SOURCE: "Sexism and the Search for the Thematic Structure of the Plays of Hroswitha of Gandersheim," in International Journal of Women's Studies, Vol. 2, No. 3, May / June, 1979, pp. 221-32.

[In the following essay, Frankforter discusses Hroswitha's six plays, arguing that they should be viewed as works focusing on women as Christian heroes rather than as imperfectly realized dramas primarily about their male characters.]

I

The writing of history has long been an activity controlled by males. Most of the honored commentators who have shaped the western historical tradition have been extraordinary men who have concentrated their professional attentions on others like themselves. As a consequence, the historical method, which was pioneered by their work, often predisposes later scholars, male and female, to approach the writing of history with a set of male presuppositons. Historians are accustomed to searching their data for evidence of the effectiveness of dominant men, and they are often content to stop their unraveling of chains of causality when they trace the roots of an event to the will or program of a powerful individual. The models of power which are used to define significant action seem most frequently to be derived from studies of the careers of men. It has been easy, therefore (until recently) to assume that history is what men make it—and that only men make history.

A sexist bias of this sort seems to have pervaded and confused studies of the work of a most remarkable medieval intellectual: Hroswitha of Gandersheim. Ever since the period of their rediscovery in the sixteenth century by the humanist Conrad Celtes, Hroswitha's six plays have constituted an enigma for students of European literature. Written at the end of the tenth century, they survive as the only evidence of western attempts to write drama in the long period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the invention of the mystery and morality plays of the High Middle Ages.

No accurate record of dates for the span of Hroswitha's life has been preserved, but inferences drawn from her works suggest that she witnessed most of the tenth century. She says in the Primordia, her history of the cloister in which she lived at Gandersheim, that she was born after the death of Duke Otto of Saxony in 912. She admits in the preface to her collections of saints' legends to being older than her abbess, Gerberga 11 (940-1001). Her chief historical work, a poem on the reign of Otto the Great, does not discuss events after the death of Otto in 973, but a chronicle of the bishops of Hildesheim seems to imply that she wrote in the service of Otto's son and grandson and survived into the early eleventh century.'

It was Hroswitha's good fortune, therefore, to be a party to the splendid revival of arts and literature which accompanied the foundation of the Holy Roman Empire. The collapse of the old Roman Empire in the fifth century had thrust Europe into a "Dark Age" in which political confusion, economic decline, and isolation combined to retard cultural development. Charlemagne's success in imposing feudal order on most of the continent in the early ninth century made possible a "Carolingian Renaissance" which secured the foundations of western literacy. Europe divided into "French" and "German" spheres of influence in the generations after Charlemagne, and, although there were serious disruptions occasioned by Viking and Magyar invasions, it found a new footing for itself as the locus of an independent civilization.

The northern German dukedom of Saxony which was Hroswitha's home had not been a part of the old Roman Empire. Charlemagne spent thirty years in the process of its conquest and pacification. But it was not until the generation of his great-great-grandson, Henry the Fowler (919-936), that Saxony succumbed to the institutions of civilized life. The ducal government of Saxony actively promoted the establishment of monasteries as centers for the conversion and education of its people. As the dukes of Saxony rose to prominence as a dynasty of German kings and emperors in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the cloisters of Saxony became famous centers of learning. Henry's son, Otto the Great, consolidated and expanded German territory, established close ties with the splendid Byzantine Empire of Constantinople, extended a protective arm over Italy and the papacy, and inaugurated a new phase in German-Christian civilization.

The Holy Roman Empire founded by Otto the Great was home to several traditions which might have affected the intellectual development of Hroswitha of Gandersheim. Hroswitha's own connection, if any, with the imperial family is unknown, but she was a close friend and client of several royal ladies who had taken the veil. The Byzantine princess, Theophano, wife of Otto II, was probably an occasional visitor at Gandersheim and a possible avenue of access to the Christian Greek literature of the east. Otto's involvement in the affairs of the papacy and Italy helped make ancient Latin materials accessible to German scholars. And Hroswitha was in correspondence, as the prefaces to her works testify, with a vital circle of northern European scholars who were products of the reformed monasteries of the Carolingian Renaissance. But none of these possible influences is a sufficient explanation of the uniqueness of Hroswitha's work.

