it seems from its very nature to be inseparably bound with pietism. To observe one another with sympathy, to watch and note each other's inner life, was the customary and approved occupation among the brethren of the Common Life and the Windesheim monks.⁵

The religious practices of the devotio moderna which Huizinga points to in this passage as an extension of the cult of “fervent friendship” were an integral part of a heavily sentimentalized religious fervor cultivated by the all-male communes. Steyn, like other fraterhouses devoted to the teaching of writing, cultivated the devotio moderna's “constant ardor of religious emotion and thought.”⁶

It would be difficult, I think, to characterize the letters which Erasmus wrote to Servatius as “religious”; however, each of the epistles does partake of the “constant ardor of emotion and thought” fostered by the religious community at Steyn. Given a survey of the secondary literature dealing with Erasmus's early life, this conclusion is not at all evident, or rather it would seem that what to make of that conclusion is not at all evident. The editors of the Collected Works of Erasmus, Wallace K. Ferguson, R. A. B. Mynors, and D. F. S. Thomson, explain: “The group of letters written to Servatius … may be no more than exercises in epistolary composition, like the formulae in De conscribendis epistolis. … Taken at their face value, though with considerable allowance for rhetorical exaggeration, the nine letters to Servatius indicate that Erasmus had become involved in an emotional attachment to his young friend” (CWE 1 6). The conclusions the editors wish to negotiate in this passage are a bit muddled or simply opaque: admittedly, they argue, the letters are emotional and fervent; yet one should make “allowances” for “rhetorical exaggeration” (or simply ignore the intensity of emotion); and one should remember that the letters might very well be “no more than exercises.” But even if bled to that, they conclude, the letters evidence an “emotional attachment.” D. F. S. Thomson, one of the two translators of Erasmus's correspondence, further argues that “literary imitation is the motivating force … and that the letters conform in style and content to a well-established tradition of monastic rhetorical letter-writing” (CWE 1 26). Thomson's recourse to “rhetorical” and “literary imitation” as epithets is meant to bleed the letters of any hint of sexual impropriety—in Erasmus as well as in the monasteries, lest the latter be seen as the breeding ground for a purple plague of homosexual corruption (which is not by any means an uncommon assertion of corruption to throw at the church); the terms deflect even the subtlest suggestion that the humanist icon was what we would consider to be a homosexual.

The assumption within the editors' gloss is, I think, that one must use caution to place the letters within the proper context. Instead of upbraiding the editors for their caution, I will commend it, and admonish that we haven't been cautious enough in explaining the meaning of the style, form, and content within its sociohistorical setting. The assumptions behind what constitutes the boundaries of style and propriety, the limits and limitations of form and content, are precisely what is under contention within a historical problem of the social negotiation of power and pleasure within the meanings and makeup of any given representation of sexuality. Accordingly, we need to examine more closely Erasmus's conceptions of the letter of friendship, since it is only by that route that we can assess the letters to Servatius and the questions of “homo”-sexuality which they entail.

The format of each section of De conscribendis epistolis is roughly similar. First, a general description of the type of letter being addressed is presented, along with its purpose(s) and proper execution, with thoughts on the form (each letter was itself a genre of sorts) and what is and is not successful as a means to carry out its intent. Sprinkled through each discussion are literary and classical antecedents of the type under scrutiny, antecedents from which the student might garner phrases, metaphors, and persuasive strategies. After the general comments, Erasmus gives an example which he feels exemplifies the genre, often from one of his own letters to a friend or acquaintance, but also examples from letters of the ancients: the epistles of Pliny, Cicero, and other writers of antiquity.⁷

Late in the body of the treatise, sandwiched between a discussion of “letters which give advice” and “letters of the demonstrative class” (a “demonstration” is an extensive description of something of interest) is a succinct exposition of “the letter of friendship” (CWE 25 203). The overall type of the letter of friendship is one of “persuasion,” Erasmus explains; but laying out the theoretical groundwork for the friendship letter by breaking it into subtypes, he concludes, “Not all letters of friendship fall into the same class. For some contain a request, others a protest, or a complaint, or coaxing, or self-justification.” Despite the disparate and seemingly endless categories into which the general class could be broken on the basis of specific content, he decides to follow previous thinkers and discuss the letter from a stance of moral classification. “I have noticed that some have divided this class into two sections, honourable and dishonourable,” he observes; “I call the honourable kind ‘conciliatory’ and the other ‘amatory.’” The basis for his divisions rests on the notion that the letter of friendship, like friendship itself, contains the sexual as well as the social. Which is to say, the taxonomy of “honourable” versus “dishonourable” rests on a distinction between gaining a new acquaintance through praise and persuasion versus sending a persuasive letter “of or pertaining to a lover, to love-making or to sexual love generally” (OED). It is important to note that the modern sense of a “love letter” per se is foreign to his schema. As will become clear from his description of the class, the love relationship and the erotic possibilities it entails fall together under the rubric “friendship.” Both are seductions of sorts which the tool of the letter helps implement.

