politica referitoare la conditia umana

Erasmus and the Education of WomenAuthor(s): J. K. SowardsReviewed work(s):Source: The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Winter, 1982), pp. 77-89Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2540011 .Accessed: 22/03/2012 08:34

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Sixteenth Century Journal XIII, No. 4 (1982)

Erasmus and the Education of Women

J.K. Sowards Wichita State University

ERASMUS IS "THE GREATEST MAN we come across in the history of education!" This arresting statement is from R. R. Bolgar's The Clas- sical Heritage and its Beneficiaries. 1 While we may shy away from so bold an assertion as this, it can be claimed, with somewhat greater con- fidence, that Erasmus is the greatest man we come across in the history of education in the sixteenth century-no inconsiderable claim in itself for a century that produced Melanchthon, Sturm, Cordier, and the Jesuit Ratio studiorum. But it is a defensible claim.2 It may also be claimed that Erasmus was one of the most important champions of women's rights in his century.3

Given these two claims we might logically expect that Erasmus would have been a powerful advocate for the education of women. Log- ically yes, in fact no. For plausibility is seldom a trustworthy guide to historical happenings. Erasmus' major educational works are all addressed to boys and to teachers of boys. The work that Gerald Strauss recently called his "pedagogical best-seller' '4 is De pueris statim ac liberaliter instituendis declamatio and in it, as the title indicates, it is boys and not girls who are to be liberally educated from an early age. The education of girls and women is not even mentioned in the De rec- ta latini graecique sermonis pronuntiatione dialogus or the De con-

'(New York: Harper, 1964 [1954]), p. 336. 2For example, speaking of Erasmus' De ratione studii specifically, J.-C. Margolin

notes that his educational philosophy, his principles of school and subject organization, and his methods "devait servir de charte p6dagogique non seulement pour St. Paul's School ou meme pour la presque totalitb des Grammar schools de la Renaissance, mais aussi pour toutes les 6coles d'enseignement secondaire d'inspiration humaniste du xvie et du XVIIe siecles," De ratione studii (Introduction), Opera Omnia Erasmi Roterodami (Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Co., 1971), I/2 85, hereafter cited as ASD.

3Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), pp. 76-77, writing of how women were discouraged from applying their minds to theology or divinity, says, "The Christian humanist Eras- mus was one of the few men of his time who sensed the depths of resentment accumu- lating in women whose efforts to think about doctrine were not taken seriously by the clergy." There is, further, no reference to be found in Erasmus' writings to the physio- logical nonsense, so prevalent at the time, that made women inferior "by nature" to men. See ibid., pp. 124 ff., in her essay "Women on Top." See also Roland H. Bainton, Erasmus of Christendom (New York: Scribners, 1969), pp. 228-233, for a treatment of Erasmus' feminism, especially his views on marriage and divorce and the education of women, and his own good relations with a number of learned women. This point will be further documented in the course of this paper.

4In Luther's House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Refor- mation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 53.

78 The Sixteenth Century Journal

scribendis epistolis. The De ratione studii and the De copia were prepared, respectively as a teacher's manual and a textbook, for Colet's all-male school of St. Paul's in London. Even the important and influ- ential little tract on good manners, De civilitate morum puerilium, again as the title shows, is specifically addressed to young boys, and feminine civility is never mentioned.

There are only two places, so far as I know, in all his works where Erasmus addressed in any substantial way the matter of the education of women. The longer of the two passages occurs in the Chr7istiani mat- r7imonii institutio of 1526, dedicated to Queen Catherine of Aragon, the other in a letter to the French scholar Guillaume Bud6 in 1521. They are the focus of this paper.

Erasmus' importance as an educational writer does not derive from theoretical novelty or daring methodological innovation. It derives rather from his summation of the complex tradition of humanist education, stemming from the ancients, and developed, largely in the fifteenth century, by the Italian humanists. And this is as true of the concept of women's education as of any other facet of the educational process. The learned lady had long been a feature of Italian humanist culture. And, while the examples of such ladies had certainly not been numerous, they were well known, even celebrated-Isotta Nogarola, whom Guarino praised; Battista Malatesta, to whom Bruni addressed a tract on the study of literature; Cecilia Gonzaga, the student of Vit- torino who was studying Greek at seven; Ippolita Sforza, the great patroness of Neapolitan humanism; Battista Sforza the duchess of Ur- bino, almost as cultivated as her famous husband Federigo; the learned young letter-writer of Brescia, Laura Cereta; Vittoria Colonna, the friend of Michelangelo and member of Cardinal Bembo's literary circle.5 These women were nearly all court figures, the daughters and wives of Italian rulers. Yet, while some of them actually ruled their principalities in the absence of their husbands-sometimes quite com- petently as in the case of the duchess of Urbino or Eleanora of Aragon, duchess of Ferrara-,6 it was never considered by the humanist educa-