II

During the course of her career Hroswitha tried her hand at three kinds of literature. Her earliest compositions form a collection of eight rather traditional saints' lives and holy legends. Later in life she experimented with more objectively historical narratives: accounts of the history of her cloister at Gandersheim and a record of the reign of Otto the Great. Her modest experiment in writing a description of Otto's deeds, a foray into the genre of contemporary history, deserves more recognition than it has received. Her achievements in this field predate by a century those of the Byzantine princess, Anna Comnena, who is usually accorded the honor of being the world's first woman historian. No modern commentator has failed, however, to be impressed by the originality of her six remaining compositions, a cycle of plays in the style of Terence.

Hroswitha acknowledges no model for her plays other than Terence. Her contemporaries seem not to have shared her interest in him and not to have been stimulated to imitate her work in his genre. Hroswitha revived a long dead art for her own use, but failed to become a bridge between the ancient and medieval phases in the history of theater. Her compositions thus seem shockingly out of context. One does not anticipate this much originality from an obscure scholar of the "Ottonian Renaissance." And one does not expect such an independent mind to have been nurtured in a medieval female.

Hroswitha's work and gender constitute an anomaly which has been troublesome to scholars. Nothing like her dramas precedes her, and for all their uniqueness her achievements seem not to have invited emulation by later medieval generations.² Her writings survive in a very slender manuscript tradition which serves largely to confound modern preconceptions about the nature of tenth century literature.³ Thus when the first of the modern text critics turned his attentions to her in the nineteenth century, his first impulse was to preserve standard academic preconceptions by denying the possibility of her existence. At the time it was widely assumed that early medieval intellectuals were severely limited in their ability to deal with, and their interests in, the literature of classical antiquity. And it was felt to be highly improbable that a tenth century scholar who could imitate the Latin of Terence would also be female. In 1867 Joseph von Aschbach⁴ advanced the thesis that Hroswitha was a historical absurdity and, therefore, an impossibility. He argued that enough was known about the general level of intellectual attainments in the tenth century to establish prima facie that a woman of Hroswitha's literary education and sophisticated taste could not have existed. He suggested that she be explained out of existence as the creation of her sixteenth century editor, Conrad Celtes. Von Aschbach found it much easier to assume that a sixteenth century male could forge plays in the style of Terence as an elaborate scholarly joke than that a tenth century nun could produce them as serious works of art. Rudolf Kopke early opposed von Aschbach's thesis,⁵ but it was not until the twentieth century that paleographers put to rest doubts about Hroswitha's historical authenticity.⁶

Von Aschbach's arguments are heavy-handed examples of scholarly sexist bias when compared with more recent attempts to interpret Hroswitha's plays. Modern commentators have been less preoccupied with the question of the authenticity of Hroswitha's work than its intent, and in this inquiry as well as the former, a male bias has established the context for discussion.

Nothing, beyond what she herself revealed in the preface to her plays, is known of Hroswitha's intent in reviving the genre of drama: "my aim [is] to celebrate within the limits of my meager ability, the honorable chastity of holy virgins [and to use in this task] the same literary mode which has been employed [by Terence] to recount the shameful, impure deeds of wanton women."⁷ It is uncertain from this brief statement whether Hroswitha thought of her works as having a unifying theme, and it cannot be determined whether she intended them for performance or simply for use as classroom reading texts which would replace the rhetorically useful, but morally dangerous, Terentian pieces.

Preoccupation with the question of Hroswitha's intent in writing the plays for performance or for study has tended to focus scholarly attention on the few which are most amenable to contemporary tastes in drama and to obscure the fact that all six seem originally to have been published as a set. The only complete medieval edition of the plays is contained in the St. Emmeran manuscript⁸ which may have originated at Gandersheim during Hroswitha's lifetime and which may reflect her understanding of the order in which the plays ought to be read. It is possible that Hroswitha simply wrote six unrelated Christian plays to replace the six independent pagan comedies of Terence. The preface she gave her work suggests, however, that she considered her plays to have a common theme (i.e., "the honorable chastity of holy virgins"), and it is likely that this theme is explored differently in each play and that the collection of six constitutes an integrated cycle.