Erasmus first discusses the honorable section. “The conciliatory letter is that by which we insinuate ourselves into the good graces of a person previously unknown.” The means of doing this consist of “convincingly set[ting] out the reasons that have led us to solicit his friendship,” carefully devoid of “flattery” (though this is “hard to do”), followed by “anything in us which can induce him to reciprocate our affection” in a manner which would “indicate it without arrogance.” Erasmus follows up the prescription with a rather dry example of the genre (“I am a frank admirer and honest partisan of the learned,” “If in turn you can welcome such a friend,” etc.). The honorable section is short, and he promptly advances to the “dishonorable” variety.

It is here, in the seamier half of the class of the letter of friendship (it contains just a taint of the “disgraceful”), that he deals with the relationship between pleasure and friendship. “But if we are seeking to arouse feelings of mutual love in a girl, we shall make use of two main instruments of persuasion, praise and compassion.” Erasmus explains that the “instruments of persuasion,” praise and compassion, are effective because “all human beings” find “delight in praise” (but “girls in particular”). To fan the fire of mutual love “we shall strive to be as supplicating as possible,” bringing light to what merits we find, while “belittl[ing] our own, or at any rate mention[ing] them with great modesty.”

We shall demonstrate intense love joined to deep despair. We shall try by turns moaning, flattery, and despair; at other times we shall make skilful use of self-praise and promises; we shall employ precedents of famous and honorable women who showed favour to a pure, unfeigned love and to the devotion of youths far beneath them in social condition. We shall attempt to show that our love is very honorable. As a last resort, with great show of humility we shall beg that if she can in no way deign to give her love in return, she will at least resign herself to being loved without prejudice to herself; we shall add that if this request is not granted, we are resolved to cut short a cruel life by whatever means possible.

(CWE 25 204)

The terms of the amatory letter are familiar. To coax, cry, complain, sigh, dream, “and all the rest” (204) are “things that are not so much disgraceful as rather foolish, giving the appearance of immorality, and therefore of doubtful propriety for setting before young men.” Which, in the meantime, doesn't stop him from giving them as examples for an “honorable youth [who] is desirous to take an honorable and well brought up girl as his wife.” Obviously, from the sentence just quoted, as well as the passage cited at length above, the “sexuality” in which the mechanics of arousing mutual love are framed is “heterosexual” if only because the sender is deemed masculine and the recipient is styled feminine. The mention of the wife is the first clue concerning the genders in which he casts his discussion. The treatise is written for young men such as William Blount, Lord Mountjoy. Like the “conciliatory” letter of friendship, the explication of the “amatory” version resides in a context of negotiations for social and economic position, the seduction to power as well as to pleasure. Making the connections explicit, Erasmus explains the ranging concerns of the letter of friendship: “More difficult and greater scope for the exercise of ingenuity is afforded in the case of a poor youth seeking marriage with a wealthy girl, one of humble birth with one nobly born, an ugly man with a beautiful girl, or finally an old man with a young girl.” Thus, the machinery of the friendship letter is structured around axes of wealth, blood, beauty, and age—each brought to bear on securing a place in the sociopolitical contract of marriage.