5There is a growing body of specialists' literature on such learned women. See the bibliographies in the essays by Margaret L. King, "Book-Lined Cells: Women and Humanism in the Early Italian Renaissance," and P. 0. Kristeller, "Learned Women of Early Modern Italy: Humanists and University Scholars," in Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past, Patricia H. Labalme, ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1980), pp. 81-83, 106-116. See also Margaret L. King's bibliography in her essay, "Thwarted Ambitions: Six Learned Women of the Italian Renaissance," Soundings, 59 (1976), 301-304, Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), and Albert Rabil, Jr., Laura Cereta, Quattrocento Humanist (Binghamton, N.Y.; Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1981).

6See, for example, Werner L. Gundersheimer, "Women, Learning, and Power: Eleanora of Aragon and the Court of Ferrara" in Beyond Their Sex, pp. 52, 54-55 or Roland H. Bainton, Women of the Reformation in Germany and Italy (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1971), p. 11.

Erasmus and the Education of Women 79

tional writers that they should be given a political education, like their husbands and brothers. Leonardo Bruni, for example, in counseling Battista Malatesta, flatly states that "rhetoric in all its forms-public discussion, forensic argument, logical fence, and the like-lies abso- lutely outside the province of woman." What is for a woman "a subject peculiarly her own" and what should be the primary concern of her education, he continues, is the study of religion, the literature of the church and the church fathers, with the ancient classical moralists appended. Then he would add, "for the profitable enjoyment of life," the study of the ancient historians and orators-not as models of action but as models of style and sources of moral maxim-and the poets, "a subject with which every educated lady must show herself thoroughly familiar," except, of course, the scandalous comic and satiric poets. The aim of it all is to achieve "breadth of learning and grace of style."7 Most other Italian humanists echoed these sentiments. Cecilia Gon- zaga is encouraged by Gregorio Correr, her humanist friend and former fellow-student under Vittorino, to "dismiss your beloved Virgil" and to "take up instead the Psalter, instead of Cicero, the Gospel" and to read the church fathers in preference to the humanist classics.8 Isotta Nogarola is scolded by her beloved old teacher Guarino for the emotion- alism of a letter she had written him in which "you seem ... so truly a woman, that you demonstrate none of the estimable qualities that I thought you possessed." Then he urges her to "create a man within the woman."9

Without exception, when Italian humanist theorists of education wrote at all about the purposes of education for women, they never went beyond the traditional roles of wife and mother. Learning was simply to add erudition to those roles, to equip a noblewoman to rear her children more capably, to enhance her practice of charity and religion, and to make her a more clever and interesting companion to her husband. Clearly, society provided no other respectable roles for women, well-born or common, outside the church. As William H. Woodward says, the Italian humanists had "not attempted any revo- lution in the position of women."10

7De studiis et literis as translated in William H. Woodward, Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators (New York: Columbia University Teachers College, Bureau of Publications, 1963 [1897]), pp. 126, 127, 128, 133.

8Margaret L. King, "Thwarted Ambitions," p. 292. 9Ibid., p. 285. '0Woodward, Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators, p. 247. This is cer-

tainly true as regards the position of women as the subjects of education. But there was an interwoven parallel tradition of respect for the worth and dignity of women which had medieval antecedents and, in Italian Renaissance literature, marks its beginning with Boccaccio's De claris mulieribus. It culminated in Castiglione's Cortegiano, especially Bk. III dealing with "la donna di palazzo." This tradition sometimes touched the rather more reticent tradition of the education of women, for example, in Corte- giano, Bk. III, where Giuliano de' Medici is made to say ". . . that women can understand all the things men can understand and that the intellect of women can penetrate wherever a man's can," Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, tr. Charles S.