The problem of identifying a thematic structure in Hroswritha's plays has attracted much scholarly attention and has generated some extremely complex theories. Erich Michalka has suggested a Gottschalkean theology of grace as the primary theme explored in all the plays.⁹ Marrianne Schutze-Pflugk sees the plays as explorations of three kinds of hero images: "Heroes of faith and chastity," "heroes of faith," and "martyrs of the courts and aristocracy."¹⁰ Dietlind Heinze has called into question the likelihood of any one unifying theme in Hroswitha's work." Hugo Kuhn has developed a very elaborate thesis which purports to identify a structure of major and minor themes linking Hroswitha's six plays with her eight legends.¹²

Kuhn's theory is the only one which sees much significance in Hroswitha's claim that her plays are about women. But Kuhn minimizes the importance of his own observation and ends by positing an excessively conjectural context for Hroswitha's work which gives precedence to the things she wrote about men. Kuhn admits that the plays do focus on the careers of heroines, but he insists that they need to be read in the larger and prior context of the legends which deal with the histories of men.¹³ He feels that Hroswitha's primary intent was to explore the Christian's struggle to maintain virtue in a hostile and sinful world, and he suggests that the themes of the eight legends provide the key for understanding the thematic structure of the six plays. The eight legends do not, however, yield without violence to the form of Kuhn's themes,¹⁴ and the cycle of six plays proves to be redundant and incomplete when interpreted as a realization of Kuhn's reconstruction of Hroswitha's original program.

Kuhn suggests that a structure of major and minor themes links Hroswitha's six "female" plays and parallels the internal organization of her eight "male" legends. He claims that the major theme of each of the plays is introduced as the minor theme of the one which precedes it. In the Gallicanus the major theme is the preservation of a woman's virginity by means of the miraculous conversion of her powerful suitor, and the minor theme is the praise of martydom. The Dulcitius has martyrdom as its primary subject and as its minor interest a depiction of the state of those who are totally obsessed by carnal passion. The third play, the Calimachus, concerns a man who is completely debased by the flesh and introduces as its secondary theme the topic of the conversion of sinners. The fourth play, the Abraham, and the fifth paly, the Paphnutius, both deal with the conversion of sinners, and Kuhn claims that they mark the culmination of Hroswitha's thematic program. The Sapientia, the last play in the series, is dismissed as a reprise of some of the ideas explored in the earlier works.

There are problems with Kuhn's thesis. It opposes Hroswitha's own claim that her plays are about women by locating the themes of some of the plays in the destinies of their male characters (e.g., the Calimachus). It cannot distinguish between the themes of the "identical" plays, the Abraham and the Paphnutius. And it cannot account for the Sapientia at the end of the series, a play which Kuhn dismisses as a needless iteration of themes developed earlier.

It is possible that the arduous struggle of modem commentators to unravel Hroswitha's dramatic program is due less to the complexity of Hroswitha's texts than to the sexist biases of their interpreters. The male orientation of most medieval literature seems to predispose historians to read Hroswitha as if she were engaged in the kind of project which might just as well have recommended itself to a monk of her generation. Her sex is assumed to have little or no significance by those who have sought to identify her motives and concerns. Her choice of women as the chief characters of her plays is not seen as crucial to their interpretation. When viewed from an asexual (or male) perspective, she appears to be a rather average medieval theologian exploring standard concepts of sin and salvation illustrated in the lives of martyrs and virgins. As such there is nothing very extraordinary or original in what she is seen to say. She emerges as a minor eulogist of ordinary Christian heroes. But if the modern preoccupation with assumedly traditional medieval virgin and martyr images is abandoned and the plays are viewed as what Hroswitha forthrightly says they are (i.e., commentaries on women), a logical and fully realized thematic structure clearly and easily emerges. In the preface to the plays Hroswitha announces her intent not simply to write in the style of Terence, but to use that style to undo the harm which he has done to the reputation of women. He has used drama to publicize the deeds of notorious females; Hroswitha will use the same literary vehicle to explore the dimensions of female virtue. What emerges from the six plays, when read in her order, is a systematic exploration of each of the opportunities for female integrity possible in the social roles permitted women in Hroswitha's world.