But given the gender of the participants presented in the general discussion (poor youth, wealthy girl; masculine wooer, feminine wooed), the examples used to illustrate his points are surprising. The sample letters under the subsection entitled “Collection of Materials for Letters of Friendship” are all between men. For example, to illustrate the last set of binarisms (young/old, humble/noble, etc.), Erasmus presents “Virgil's Corydon” (205). Erasmus tells us that the relationship presented in Virgil's second eclogue is exemplary of the “persuasive class” mixed with the “demonstrative class”: Corydon's plaint for Alexis illustrates “love [which] is chiefly obtained by praise.” Erasmus cautions that the relationship itself is not all that exemplary—the principal wooer, Corydon, does give “an appearance” of “stupidity.” Importantly, the latter comment echoes a caveat voiced in another pedagogical work, De ratione studii. In that work Erasmus hesitated to use the relationship between Corydon and Alexis as something to be emulated; the difference in age and class makes their relationship the paragon of “unstable friendship” and unlikely to succeed.⁸ It is clear, however, that Erasmus's distaste for Corydon and Alexis as an example is not because of its male-male love relationship. By using the youth and shepherd to illustrate the mixed class of letters, the youth, the “beautiful Alexis, the master's favorite” for whom the “Shepherd Corydon burned,”⁹ plays the role of the “young” or “beautiful girl,” the body who stands in as recipient of the letter, just as the youth learning to write from De conscribendis epistolis is meant to stand in the stead of the shepherd himself. Masculine sender, feminine recipient; man Corydon, boy Alexis. No sodomitical taint of “immorality” of Corydon's love for Alexis makes the treatise “of doubtful propriety for setting before young men.” Importantly, the gender of the recipient within the theoretical discussion does not restrict the gender of the players of “wooer” and “wooed” within the practice of letter writing. Although the discussion directs male writers to female recipients, amatory letters of friendship may be written between men too.¹⁰

Which is a less than intuitive point given the distance between the Renaissance and the present: but other examples from the “collection of materials” support such a proposition. Each of the remaining letters used to guide the practice of the student's writing is also from a man to a man, beginning with an epistle in Cicero's Ad Atticum (“Upon my life, my dear Atticus, neither my house at Tusculum, which otherwise is a favorite sojourn for me, nor even the Isles of the Blest mean so much to me that I can be without you for so many days”) to “For, believe me, nothing is more beautiful, more fair, or more worthy to be loved than manly virtue. I have, as you know, felt affection for Marcus Brutus … yet on the ides of March my affection was so enhanced … Who would have thought that any addition could be made to the love I felt for you?” (CWE 25 205).

Though the skeleton of the theoretical discussion was cast in bigendered terms, as that discussion is put into practice, the “girl” of the original formulation drops out at the critical moment the practical examples are presented as scripts for the boy's own letter writing scenarios. All of the example letters are epistles between men. What might we then conclude about the theoretical discourse of Erasmus's thinking concerning friendship and its inextricable companion, love, and the specifically gendered attributes of power—wooer/wooed, pursuer/pursued, etc.—within these relationships? It is obviously not that the terms of the scenario automatically prescribe the gender of the objects they purport to adjudicate. That is, boy-girl rule book recipes for friendship/courtship do not ban boy-boy letters of equal intensity of affection, nor do they introduce a proper/improper, heterosexual/homosexual split between male-male and male-female love and courtship. Indeed, the genders of the subject and object within the grammar of social relations (in this case, the rules informing the practices of the sender and the recipient of the letter) become, in practice, orthogonal to the forms of position, power, and age which we recognize to be the quintessential Renaissance determinants of social and political relations from the prince on down through the human hierarchy. We have already seen this in Erasmus's explication of the binarisms which mediate the dialogue between the subject and object positions on either side of the letter of friendship.

To further illustrate the point, take, for example, his discussion of the general class of the “persuasive” letters (of which the letter of friendship is a subclass). Erasmus clumps together any “letters exchanged between young men, boon companions, and lovers” (CWE 25 37), and he delineates the decisive determinants in their composition as being not gender, but age, body, blood, and money.¹¹ The “letters exchanged between young men, boon companions, and lovers should be framed in a more winning manner,” he points out. “In this way the person persuading will inspire more confidence … and he will evoke the memory of past sensual pleasures in such a way as to reveal that his mind shrinks from mere recollection.” So, too, the letter writer

will take advantage of the age of his correspondent. If this is greater than his own, he will say that it is proper for the one superior in years to have more wisdom … But if it is less, he will say that no time of life is more vigorous … He can argue from the person's appearance also … it is not right for a deformed mind to dwell in a beautiful body … Arguing from descent … he must be encouraged to acquire nobility by his own efforts … From the standpoint of wealth … he must devote himself with all the greater energy to the acquisition of learning, which produces both wealth and reputation.

(CWE 25 38-39)

As a tool which negotiates the boundaries among “young men, boon companions, and lovers,” the letter of friendship operates within and between the sexual relations promulgated by the alliance systems (marriage to secure property and family title, for instance) and other homosocial relations, sexual or not, but always sexualized, which existed to cement ties between men. The genders of the sender and recipient of the letter are equally—and indifferently—subject to the overall concerns of age, aesthetics, famous lineage, or family fortune.

