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...