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...