Erasmus on Women.

Erika Rummel's new Erasmus anthology is an effectively organized and illuminating group of texts edited from Craig Thompson's version of The Colloquies and more recent CWE translations, with a prefatory essay and brief introductions and generally useful notes to the individual texts. The volume includes substantial excerpts from The Institution of Marriage, In Praise of Matrimony, On Disdaining the World, and The Christian Widow. Presented in full from The Colloquies are the wonderful "New Mother," which works well with students, plus the other six colloquies in the so-called marriage group along with "The Council of Women" and "The Abbot and the Learned Lady," usually thought to be a salute to Margaret More.

As Rummel points out in her introduction, the book is not only a source for Erasmus's own opinions about women but is "a kaleidoscope of views current in the Renaissance" (3). The readings also provide an excellent introduction to humanistic thought, method, and literary technique.

The selections are organized on two levels, first according to the conventional premodern categories of female existence: virgins (here "unmarried women"), wives and widows. Within each of the larger rubrics there is a further topical breakdown derived from Erasmus's own positions and program. The first section discusses the dangers of the world, questions the cloister as a haven from worldliness, and proposes marriage as an alternative. The second section discusses the selection of a marriage partner, the marital relationship, and aspects of the life of the matron. The last section presents the proprieties of the widowed estate and ends with Erasmus's early eulogy of his first patron, the widow Berta Heyen. With this format the book would make an excellent classroom companion to Margaret King's similarly organized Women of the Renaissance.

While no anthology can be a perfect mirror of its sources, Rummel might have included, rather than merely mentioned, examples of the casual anti-feminism and misogyny present in asides in Erasmus's letters and other works not directly addressing the woman question. As they stand, the readings somewhat misrepresent the temper of Erasmus's attitude and of the debate about women by concealing, for example, the angry contempt he expresses for a patroness who failed him and his frequent and easy use of negative stereotypes of women as a way to build rapport with his readership in the male elite. All the same, the readings Rummel has chosen are inherently accessible and well-edited, providing a clear and balanced picture both of Erasmus's own considered doctrine on women and marriage and of the official cultural construction of the Renaissance woman in relation to patriarchal politics and culture.

WOOD BOULDIN Villanova University