Each line of courtship/seduction which Erasmus recommends to the young reader of De conscribendis epistolis is woven into his own letters to Servatius. In one of the first letters, he attempts to cheer his young friend, who is evidently greatly depressed, by resorting to the formula of moaning, flattery, and despair: “Although I who seek to give you consolation am rather myself in need of it … still it is my very special love for you, sweetest Servatius, that has caused me to forget my own pain and attempt to heal yours … For what has become of your usually delightfully gay expression and your former good looks and bright eye? … Alas for me; what more can I do to please you, my soul?” (CWE 1 7).

So, too, through every letter he “demonstrate[s] intense love joined to deep despair” (“as there is nothing on earth more pleasant or sweeter than loving and being loved, so there is, in my opinion, nothing more distressing or more miserable than loving without being loved in return”); shows that his love is very honorable (just as any amatory letter which drops such pick-up lines should); and “as a last resort” when he finds that Servatius “can in no way deign to give her [sic] love in return,” asks that he resign himself to being loved, or else Erasmus would “cut short a cruel life”: “So, my dearest Servatius, if I cannot acquire from you that friendship which hereafter I would most heartily desire, I request that at least the common intercourse of every day should exist between us. But if you think that I should be denied this also, there is no reason for me to wish to live further” (CWE 1 14).

The “her” in relation to the paragraph highlights one last important point. As recipient of the letter of friendship, Servatius steps into a role gendered female in the masculine-sender/feminine-recipient nexus, and the language Erasmus uses to describe him is inflected accordingly. “What am I to call it, dear Servatius—harshness or obstinacy or pride or arrogance? Can your nature be like that of a young girl so that my torments yield you pleasure, and your comrade's pain gives you happiness, his tears, laughter?” (CWE 1 9). Though exhorted by Erasmus to “play the man” (CWE 1 21) and “prove your manhood” (CWE 1 18), Servatius also operates within the role of “young girl” and “tigress” who refuses to move as Erasmus woos. Which is not to say Servatius is “passive,” meaning “inactive,” within the relationship. When Servatius does return his affection, Erasmus is overjoyed: “For as I was reading your very sweet letter, the effective proof of your love towards me which I long for, I wept as I rejoiced and in the same measure rejoiced as I wept” (CWE 1 14).

Of the topics that I have discussed—the language of the letter, the gender mechanics of wooing, and the sexualities put into play by those mechanics—I have not mentioned “sodomy.” Sodomy within the Renaissance is an intractable topic, to say the least, but I do wish to touch on Erasmus's general view of that “horribly muddled category,” peccatum illude horrible, inter christanos non nominandum. In Paraphrases on Romans and Galatians there are two features of Erasmus's gloss on the famous Pauline condemnation of sexual relations between men (read, “homosexuality”¹²) which should be noted. Erasmus is well aware of Paul's proscription and acknowledges that men “abandoned the natural use of women” and “burned for one another with a mutual desire to such an extent that the male committed foul acts with male” (CWE 42 18). What should be stressed, however, is that desire between men in and of itself is not the issue—amount or intensity is. Were it otherwise, Erasmus would surely have commented on the inappropriateness (to say the least) of Corydon's pining for Alexis, or Socrates' relationship with Alcibiades, something he never does. Indeed, sexual desire within the latter couple's relationship is used as a means to amplify the presence of virtue: “But the forms of amplification by reference to something else are innumerable, as when one magnifies the disasters suffered by the Greeks and Trojans to set off the extraordinary beauty of Helen … and as in Plato's Symposium the unusual sexual restraint of Socrates is inferred from the beauty of Alcibiades and the frequency of the occasions presented” (CWE 25 93).

Erasmus blithely presents Helen's beauty along with the beauty of Alcibiades (can you imagine someone like Jerry Falwell making such an analogy?), but more tellingly, comments upon Socrates' “unusual sexual restraint,” a restraint magnified by the presence of a beautiful boy. The power of the amplification rests on the knowledge that an Alcibiades is, above all, desirable—and Socrates' being tempted by the goods more than once only increases the magnitude of his virtuous abstinence. After all, who wouldn't desire a beautiful youth? It would only be natural.¹³