With regard to the position of women, as we have said, Erasmus was somewhat more revolutionary than his Italian humanist predecessors. It is true that he too praised noble women for their learning. He characterized Queen Catherine, for example, "tum pia tum erudita'"1 and respectfully noted her capability as the supervisor of her daughter's early education.12 Many years before he had courted the wealthy Dutch noblewoman Anna van Borssele of Veere, comparing her favor- ably with three other Annas "on whom ancient literature conferred en- during fame"-Anna, the sister of Dido; Hannah, the mother of Samuel; and St. Anne, the mother of the Virgin-and sending her a gift of some prayers to the Virgin and a learned poem in praise of St. Anne.13 There is no evidence that this good lady either understood his learned allusions or prized his learned gifts, certainly none that she ever rewarded them.14 And this was the real point of such gifts and letters; Erasmus was clearly more interested in the patronage of women like the Lady of Veere, even of Queen Catherine, than their learning. And in this he was at one with most of his Italian humanist predecessors.

Yet Erasmus was genuinely impressed with genuinely learned women. In a passage from the colloquy Abbatis et eruditae, which was published in the Froben edition of March 1524, he makes his saucy "learned lady" say to the abbot, in reference to other learned ladies,

In Spain and Italy there are not a few women of the highest rank who can rival any man. In England there are the More girls, in Ger- many the Pirckheimer and Blauer girls. 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.15

Singleton (New York: Anchor, 1959), p. 214. See also C. F. Fahy, "Three Early Renais- sance Treatises on Women," Italian Studies, 31 (1956), pp. 31-55. The same assump- tion is implicit in Bruni and fully accepted by Erasmus. See for example De conscribendis epistolis in Opera Omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami ASD, I/2/252. As for the learned women themselves, they, as Margaret L. King observes in "Book-Lined Cells," p. 74, ". . . conquered from within, [by their own self-doubts] capitulated, and withdrew from battle. They withdrew to convents and to good works and to silence. They withdrew from secular studies, where men excelled, and took up sacred studies, appropriate for women, and formed cloisters of their minds. They withdrew from friend- ships, from the life of their cities, from public view, to small corners of the world where they worked in solitude: to self-constructed prisons, lined with books-to book-lined cells, my symbol for the condition of learned women of this age."

"See n. 30 below. 12P. S. Allen, Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1906-1965), VI, Ep. 1727, p. 369 and n. 27. '3Allen I, Ep. 145. See the translation in the Collected Works of Erasmus, The Cor-

respondence of Erasmus, vol. 2, tr. R. A. B. Mynors and D. F. S. Thompson, annot. Wallace K. Ferguson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), hereafter cited as CWE. See also Epp. 80, 91, 135, 138, 139.

'4See CWE 2, Ep. 151, n. 11. '5"The Abbot and the Learned Lady" in The Colloquies of Erasmus, ed. and tr.

Craig R. Thompson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 223.


In the previous year Erasmus had written, in a Christmas letter to Thomas More's daughter, Margaret Roper, of how he looked forward to the appearance of more learned women like Margaret and her sisters though "they are certainly rare enough now." And, he goes on, "there are also in Germany some esteemed families that can be counted hard- ly inferior in those arts in which you clearly excell." He sends final greetings not only to Margaret but to her sisters, "that whole choir" of "More's school."'16

A few years later, writing to his friend Juan Vergara, a liberal Spanish humanist who had commended his learned sister to Erasmus as one familiar with his books,17 he says,

I have received a welcome greeting from your sister Elizabeth which I return in the same kind. It is a joy to get fresh examples of the learning of her sex. We have a queen of England who is a famous learned woman and whose daughter Mary writes very good Latin letters. Thomas More's house is a veritable home of the muses. Mary, the emperor's sister, takes delight in books: I recently dedicated my Vidua christiana to her. She urgently requested this of me on the recommendation of a favorite preacher of hers. The scheme of human affairs is turned topsy-turvy: monks hate books and women love them! 18

The references in these three passages are not all easily identifiable. What learned women of Italy he refers to remain unknown. Vittoria Colonna, Laura Cereta, and Cassandra Fidele were contemporaries of Erasmus and celebrated for their learning, but they are not identified, nor are any other individual Italian women, in either his correspon- dence or works.19 By the learned Spanish women he probably means the court circle of which Catherine of Aragon was a product. The other learned Spanish lady, Elizabeth Vergara, became known to him only in 1528.

Even the references to the families of Pirckheimer and Blaurer remain somewhat obscure. Wilibald Pirckheimer, the Nuremburg patri- cian and humanist, was, of course, a friend of long standing-Erasmus addresses him in one letter as "clarissime doctorum et clarorum doc- tissime."20 Pirckheimer had seven sisters and five daughters, all of them celebrated for their learning. All seven of his sisters were nuns as well as three of his daughters. Erasmus apparently knew them only by

16Allen V, Ep. 1404. '7Allen VII, Ep. 2004. '8Allen VIII, Ep. 2133, March 24, 1529. '9The only exception I can find is in De pueris statim ac liberaliter instituendis

declamatio, where Erasmus cites Poliziano's admiration for the precocious learning of Cassandra Fidele: there is no indication that Erasmus knew her work himself. See ASD I1/2/76 and n. 4-5.