III

Each of Hroswitha's heroines is a distinctive creature, and each one of them enjoys a unique destiny. Together their careers mesh to provide a description of female options in the three life styles (virgin, whore, or mother) which were popularly accorded medieval women. If, as seems likely, the St. Emmeran manuscript reflects the order in which she published the plays, Hroswitha analyzed the feminine condition in six logically successive and increasingly complex stages: 1) the young girl who chooses virginity over marriage; 2) the virgin whose desire to remain unmarried is not accepted by those in power over her; 3) the woman who marries but emulates the life of a nun in her marriage; 4) the nun who falls into sin and loses her faith, her religious profession, and her virginity; 5) the whore who willingly adopts a life of vice and wantonness; and 6) the woman who surrenders her virginity for the vocation of Christian motherhood.

Hroswitha's first play concerns the successful attempt of the Emperor Constantine's daughter, Constantia, to avoid an offer of marriage from her father's general, Gallicanus. Constantia has secretly vowed to serve God as a virgin and professes that she would rather die than marry (I,ii,3). Her father concurs in her decision, but Gallicanus's request for her hand puts everyone in a difficult position. Gallicanus is her father's most powerful general, and his support is needed in a great war against the Sythians which will complete the stabilization of Roman world power. If Constantia persists in her determination not to marry, her father may lose Gallicanus's support and the security of his empire. Many medieval women, who found themselves used as prizes and pledges in the political programs of their families, could have sympathized with Constantia's dilemma. How does one handle a situation in which one's personal vocational desires and one's obligations to society come into conflict? By a combination of her own wit and God's grace Constantia devises a clever, if somewhat dishonest, plan. She allows Gallicanus to think that she will marry him, after he returns from the war with the Sythians, and trusts in the interim to God to convert Gallicanus to Christianity and away from the earthly delights of the marriage bed. As a vehicle for God's action she sends her two chaplains, John and Paul, with Gallicanus on his campaign, and she undertakes to convert his two daughters during his absence. All turns out as she desires. The battle against the Sythians goes badly until Gallicanus is enlightened by grace and converts to the Christian religion. He returns to Rome prepared to renounce the woman he loves so that he might please "the Virgin's son" (I,xii,10). Constantia offers him the hope that someday they might enter heaven's eternal joy together, and years later during the reign of Julian the Apostate Gallicanus, now a holy hermit, receives the reward of martydom. Constantia's success in reconciling her beloved to her preference for virginity has as its fortunate outcome his salvation, that of his daughters and all those who observed their pious examples.

Not all women could be as fortunate as Constantia in reconciling their preferences for holy virginity with the pressures of their society, and Hroswitha's second play, the Dulcitius, explores a situation in which the desire of three girls to maintain their virginity is forcefully opposed. The play concerns the ladies Agape, Chronia, and Irene, whom the Emperor Diocletian would like to provide with honorable marriages to leading members of his court. They refuse marriage as a "corruption of integrity" (i, 2), and they are turned over to a judge named Dulcitius. Dulcitius falls in love with them and locks them up in his pantry so that he can visit them at his convenience and force his attentions on them. God intervenes to protect the girls and causes Dulcitius to mistake the filthy pots and pans of the kitchen for the objects of his desire. He makes love to the kettles and then convered with soot goes forth to be ridiculed and baited by his men. When he comes to his senses, he attempts revenge on the girls by ordering them stripped in public. But divine grace bonds their clothing to their bodies so that the soldiers who attempt to tear it off sweat and strain in vain. Diocletian then turns the women over to another official, Sisinnius, who is ordered to force them to deny their faith or to execute them. The two older girls, Agape and Chronia, eagerly accept all the tortures which Sisinnius provides and enjoy glorious martyrdoms. Since physical threats have failed to have any effect on them, Sisinnius decides to apply psychological pressure to their youngest sibling, his last remaining victim. He warns Irene that if she does not see things his way, he will lock her up in a brothel where she will be violated and prevented for all eternity from joining the company of her sisters among the heavenly virgins. Irene responds by informing him that is is "better to injure the body than to pollute the soul with idolatry" (xii, 3), and then she proposes a rather curious theory of technical virginity. She claims that "pleasure merits punishment, but compulsion (earns) a reward, and one is not accused of crime unless one's soul consents" (xii, 3). Sissinius thus learns that true virginity of spirit lies beyond mere physical compulsion, and in frustration he grants her the martyrdom she desires.

