SOURCE: "Hrotsvitha" in Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua († 203) to Marguerite Porete († 1310), Cambridge University Press, pp. 55-83.

[In the following essay, Dronke undertakes an overall evaluation of Hroswitha's writings, examining her life and relation to the court of Emperor Otto I; her literary intentions and possibly self-conscious pose as a humble and unassuming woman writer; the thematic structure of her collected writings; her artistic limitations; and her influence in the Middle Ages.]

Hrotsvitha wrote more prolifically than Dhuoda, and planned her major work on a larger scale. Like Dhuoda, she clung to prefaces and preliminaries, dedications and elaborate articulations; but, having far greater literary ambitions than her predecessor, she carried out such manoeuvres with the utmost self-consciousness and craft.

There exists much scholarly writing on Hrotsvitha,¹ yet in it her life and work tend to be misrepresented. Discussion of Hrotsvitha has seldom wholly escaped the assumptions that her existence was 'cloistered' and that her talent was naïve. The stereotype still most widely encountered is that of a woman (usually thought of as a nun) immured in her convent, who unaccountably took it into her head to read the plays of Terence and to 'imitate' them by writing edifying Christian counterparts. It is considered scholarly to add that Hrotsvitha could not have intended her own plays for performance—at most, for reading aloud at mealtimes in the convent refectory.²

Specialists, admittedly, have meanwhile recognized how different Gandersheim was from a convent in the usual sense. Founded in 852 by Duke Liudolf, the great-grandfather of Emperor Otto I, Gandersheim was from its beginnings a high aristocratic, then royal and imperial, foundation. Its abbesses were members of the reigning family. When Otto I, in 947, invested the abbess of Gandersheim with supreme authority, she became the ruler of a small autonomous princedom. The situation is well sketched in Ferruccio Bertini's recent study:

Thus the convent had its own courts, an army of its own, was empowered to mint its own coinage, had its own representative at the imperial Assembly, and enjoyed the direct protection of the Papal See without any interference from bishops.³

At least in Hrotsvitha's lifetime, that is, Gandersheim was a small, proudly independent principality ruled by women. Such independence will also have suited the Ottonian dynasty politically, since it gave the unmarried women of royal blood a certain power and intellectual scope, and lessened the danger of their marrying princes outside the family, who might loom as rivals for the throne. All who belonged to Gandersheim (except for the servants) were of noble birth, some taking vows as nuns, others remaining canonesses. It is almost certain that Hrotsvitha, born ca. 935, was one of the canonesses. It seems likely, too, that she was related to the earlier abbess of Gandersheim, Hrotsvitha I (919-26), and hence was at least a distant relative of the royal house.⁴

The nuns and canonesses at Gandersheim shared certain intellectual aspirations, which were essentially those that had been realized by Radegunde, Agnes and their circle at Poitiers. The intellectual ideal, which implied cultivation of the mind, the study of major authors both pagan and Christian, and literary exchanges with learned men, was combined with a social ideal, a gracefulness of behaviour towards others, in which an aristocratic habit of gentilezza blended with Christian love of one's neighbour. These intellectual and social impulses culminated in the spiritual—the attempt to lead a life serenely dedicated to Christ. While the nuns at Gandersheim, however, accepted strict monastic vows, the canonesses kept a number of significant personal freedoms: they could retain their private fortune, have their own servants and buy their own books, they could entertain guests, and come and go without special difficulty. If they chose to leave Gandersheim permanently, in order to marry, no stigma was attached.

Hrotsvitha's abbess, and (we can safely say, despite her many formulaic self-deprecations) close friend, Gerberga II, was the emperor's niece. Born ca. 940, and schooled at St Emmeram in Regensburg, she was still young when she came to rule Gandersheim in 959. As abbess she maintained close relations with the imperial court, and especially with the emperor's younger brother, Bruno, the court's chancellor and chaplain, whom Bezzola has called 'the soul of the Ottonian intellectual Renaissance'.⁵

We do not know how old Hrotsvitha was when she entered Gandersheim. It is possible that she spent some of her youth at the Ottonian court rather than in a convent. One detail here seems to me particularly suggestive. In 952, Otto I had invited Rather, the most widely-read scholar and most brilliant prose-writer of the age, to his court: Rather, exiled from his see at Verona because of quarrels and intrigues, arrived virtually as a refugee. Ostensibly he came to give Bruno some advanced literary teaching; but the fact that Rather cultivated a distinctive style of rhymed prose, which has notable parallels in Hrotsvitha,⁶ makes it tempting to suppose that, in Rather's years with Otto, Hrotsvitha too received instruction from him, and then tried to model some of her mannerisms on his. Especially her longest and most complicated sentences, often filled with coinages and new formations as well as rhymes, have to me a markedly Ratherian ring.