20Allen III, Ep. 694.


reputation and might have meant any or all of them in his reference in the colloquy cited. We know that two of Pirckheimer's sisters, Chari- tas and Clara, of the convent of Sta. Clara in Nuremburg, were avid readers of Erasmus' books and had a copy of his New Testament shortly after the first edition appeared. Pirckheimer says, in a letter to Eras- mus in the spring of 1516, that they are reluctant to write him themselves, fearful that he might find their Latin inadequate, though, Pirckheimer asserts, they are more learned than most learned men.21 Some years later Erasmus asked to be remembered to these sisters.22

The reference to the "Blauer girls" is even more obscure. Erasmus had known the two Blaurer brothers, Thomas, a lawyer, and Ambrose, first an ecclesiastic and later a town councillor of Constance: he referred to them as "virtuti pietatique natis fratribus."23 But whether the reference to learned Blaurer women is to their sister, who was known as a good Latinist, or to the daughters of one or the other brother is unknown.24

Erasmus' further reference to "some esteemed families" in Ger- many that could boast learned women clearly could have included the Blaurers and Pirckheimers. But he could also have been referring to Margareta Peutinger, the wife of Conrad Peutinger of Augsburg, who, only two years before, had appended a scholarly note of her own to one of her husband's letters to Erasmus, concerning a point in the Greek New Testament.25 And he could have included Froben's second wife, Gertrude, the mother of his godson Erasmius, who apparently wrote him, for he acknowledges a letter from her.26

Mary "the emperor's sister," the queen of Hungary, widowed by her husband's death at Mohacs in 1526, was well known to Erasmus from his service at the Burgundian court, and respected by him.27

But best known to him of all were the women of Thomas More's family, referred to several times in these passages and very often else- where. He was especially fond of Margaret Roper, More's eldest-his beloved and spirited Meg-whom Erasmus had known all her life. He later corresponded with her as an intellectual equal, and she translated

2"Allen II, Ep. 409. 22Allen V, Ep. 1259, dated February 12, 1522. 23Allen I, 46. 24Thompson, in The Colloquies of Erasmus, p. 218, mentions the sister as does Allen

IV, Ep. 1233, n. 103. ASD I/3, 407, n. 156 refers to the family of Ambrose Blaurer. It seems somewhat more likely to have been the family of Thomas since Ambrose was in orders until 1522 and did not marry until 1533. See Allen V, Ep. 1396.

25Allen IV, Ep. 1247. 26Allen III, Ep. 634. 27Allen VII, Ep. 2011, in which Mary's literary interests are described in some de-

tail, including her reading of Erasmus' Paraphrases in Latin. See also Allen IX, Ep. 2392, in which Mary is reported to have read with approval his apologetic letter to Car- dinal Campeggio (1530).


his treatise on the Lord's Prayer into English. She was, very likely, the model for "the learned lady" in the colloquy Abbatis et eruditae.28 Meg and her sisters were all educated by their father and by tutors in whose work More remained deeply involved.

Indeed, Erasmus says that it was More who convinced him of the need to educate women. The reference occurs as part of a description of More and his family in a letter of Erasmus to Bude. The passage is quoted in full for the argument of this paper.

It was not always believed that letters are of value to the virtue and general reputation of women. I myself once held this opinion: but More completely converted me. Two things are of the greatest peril to the virtue of young women, idleness and lascivious games, and the love of letters prevents both. Nothing else better protects a spotless reputation and unsullied morals: for they are more secure- ly chaste who are chaste from conscious choice. I do not necessari- ly reject the advice of those who would provide for their daughter's virtue through handiwork. Yet there is nothing that more occupies the attention of a young girl than study. Hence this is the occupation that best protects the mind from dangerous idleness, from which the best precepts are derived, the mind trained and at- tracted to virtue. Simplicity and ignorance may lead many to the loss of innocence before they are aware how many things threaten their treasure. Nor do I see why husbands should fear that their wives would be less obedient if they are learned, unless they are such as would require of their wives what should not be required of proper women. In short, in my judgment, nothing is more intracta- ble than ignorance. Surely the mind must be trained in the cultivation of studies so that it may understand right reason and see what is proper and what is advantageous. This becomes obvious the mo- ment it is said. To this end, since the pleasure and durability of a marriage depend more on the pleasure of minds than the love of bodies, they are bound by much stronger chains who are linked in the devotion of their minds. A wife will respect a husband more whom she recognizes also as her teacher [Recall that More tutored his first wife Jane Colt and later tried to teach Dame Alice, to less effect]. And she will have no less piety for having less superstition. Truly I prefer a single talent of pure gold to three contaminated by lead and dross.