Irene's concept of the virginity of the spirit sets the stage for Hroswitha's third play, the Calimachus, which describes the situation of women who choose to follow the ascetic disciplines of holy virgins within the institution of marriage—a custom which may have been not uncommon during the early Christian centuries. Wives who desire to adopt lives of sexlessness may find it necessary to cope with a variety of different responses from the males of their acquaintance, and Hroswitha's heroine, Drusiana, handles two extreme, but natural, situations. She is fortunate in having a Christian husband, Andronicus, who is willing to join her in the renunciation of the pleasures of the flesh, but one could not expect every husband to be a saint like Andronicus. Therefore, Hroswitha explores the alternative possiblity of resistance to Drusiana's decision by providing her with an aspirant lover whose frantic assaults on her virtue stem from the extremes of frustrated male lust. Callimachus, the lover, is totally obsessed by his desire for Drusiana and devotes all his strength and cunning to an effort to trap her. Drusiana is aware that his plots place her in great moral danger and that they are likely at the very least to occasion a scandal which will disrupt the peace of her community. She, therefore, beseeches God to grant her an escape from an impossible situation by allowing her to die. Her prayer receives an affirmative answer, but even death does not remove her from danger. Callimachus is so frenzied by lust that he forces his way into her tomb to launch a post-mortem assault on her chastity. God does not abandon Drusiana. Before the necrophile can achieve his objective, he is struck down, and one might assume that his death brings the play to an adequate conclusion. But at this point Andronicus and his friend John arrive at the tomb with the news that Christ wishes Callimachus to be raised from the dead and given an opportunity to repent. Callimachus returns to life sobered by his experiences, and he freely renounces the passion which had inspired him to attempt unthinkable crimes. Drusiana's firm resolve has helped to effect his conversion, and the play ends with a reminder that while lust is a horrible emotion, it is not the worst of human sins. Even those who fall prey to it are not necessarily placed forever beyond the possiblitiy of forgiveness and redemption—provided they repent their evil ways in time and die with a virgin's heart.

This theme of the forgiveness of the sins of the flesh provides the context for Hroswitha's fourth play, the Abraham, which deals with the painful subject of the girl who vows her virginity to God but subsequently fails to maintain her purity. The young woman in question is Mary, a dependent of a holy hermit, Abraham, who instructs her from infancy in the religious disciplines of the desert anchorites. She spends ten years in a small cell near his ardently imitating his ascetic example. But when she attains womanhood, the devil comes to her disguised as a monk, and he tricks her into abandoning her cell and surrendering her virginity. When she realizes what has happened, she despairs of her salvation and flees the desert. Her uncle Abraham resolves to do whatever he must in order to restore her to her monastic vocation, but it takes several years to locate Mary. Finally the news reaches Abraham that she is employed as a prostitute by a tavern keeper and that she has earned considerable popularity in her trade. Disguised as a soldier Abraham sets out for the brothel, and he obtains an opportunity for private conversation with Mary by pretending to her manager that he wishes to buy her services. Once alone with her he reveals his true identity, and she is overcome by a sense of shame. She confesses that she did not come to him for help for fear of offending his purity by her sin. He reminds her that no human being is beyond sin or in a position to condemn others, and as for her future, she is to contemplate the fact that "it is human to sin, [but] it is demonic to remain in sin" (vii, 6). Mary despairs of ever receiving God's forgiveness, but Abraham talks her into returning with him to the desert. Once back in her cell she becomes a model of repentence, and her example serves to turn many others from their evil ways. Hroswitha ends the play by marveling that the power of God's grace can return even a sinner like Mary to the path of virtue.