Erasmus's discussion of sodomitical desire comes in the context of Paul's condemnation of paying tribute to God in improper ways. Erasmus refers to the impropriety as an “unnatural worship of God,” stemming from their “foolish hearts” which were “darkened by a cloud of arrogance” (CWE 42 18). It is the “vapour of [their] empty glory” and “their vanity” which lead to God's allowing the miscreants to “rush headlong into the gratification of the desires of their own hearts.” And the “desires of their own hearts” turn out to be, specifically, idol worship: “they worshipped a false statue fabricated by art in place of the true God, and absurdly venerated and worshipped created things and have honoured these more than him who created all things” (CWE 42 18). Such behavior was a crime against God and state: sodomy becomes the sign of sedition.¹⁴ Sexual impropriety derives directly from the idol worship and their “bringing dishonour upon God who alone ought to be praised,” not the other way around. Such “perverse worship of the known God” leads to becoming “steeped in every kind of wickedness”: “fornication, covetousness, cunning, everywhere polluted with envy, murder, contention, deceit, malice, possessed of an evil character, gossips, backbiters, haters of the divine power, overbearing, … disobedient to parents, devoid of understanding, confused, lacking all sense of piety, ignorant of covenants, unmerciful.” As Alan Bray points out in the context of Elizabethan England, sodomy is inextricable from other fantastic horrors and crimes against God and humanity.¹⁵ The conceptual distance between what one does with one's friend and the acts committed by the sodomite is large, given a context of the persons involved and their relative relationship. To label one's own actions as sodomitical would be to identify oneself in league with “every kind of wickedness.”

When Erasmus chides Servatius that the youth knows what it is that he wants, he also contrasts what he wants with other things which might be demanded from a friendship: the “sake of reward” or the “desire for any favour.” It is when the sexualized friendship opens up into demands of reward and favor that the relationship comes precariously close to those representations of sodomitical friendship. The physical actions are the same; the language mediates the propriety:

How sweet its language is and how pleasing its sentiments! Everything in it smacks of affection and of a very special love. And as often as I read it, which I do almost hourly, I think I am listening to the sweet tones of my Servatius' voice and gazing at his most friendly face. Since we are seldom permitted to talk face to face, your letter is my consolation; it brings me back to you when I am absent, and joins me with my friend though he be away.

(CWE 1 14)

Erasmus doesn't shy away from imagining the relationship carried on through the language of the letter to be a substitute for the physical intercourse between the two. And if we cannot be together in person, which would of course be the most pleasant thing possible, Erasmus tells Servatius, why should we not come together, if not as often as might be, at least sometimes, by exchanging letters? And as the writing is the site of meeting and exchange of affection, so the body of the letter becomes the body of the lover: “As often as you look upon these and read them over you can believe that you see and hear your friend face to face. … Ah, ‘half my soul’” (CWE 1 6).

A survey of the secondary literature concerned with Erasmus's early writings finds at one extreme the critic who argues that the letters are signs of a “young man of more than feminine sensitiveness; of a languishing need for sentimental friendship.”¹⁶ At the other end we find the facile, homophobic Freudian, making much of a “volatile neurotic, latent homosexual” Erasmus.¹⁷ As I have attempted to show, the letters do not answer to the desexualizing move of the former; nor is the point to prove that Erasmus was a homosexual, and certainly not within the vituperative, pathological terms of “latent homosexuality.” Rather, any approach to the question must work within the conceptual universe in which there is neither a state of gender boundary nor an absolute distinction between proper and improper sexual acts. Many critics of Renaissance friendship (L. J. Mills, for example) have read the varying elements of Renaissance writings of love and friendship as opposing factions, mutually exclusive elements in a conceptual universe governing affection. Were Erasmus or any other Renaissance thinker to have made distinctions between the two, it would not have been based on a supposedly naturalized sexuality mediated by genitalia or gender-roles: “My sweetest Servatius, though your letter was such that I was unable to read it without tears, still it not only removed the distress of mind which had already reduced me to an extremity of wretchedness, but even gave me an amazing and unexpected degree of pleasure” (CWE 1 14). Instead, the same language constitutes friendship, pleasure, and the Renaissance letter—and perhaps, for us as well, pleasure in the art to an amazing and unexpected degree.

Notes

1. A note on notation: quotations from the Collected Works of Erasmus, 66 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974) will be given in the form “CWE” followed by a volume number, followed by page number(s). This quotation from the letter to his brother appears at CWE 1 5. Further citations will be placed within parentheses within the text.

2. I am quoting P. S. Allen, the fin-de-siècle Oxford editor of Erasmus's Latin letters. See Opus Epistolarum Desiderius Erasmi Roterodami (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), Tom. I, p. 585.

3. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick puts it in Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), even the most liberal of academics have been willing to dismiss questions of sexuality between men, at least those posed by an antihomophobic gay studies movement, as meaningless. Take, for instance, the cult of friendship which I discuss in this paper: questions concerning the possibilities of sexuality are dismissed because, most would claim, “passionate language of same-sex attraction was extremely common during whatever period is under discussion—and therefore must have been completely meaningless. Or 2. Same-sex genital relations may have been perfectly common during the period under discussion—but since there was no language about them, they must have been completely meaningless” (52). If my supposition about the language in which these relationships was mediated proves to be correct, then to point to the popularity of a writing manual like De conscribendis epistolis is to point to the ubiquity of images, diction, and social functions which opened up spaces for relationships, even erotic ones, not only between men and women, but between men and men, and even, say, fathers and daughters (e.g., Thomas More's letters to Margaret More Roper). To rework the boundaries of possible sexual expression in early modern Europe is to dissolve the terms of the debate, the homo/hetero binarism—indeed, modern sexualities at all—and the psychological restrictions surrounding those categories (e.g., our [Freudian] understanding of incest and the network of its taboos—or even what makes up those taboos).

4. Lauren Mills's is (still) the most thorough discussion of the cult of friendship in Renaissance England. Mills examines both Renaissance and classical sources for the “repeated stress on friendship in Elizabethan and Stuart” England. See Lauren Joseph Mills, One Soul in Bodies Twain (Bloomington, Ind.: Principia Press, 1937). In one letter to Servatius, Erasmus quotes Pythagoras, saying “A friend is one soul in two bodies” (CWE 1 20), playing off of Cicero's definition in De amicitia.

5. Johan Huizinga, Erasmus of Rotterdam (London: Phaidon Press, 1952), 12. My discussion of Erasmus's early life at Steyn is drawn from Huizinga.

6. Ibid., 3.

7. “The lists of such lists [of the authors he quotes] is nearly endless. … There are, for example, over five hundred references to Cicero in De conscribendis epistolis and one hundred fifty to Pliny” (CWE 25 xv).

8. Jonathan Goldberg discusses literary propriety and Erasmus's use of Virgil's second eclogue to illustrate pedagogic method in “Colin to Hobbinol: Spenser's Familiar Letters,” in Displacing Homophobia: Gay Male Perspectives in Literature and Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 107-26. Goldberg concludes, “For Erasmus, Virgil's poem savors of disorderly love,” which is to say that the relationship is, to use Erasmus's words, “a parable of unstable friendship”: “Alexis cultivated, young, graceful; Corydon rude, crippled, his youth far behind him. Hence the impossibility of a true friendship” (110).

9. Virgil, The Eclogues, trans. Guy Lee (London: Penguin Books, 1984), 39.

10. Cf. Stephen Orgel, “Nobody's Perfect: Or Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women?” in Displacing Homophobia: Gay Male Perspectives in Literature and Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 7-29. Indeed, following Orgel's argument in “Nobody's Perfect,” there is a certain substitutability of boys and women: they are both roughly analogous in that they are both sexual objects for men; gender doesn't count, inserter versus insertee does. A brilliant explication of the classical antecedents for this relationship appears in David M. Halperin's “One Hundred Years of Homosexuality,” in One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1990), 15-40.

11. I mean to gesture toward Foucault's notion of alliance as explicated in The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1980). In that volume he explains “the relations of sex gave rise, in every society, to a deployment of alliance: a system of marriage, of fixation and development of kinship ties, of transmission of names and possessions” (106).

12. I wouldn't speculate on what Paul meant in Romans by the category of men having sexual relations with men. I would, however, stress that Erasmus's understanding was a fifteenth- and sixteenth-century one, not the post-nineteenth-century, naturalized category of the “homosexual.”

13. And its “naturalness” is certainly one of its more distinguishing features. Several years earlier, at the time Erasmus was upbraiding Servatius for being “crueller than any tigress” and a “heartless spirit,” what is marked as unnatural is an entire lack of mutual desire. “Alas unnatural man! Even the fiercest beasts are responsive to those who love them, forgetting their savage instincts” (CWE 1 12).

14. As of this date, Alan Bray's discussion of sodomy in Homosexuality in Renaissance England (1988; London: Gay Men's Press, 1982) is the best handling of the social and political meanings making up that category. See especially pp. 20-30.

15. Bray notes this both in Homosexuality in Renaissance England and in “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England,” elsewhere in this volume.

16. Huizinga, Erasmus of Rotterdam, 11.

17. Nelson H. Minnich and W. W. Meissner, “The Character of Erasmus,” American Historical Review 83 (1978): 598-624.