Now and then we find some young women returning from a sermon able to relate wonderfully well what the preacher said-com- plete with facial expressions. Others are unable to recall either what he said or how he said it. More's daughters are able to repeat

28See Allen IV, Ep. 999, the famous description of More and his household that Erasmus wrote to Ulrich von Hutten, especially p. 18, no. 174. See also J. A. Gee, "Mar- garet Roper's English Version of Erasmus' Precatio Domenica and the Apprenticeship Behind Early Tudor Translations," Review of English Studies, 13 (1937), 257-271 and The Colloquies of Erasmus, pp. 218-219.


nearly the entire sermon, in order and with discrimination: if the preacher babbled anything stupid, impious, or otherwise out of the way-something we see happening not infrequently these days-, they know whether to laugh at it, ignore it, or despise it. This is how sermons ought to be attended, and it is pleasant to be around people of this sort. I very much disagree with those who consider wives as having no use but the satisfaction of desire, for which business fools are more suitable. A woman's spirit is necessary to hold a family together, to form and fashion the habits of children which of all things is most satisfying to a husband. In our last con- versation I threw this out to More, would he not be more tor- mented by the thought of losing those daughters on whom he had spent so much labor in their instruction? He answered immediate- ly, "If something happens that cannot be avoided, I should prefer that they die learned rather than unlearned." At this the story at- tributed to Phocian, I believe, came to mind: when he was about the drink the hemlock, his wife cried out, "Oh, my husband, you are dying an innocent man." To which he responded, "What are you saying, woman? Would you prefer me to die guilty?"29

The sentiments expressed in this letter of 1521 lead directly into those we find five years later in the Christiani matrimonji institutio concerning the education of girls and women.

The Christiani matrimonji institutio is the largest and most sys- tematic of Erasmus' works on Christian marriage. He wrote it rather hurriedly, in response to the repeated urging of his old friend and patron Lord Mountjoy, who was then the chamberlain of Queen Cath- erine of Aragon's household. The work is dedicated-with unintended irony-to Queen Catherine who, within a year of receiving it, would be beginning to be involved in the "great matter" of her divorce. Indeed, she was so involved that she neglected to send Erasmus an appropriate gift-payment for the dedication, and he had to remind her of her lapse in a graceful and discreet letter two years later. It is doubtful she ever read the work: and it is just as well, for it contains precious little comfort against the painful trials in which she would shortly be em- broiled.30 The passage that interests us is buried in a longer passage

29Allen IV, Ep. 1233, pp. 578-579. More and Bud6 had met briefly at the conference of their respective monarchs on the field of the cloth of gold, in 1520, though they had no opportunity to know each other well. See St. Thomas More: Selected Letters, Eliza- beth F. Rogers, ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), Ep. 97, p. 145 and Ep. 102. In the letter of 1521 from which this passage is taken, Erasmus is attempting to remedy this situation in sketching More more fully to Bud6, who had long admired him and whose laudatory letter about Utopia was often published with that work in later editions.

30The prefatory letter, dated July 15, 1526, is in Allen, VI, Ep. 1727. It is first mentioned in Ep. 1624 to Lupset, dated in the autumn of 1525. He is at work on it in March 1526, noted in a letter to Michael Boudet, Allen VI, Ep. 1678, where he says, "Aggresus eram Praecepta connubialia, quod a me flagitarat Regina Angliae, foemina tum pia tum erudita" and notes that it has interrupted his writing against Luther. Erasmus' letter


near the end of the work, in which Erasmus takes the occasion of re- hearsing his already familiar general views on education, and from which he digresses to discuss the matter of the education of women. It is less of a digression than an afterthought, suggested perhaps by the theme of the larger work, by Queen Catherine's own reputation for learning, or by the well advertised solicitude of the queen for the education of her daughter Mary.31