But Mary was not the worst of sinners. She had made a bad mistake which had led her to a life of vice, but it was a life to which she felt condenmed by despair—not one which she freely chose for herself. Hroswitha knew that there was a deeper level at which the relationship between sin and grace in a woman's life could be explored. Not all bad women became bad by accident or through uncontrollable circumstances. Some had no excuse at all for their decisions to enter and persist in their vices. There were prostitutes who knew what they were doing and who liked their work. Such a woman was the famous Thais, the arch-whore of Alexandria, whose story Hroswitha tells in her fifth play the Paphnutius. Thais was such a phenomenally sexy woman that all the men of the city, old and young, wise and foolish, were caught in her snare. They fought in the streets over her, and her doorstep ran with the blood of their battles. So great was the corruption and disorder which this one sinful woman introduced into God's universe that the holy hermit Paphnutius felt obligated to leave his desert retreat and to do something about her. Armed with his prayers he enters the city and is conducted to her home by a troop of young men he meets in the streets. He asks her for a private conference, and she takes him to her bedroom. But that does not content him. He inquires if she does not have an even more secret retreat, and she admits that there is a room in her house known only to God. Her reference to God gives Paphnutius the opening he needs to discourse on spiritual subjects. He finds to his distress that she is indeed the worst of sinners: she sins not in ignorance, but in full knowledge of God's will and the consequences of her acts. He breaks down and weeps over her, and his concern for her succeeds in awakening her conscience. She determines to abandon her sins, burns all her ill-gotten wealth, and publically repudiates her lovers. She follows Paphnutius into the desert, and he has her walled up in a tiny cell where for three years she does penance—wallowing in her own filth as she once wallowed in her sins. At the end of this period God sends a vision to one of the desert monks which suggests that she has been forgiven. Paphnutius, therefore, orders her released from confinement, but she is loath to leave her cell for fear that she has not yet done enough penance to earn God's grace. Paphnutius reminds her that divine grace is a gift which cannot be earned. As he succinctly puts it, "if it were to be imparted according to [our] merits, it could not be called grace" (xii, 5). Thais dies in her nunnery shortly after her liberation, and although there is no reference to her joining the company of heavenly virgins, Hroswitha promises her an equally glorious future. Visions depict her among "white flocks" of heaven enjoying the reward of a glorious bed guarded by four virgins. It is clear that even the most sinful of women need not despair of her ability to repent and share in the delights of the blessed.

Hroswitha's sixth and last play, the Sapientia, takes up what seems to have been for her the most difficult topic of all: the spiritual destiny of the Christian woman who chooses the life of a wife and a mother. Hroswitha comes very close to equating virtue with virginity, and she occasionally infers that the exercise of religion and the practice of sex are incompatible. For her, Christ is the "Virgin's son," who takes a special delight in the company of virgins and reserves to them the highest places in heaven. It seemed self-evident to Hroswitha that the best of all feminine vocations was that of the nun, but she knew that the church blessed marriage and recognized it as an honorable alternative to virginity. Try as she might, however, Hroswitha could not bring herself to accord a married woman spiritual equality with a virgin. But she did attempt in her last play, the Sapientia, to describe a model of feminine heroism based, not on the repudiation of sex, but on its legitimate use.