Erasmus begins, as he tends to do in all his educational writings, with the matters of nurture and habit formation, early home training and example. He asks rhetorically of young women why should they "live among fools and untutored women servants and drink in more corruption than if they lived among men?" Moreover, he continues,

In this I counsel first the vigilance of the mother and father lest they say or do anything untoward in the presence of their daughter, no matter how young she might be. Somehow we are all precocious in learning wickedness. And without even knowing it whatever is seen or heard may cling to the spirit like a bad seed and eventually grow into a noxious weed. The greatest care should be taken with a boy-but even more with a tender young girl. Hence, mother or father, anything you do that is in the least unchaste risks the chastity of your young daughter. How will children avoid evil association if they learn wickedness from their parents?

of reminder to the queen is Ep. 1960, March 1, 1528. He noted receipt of the gift in a letter to Mountjoy, Allen VIII, Ep. 2215, September 8,1529, "Regine munus mihi fuit longe gratissimum, quanquam illius animus mihi sine ullo munere abunde sufficiebat. Sic enim amo insignem illius feminae pietatum et eruditionem, nobis ignaviam ac mores corruptos exprobrantem, ut mihi beneficium accipere videar, si quid illi queam facere gratum." More mentioned to Erasmus, somewhat earlier, that the queen appreciated the work, "quod Regina serenissima merito facit maximi," Allen VI. Ep. 1770. The work was printed by Froben in two simultaneous editions, a folio and an octavo, in 1526; there was an Antwerp edition of the same year, probably pirated, and no later editions until the Erasmus Opera Omnia of 1540; there was a German translation of 1542 and an undated English translation-in all, a rather slender publication history given the usual popularity of Erasmus' writings. It is the more puzzling because of the work's association with Erasmus' attacks on monasticism. He was charged, and probably just- ly, by his conservative Catholic opponents with advocating Christian marriage as a veiled attack on clerical celibacy and monasticism. An earlier work, Declamatio in genere suasorio de laude matrimonii, published by Martens in 1518, in various editions and under slightly different titles, appeared in several versions, including an example of the type Epistola suasoria in De conscribendis epistolis (1522). The work was con- demned at Louvain and at Paris and enjoyed an immense popular vogue, becoming indeed a succes de scandale. It is likely that the Institutio christiani matrimonii was hur- ried into print, in part at least, as a response to the attacks on the earlier work by the Paris theologians, which appeared in May of 1526, the Institutio christiani matrimonii appearing in July of the same year.

3"In his letter of dedication, Ep. 1727, Erasmus mentions both the gifts and reputation for learning of Queen Catherine, his expectation that the work will be of some profit to her daughter, and the involvement of the queen in her daughter's education. Eras- mus was also aware of the work of his friend Juan Luis Vives, De institutione foeminae Christianae (1524), written for Princess Mary's instruction. See Allen VI, Ep. 1624.


There follows then a lively ironic passage in which he scorns the "fashionable education of girls."

In the morning make-up and hair-do, then to church to see and be seen, then breakfast, then gossip. After this lunch. Then trifling little stories. Here and there girls will sit down, and men will throw themselves on their laps-which offends no one, indeed is greatly praised as polite conduct. Then there are foolish games, not infrequently immodest. So the afternoon is passed until dinner time. At dinner there is the same behavior as at lunch. The sons and daughters even of princes are brought up in this way. Nor are they much more decently educated away from home. Sons and daughters of the nobility spend all their days among bored and sated servants, generally despicable and of low morals. This is how they pass the time! They would do better set to weaving cloth.

He does observe that "common sense dictates that girls be instructed in letters, for nothing is more conducive to a good mind or more useful to the preservation of virtue." But he does not explain in what letters precisely they ought to be instructed. Instead, in this whole passage he is preoccupied with the question of the chastity of girls and the preservation of their virtue. "For," he observes,

the precious treasury of virginity is irrecoverable once violated. This, as I have said, is the first reason why the mind of a girl should be imbued with the most chaste teachings, why they should learn to know first what is honorable, then to love. The second reason is that they may keep themselves clear of every stain of dishonor. One who never knows vices will never love them. The third reason is that they may avoid idleness, the most dangerous plague of good morals.

Erasmus was concerned, indeed almost obsessed with the problem of the abuse of children, whether by flogging schoolmasters, overbear- ing upper classmen at school, or brutal parents.32 In the Christiani matrimonii institutio he extends his concern to include girls as well as boys. He tells of a widowed young mother drilling her little daughter, not yet five years old, in the artificial forms of courtly address and response and repeatedly striking her down senseless. "I have seen this child nearly suffocate trying to choke back her sobs and check her

32Three anecdotes about flogging schoolmasters, each related with increasingly savage detail, he uses to illustrate the device of rhetorical amplification in the De pueris instituendis. In that same work he extends these views to include his opposition to school hazing, characterizing it as a rite "fit for executioners, torturers, pimps, thieving Carians, or galley slaves" but not for students, and to the organized bullying that went on in many schools, sanctioned by school authorities in the name of custom "as though an evil custom were not simply a deeply embedded error, which the more widely it pre- vails, the more energetically it ought to be stamped out." ASD, I/2, 61-62, ed. J. C. Margolin.


tears in the face of her mother's threat." "The violence that shone out of this little girl's eyes is like those who have been terrified by a ghost, their tears congealed and a look of madness on their faces." He con- cludes, "I judge the mother more deserving of blows than the daughter.'33

Notwithstanding its clearly expressed compassion and appeal to decency and its general sensibleness, all the foregoing about the education of girls and women seems somewhat unsatisfactory and trun- cated. It is haphazard and anecdotal rather than structured and sys- tematic. Why? I believe the best answer lies in the purposes Erasmus attached to education, some of them expressed here, such as the cultivation of the mind for its own delight or as a hedge against the cor- rupting effect of idleness. But the most important purpose of education, to which Erasmus returned again and again in his educational writings, was the service of society. He probably expressed it most succinctly in the De pronuntiatione: speaking of the education of young boys he calls them "the seed-beds from which will appear sena- tors, magistrates, doctors, abbots, bishops, popes, and emperors."34 These were social roles that simply were not open to women-with the rare exception of a reigning female monarch or noblewoman. There was thus no practical reason for Erasmus-or for any other pedagogical theorist of his age-to construct a system of education for women when no purpose for it existed.35 In this respect, as in so many others,

33All the above passages from the Christiani matrimonii institutio are in Desiderii Erasmi Roterdami Opera Omnia ... (Louvain: Clericus, 1704), V, 712 B - 713 A, 716 C - 717 A, hereafter cited as LB. Especially in his vigorous condemnation of the "fashionable education of girls" Erasmus is responding to a tradition of the education of the northern aristocracy that is pre-humanistic, devoted to the cultivation of manners in order to conform to what he (and most other northern humanists) regarded as the "vain and empty" standards of court life. As it pertained to the education of men this tradition had been modified somewhat by that of humanist education-to which Erasmus himself was a major contributor. But no such counter-tradition for the humanist education of women really existed. See J. H. Hexter, "The Education of the Aristocracy in the Renaissance," Journal of Modern History, 22 (1950), 1-20.

34ASD I/4, 27. 35This was true even for Vives, who is usually thought of as the greatest sixteenth

century champion of education for women. See, for example, Foster Watson, ed., Vives and the Renaissance Education of Women (New York and London: Longmans, 1912). Nevertheless, "Vives was not prepared to recognize any other role for women than their domestic functions," Carlos G. Norefia, Juan Luis Vives (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1970), p. 195. Even the elaborate program he laid out for the Princess Mary in his De institutions foeminae Christianae was a curriculum and not a structure. See W. H. Woodward, Studies in Education during the Age of the Renaissance, 1400-1600 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1965 [1906]), pp. 207-209. There is an interesting tie between Vives and the queen's household and the learned daughter of Thomas More: the first English translation of Vives' work, entitled Instruction of a Christian Woman (STC 24856), was by Richard Hyrde, another tutor to More's family who had written the introduction to Margaret Roper's translation of Erasmus' treatise on the Lord's Prayer, in which he re- hearsed More's arguments for the education of women and praised Margaret Roper as their exemplar. See Ruth Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana: Uni- versity of Illinois Press, 1956), pp. 62, 72.