The Sapientia opens with the Emperor Hadrian receiving a report which charges Sapientia and her three daughters with threatening the stability of the state. Hadrian at first scoffs at the idea that a few women could cause any significant trouble, but he becomes alarmed when he learns that Sapientia is converting large numbers to Christianity and, as a result of her teaching, many wives have begun to refuse to sleep with their husbands. Sapientia is brought in for examination, and although Hadrian is most gallant and courteous, she treats the pagan emperor with contempt. She and her daughters are, therefore, locked up for three days to think things over. During their imprisonment, Sapientia has an opportunity to explain to her daughters why she decided to have children: "for this I abundantly fed you with mother's milk, for this I carefully nourished [you], that I might deliver you to a celestial, not an earthly, husband and that I might through your merits be proclaimed the mother-in-law of the eternal king" (iv, 3). "I wish for this: to be crowned by your virginity and to be glorified by your martyrdom." (iv, 4)

When the girls return to Hadrian, they are eager for the trials for which their mother has prepared them, and one by one they receive martyrdom after manifesting numerous miracles of faith. When the last and youngest daughter is brought forth, Sapientia greets her as "the one hope of my womb" (iv, 29), and she sends her on her way to die reminding her of the "crown of unimpaired virginity" which she will soon wear in heaven. In her last speech to her daughter, Sapientia's thoughts seem to be primarily for herself. She says: "Go sweetest child; and when you are joined with Christ in heaven, remember [your] mother, [and be] a patroness of the one who bore you." (vii, 2) The girl dies as valiantly as her sisters, and the play closes as a chorus of Roman matrons assist Sapientia in burying her daughters. In a final prayer before her own death Sapientia reminds God that in sacrificing her children she has forsaken all earthly bonds and although she will not be able to "sing the song of virginity" (ix, 8) with her daughters in heaven, still she deserves an honored place among the company of the saved. It seems that Hroswitha wishes to imply that a mother's salvation derives in part from the virtues of her children. The merit of their virginity and faith can serve to cancel some of the effect of the "impairment" which she acquired in giving them birth. But there still remains a distinction of precedence in heaven between the virgins and all other women.

IV

With the Sapientia Hroswitha brought the project which she announced in her preface to a conclusion. Terence wrote six plays in which he celebrated the folly of base women. Hroswitha has redressed the balance by writing six plays in which she has demonstrated the strength and wisdom of women in the exercise of Christian virtues. There are superficial resemblances of theme or situation among some of the dramas, but these are of little consequence. Each play is a distinct work which treats its own separate subject, and each play makes a unique contribution to the structure of a cycle. As a cycle the plays reflect Hroswitha's concern, not with generalized, asexual Christian heroism, but with the unique challenges confronting women in the very circumscribing world of the tenth century.

The discovery of this thematic plan in Hroswitha's six dramas is more surprising in what it reveals about the biases of modern scholarship than in what it depicts as the condition of medieval women. Hroswitha does not rise far above the limits of her own education in her analysis of the condition of her sex. Her understanding of the Christian faith as a war with the flesh is completely consistent with the ascetic worldview of traditional medieval monasticism. Virginity is a condition which she, along with most of the fathers of the church, accepts as self-evidently superior for members of both sexes. Christ is the chaste son of the Virgin, and his life is the ultimate model for all human lives. Those who sink into whoredom and fornication are automatically ranked with the enemies of God. But Hroswitha's Christianity is a theology of grace and forgiveness. The situation of the sinner is not hopeless; the pressures of the flesh are never overwhelming once the soul is stirred by a concern for its own purity. Hroswitha's uniqueness lies not in the articulation of these thoughts, but in her decision to illustrate them in the lives of six kinds of heroic women. Medieval literature is filled with tales of male champions of the faith or women who emulate the examples of males in making similar witnesses of martyrdom. Hroswitha's originality lay in attempting to discuss women as Christian heroes within their normal social roles as women. Many saints legends would read much the same if narrated about heroes or heroines. Hroswitha's plays would be ludicrous if converted into dramas about men.

Modern comentators have been disturbingly slow to recognize this. No one today would be surprised to find a female playwrite choosing the lives of women as the theme for her work. But few historians have shown much sensitivity to the possibility that a medieval woman could have found dignity and significance in the lives of her female compatriots. Hroswitha plainly announces her intent to write about women, but historians have persistently explored the actions of her male characters for clues to the thematic structure of her plays. The result has been the "discovery" of numerous problems, imperfections, and redundancies in her dramatic program. Bert Nagel, for instance, has found the Abraham and the Paphnutius to be such similar plays that he can account for them only by theorizing that Hroswitha paused between their compositions and wrote the second as a review of the first in preparation for completing the cycle."¹⁵ The two plays are similar, however, only in the situation of their leading males, the holy men who visit prostitutes in order to covert them. The women who receive their attentions are significantly different. Mary, the woman of the Abraham, falls into sin unwittingly and remains in it through motives of despair. Thais, the woman of the Paphnutius, embraces sin willingly and in full knowledge of its consequences. Hroswitha makes her intention to demonstrate Thais's culpability clear by omitting from her version of Thais's legend the stories which credit Thais's sin to abuses inflicted on her in childhood. Thais is to have no excuse beyond her own will for her immoral career. Her play is not a repetition of Mary's play, for her life, although it comes to the same conclusion by similar means, is not a repetition of Mary's life.

Many of the problems which have preoccupied students of Hroswitha's plays have been suggested not by insufficiencies in her thought or texts, but by imperfections in the perspectives or assumptions which commentators bring to the interpretation of her work. The study of a figure like Hroswitha has value, therefore, on at least two levels. It has something noteworthy to reveal about the lives and intellectual attainments of medieval women. And it also has something to teach about the critical process itself. It becomes a source for discovering and analyzing sexist attitudes which bias apparently objective research, and it offers useful perspectives on the present which encourage the development of more accurate perceptions in the writing of history.

Notes

¹ M. B. Bergman, Hrosvithae Liber Tertius (Covington, Ky.: The Sisters of St. Benedict, 1943).

² See, Boris Jarcho, "Zu Hrotsvithas Werkungskreis," Speculum, 2 (1927), 343-44; and Edwin H. Zeydal, "Knowledge of Hrotsvitha's Works Prior to 1500," Modern Language Notes, 54 (1944), 382-385.

³ The bulk of Hroswitha's work survives in one medieval manuscript from the cloister of St. Emmeran in Regensburg (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek clm 14485). An excellent modem edition of the Latin texts has been published by Helene Homeyer, Hrotsvithae Opera (Munich: Ferdinand Schoningh, 1970). A rather free English translation of the plays will be found under the name Christopher St. John (Cristabel Marshall), The Plays of Hroswitha (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1923).

⁴ Joseph von Aschbach, "Roswitha und Conrad Celtes," Kaiserlichen Adademie der Wissenschraften, Sitzungsberichte, 56 (Vienna, 1867).

⁵ Rudolf Kopke, "Hrotsvit von Gandersheim," Ottonishe Studien, 2 (Berlin, 1869).

⁶ Edwin Zeydel, "The Authenticity of Hrotswitha's Works," Modern Langueage Notes, 61 (1946), 50-55.

⁷ Latin text has been omitted. Translations are mine.

⁸ Bayerische Staatsbibliothek clm 14485.

⁹ Erich Michalka, Studien uber Intention und Gestaltung in den dramnatischen Werken Hrotsvits von Gandersheim (Heidelberg: Ruprecht-Carl-Universitat, 1968), pp. 114-18, 189.

¹⁰ Marrianne Schutze-Pflugk, Herrscher-und Martyrer-Auffassung bei Hrotsvit von Gandersheim (Wiesbaden: Steiner Verlag, 1972).

¹¹ Dietlend Heinze, Die Praefatio zu den 'Dramen' Hrotsvits von Gandersheim—ein Programm? (Karlsruhe: O. Berenz, 1973).

¹² Hugo Kuhn, Dichtung und Welt im Mittelalter (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1959), pp. 94-100.

¹³ Ibid., p. 99.

¹⁴ The "male" legend of "Gongolf' features a woman who is central to the fate of the male subject. Kuhn identifies virginity as Hroswitha's "female" theme, but the struggle for its maintenance is the crux of many of her stories about men. It is a virtue which she advocates equally for both sexes.

¹⁵ Bert Nagel, Hrotsvit von Gandersheim (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1965), p. 64 ff.