Erasmus is in the mainstream of educational philosophy that flowed down to his time from the Italian humanists of the preceding century. Like them, Erasmus wanted a young girl to be sufficiently well instructed "that whatever she does she will do with judgment and intelligence." But like them also, he never sets out any occupation for the judgment and intelligence of women in society beyond that of wife and mother. Both Erasmus and his Italian predecessors had ignored-or perhaps simply were unaware of-the great increase in the number of women, especially since the mid-fifteenth century, who received a vernacular education and used it in a substantial way in the pursuit of family and business affairs. It was rather in the traditional humanist Latin education that Erasmus was interested, like the earlier Italian humanists. And both they and he regarded it alone as worthy to be called education. Natalie Davis points out that "Latin education among non-noble women was rare enough that it was remarked- 'learned beyond their sex,' the saying went."36

I believe also that Erasmus' lack of any perceived secular role for women beyond marriage and the home accounts for another obvious feature in his educational prescriptions for girls and women-his pre- occupation with chastity. It is not enough to read this simply as the harping of a prudish old monk-though some of that may certainly be present. Erasmus is being practical here, as he usually is. He is writing for an audience which, despite some of the social and intellectual freedom which the last century or so had brought, was still traditionalist as regards sex-roles, especially the sex-roles of women. Virginity was, quite simply, the indispensable precondition for an honorable marriage. Erasmus, like his Italian predecessors and such contemporaries as More and Vives, was convinced of the ultimate moral purpose of education. For women, the additional moral requirement of chastity was a normal condition. In this, again, Erasmus was in the mainstream of humanist educational writing.

On the other hand, this very traditional view of premarital chastity must not be seen as affecting Erasmus' view of marriage itself. In this regard, on the contrary, he was the most innovative champion of women's rights in his age, especially touching the matter of arranged

36Natalie Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, p. 72. This tendency was greatly increased in Germany by the Reformation. See Strauss, Luther's House of Learning, especially pp. 127-129, 195-202 and Lowell Green. "The Education of Women in the Reformation," History of Education Quarterly, 19 (1979). In a recent arti- cle Merry Wiesner Wood, "Paltry Peddlers or Essential Merchants? Women in the Dis- tributive Trades in Early Modern Nuremberg," The Sixteenth Century Journal, XII, 3 (1981), 3-13, Wood details the importance of women in the domestic economic life of Nuremberg and probably other German cities. The inference is that they possessed at least a rudimentary vernacular education to be able to write letters and receipts and to keep accounts.


marriages. The group of colloquies sometimes called "the marriage colloquies" were all written at about the same time as the Christiani matrimonii institutio37 and were extremely controversial because of their liberal tone. Among other things, he advocated a greater freedom in choosing their marriage partners and a greater control of their own lives not only for noble women but for all women.

In conclusion then, while Erasmus failed to provide a specific set- ting or detailed program for women's education, he clearly favored it in fact and regarded a woman's education not only as a clear advan- tage to her but an asset to her husband and her family. He clearly made no distinction between the intellectual capabilities of girls and boys and extended to all children his concern for their welfare and good upbringing. And he would not have been at odds with the sentiments expressed by his friend Thomas More, writing to William Gonnell, the tutor of his children, whom Erasmus had recommended to him. "If a women," he writes,

to eminent virtue of mind should add even moderate skill in learning, I think she will gain more real good than if she obtain the riches of Croesus and the beauty of Helen. Not because that learning will be a glory to her, though learning will accompany virtue as a shadow does a body, but because the reward of wisdom is too solid to be lost with riches or to perish with beauty.... Nor do I think that the harvest is much affected whether it is a man or a woman who does the sowing. They both have the name of human being whose nature reason differentiates from that of beasts; both, I say, are equally suited for the knowledge of learning by which reason is cultivated, and, like plowed land, germinates a crop when the seeds of good precepts have been sown.38

37These include Virgo 1o6yaxtoq (1523), Virgo poenitens (1523), Proci et puellae (1523) and "AyaQtoq yaioq sive Coniugium impar (1529). See the colloquies themselves and the headnotes in Thompson, The Colloquies of Erasmus. See also n. 29 above.

38Erasmus, however, might not so readily have agreed with More's next point re- garding "nature's defect" in women, whose natures are "apter to bear fern than grain," hence his next argument "that a woman's wit is the more diligently to be cultivated, so that nature's defect may be redressed by industry." See St. Thomas More: Selected Let- ters, Ep. 20, pp. 103-107. Erasmus himself could occasionally lapse into the traditional generalizations about the special qualities of the female nature. See, for example, De pueris instituendis, ASD I/2, p. 55, or such items in the Adagia as "Mulierem ornat silentium," LB II 991 B, or "Ignis, mare, mulier, tria mala," 464B. Nevertheless, I believe his truer judgment on the nature of woman vis-A-vis man is better revealed in his gloss to 1 Timothy 2:15, where he prefers the Greek text, that one is saved by grace and not according to sex. See LB VI, 933 C-D. See also his paraphrase of the same passage which moderates significantly the anti-feminist harshness of the scriptural text, LB VII 1043 A-B.

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