There are other good reasons for supposing that Hrotsvitha was at the court at an early age. In the passage of transition that links her series of poetic legends to her series of plays, she distinguishes between the various written sources that she used and the one piece for which she was able to rely on an eye-witness account:

the order of events leading to Pelagius' martyrdom was told me by a certain man, a native of the city [Cordova] where Pelagius suffered, who assured me that he had seen that fairest of men and had true knowledge of the outcome of the matter.⁷

This native of Cordova can only have been a member of one of Abd ar-Rāhman III's two embassies to Otto the Great (950 and 955/6). While it cannot be ruled out that one of the ambassadorial party spent some time at Gandersheim, it is far more probable that Hrotsvitha met her witness at the court itself.⁸ She must indeed have spoken with him sufficiently long and often to receive not only the account of Pelagius but some detailed related information about the life of Christians in Cordova under Moslem rule.⁹

At all events from the 960s onwards, especially through Gerberga, Hrotsvitha's links with the Ottonian court were far-reaching. And here I believe one should formulate and advance a hypothesis which, strangely, scholars have not hitherto entertained. Ruotger's biography of the emperor's brother, Bruno, mentions not only Bruno's relations with Gandersheim, the foundation ruled by his niece, but also, among Bruno's wide reading, singles out his enthusiasm for 'the unseemly jests and mimetic matter (scurrilia et mimica) that, in comedies and tragedies, are presented by various personages: while some people react to these noisily, shaking with endless laughter, he always used to read them frequently and seriously; he set least store by the content, and most by what was exemplary in the style'.¹⁰ The reference (as a passage in Thietmar of Merseburg's Chronicon, II 16, confirms) is clearly to Roman comedies and tragedies, and the scurrilia alluded to must be first and foremost those of Terence. That these were performed 'a personis variis' is presumably not a mere antiquarian aside. The biographer's contrast between using this material for an occasion of riotous merriment and using it for earnest stylistic study (as he claims of Bruno, and Hrotsvitha affirms of herself), suggests that both possibilities were familiar in his world, and that Bruno's interest—amazing if not scandalous in a holy man—was too well known for even the author of a Vita to ignore. The hypothesis I would propose, then, is that when Hrotsvitha prefaces her plays with an 'Epistola ad quosdam sapientes huius libri fautores', Bruno must have been a leading figure among those 'wise … favourers'. Hrotsvitha is overjoyed, that is, to have found favour, not in some monastery or other (as has generally been alleged), but at the court itself.

If this is correct, then it does not seem too bold to suggest that at the Ottonian court, with the encouragement of Bruno and others—including quite possibly Rather of Verona, and another spirited writer, Liutprand, likewise a keen Terentian, who often visited the court and served Otto as ambassador and chronicler—the plays of Terence were read aloud with distribution of parts; and that then, after Hrotsvitha had sent Bruno and his circle five of her own plays (the two on Gallicanus; Agape, Chionia and Hirena; Drusiana and Calimachus; and Mary the Niece of Abraham), they showed their appreciation by having these too read publicly in a similar fashion. Hrotsvitha's Epistola would represent her delighted reaction at this: it made her feel unafraid to complete her dramatic series, with her two longer, more 'philosophical' plays, The Conversion of Thais and The Passion of the Holy Maidens.¹¹

The question, what precise form a tenth-century reading might have taken, is difficult for want of documentation, and has in the past caused the most heated division of scholars into romantics and sceptics. There is indeed no direct evidence that such a reading, even with the apportioning of rôles to different readers, would have been at all like a fully-fledged performance, with the element of impersonation dominating. The chief relevant indirect evidence is the fragmentary poetic altercation between Terence and his critic,² copied probably at Reims in Hrotsvitha's lifetime, but itself somewhat older (perhaps early ninth century). There the indications of movement ('Now Terence comes out, hearing this, and says … '),¹³ of impersonation ('persona delusoris'), and even of asides ('persona secum'), make clear that the Altercation was to be performed, and almost certainly performed as prelude to a play by Terence. For how could the persona Terence have answered the mocking challenge of the persona delusoris, that his compositions were worthless and outworn, save by having a piece of his own presented for the audience to judge? Yet even here (as with the twelfth-century reference to an 'acted reading (scenica lectio)' of Terence)¹⁴ this does not, I think, warrant an inference to a fully staged performance.

On the other hand, the difference between a lifelessly academic reading of a work and one clarified and pointed by looks, gestures and movements, depends chiefly on the inclinations and skills of those taking part. These must have varied in the Middle Ages, whenever a group of people tried out a new piece, whether spoken or sung, with the text in front of them—just as at the concert performance of an opera, or the first public reading of a play today, there will always be some who cling stiffly to their script or score, and others who are able from the outset to enter into the spirit of the work. And there is no reason to suppose that the Ottonian court had only untalented, statuesque readers.

As regards movement, at least a few reasonable conjectures may also be made from internal evidence in Hrotsvitha's texts. When for instance (Drusiana and Calimachus VIII) St John goes to Drusiana's tomb with Andronicus, the heroine's husband, God appears to them in the semblance of a most fair young man:.

Andronicus: I am trembling!¹⁵
John: Lord Jesus, why have you deigned to appear

    to your servants in such a place as this?
The Lord: I have appeared so as to waken Drusiana
     and him who lies beside her tomb, for in them
     my name shall be glorified.
Andronicus: How suddenly he was taken back to
     heaven!

Even in the most unadorned public reading, these last words of Andronicus would be hard to fathom unless the fair young man were seen to vanish before the eyes of the audience. One need not suppose anything elaborate: he could quietly ascend steps to an upper gallery, or even make a simple exit behind the readers. But for Andronicus to speak his sentence while the reader of the Lord's part was still glued to the spot would have been fatuous then, just as it would be now.

More problematic is the 'mime-like' element in such a famous scene as the delusion of Dulcitius, when he embraces the sooty pots and pans in the prison kitchen, convinced that he is enjoying the bodies of the three Christian maidens. The idea of having the girls peeping through the cracks in the wall, filled with mirth at the villain's bewitchment, is Hrotsvitha's own. There is no hint of this in her hagiographic source, nor is it a kind of humour she could have learnt from Terence's text. It is the broader, visual humour of scurrilia, performed in such a way as to make people 'shake with endless laughter', in Ruotger's words, that Hrotsvitha must have witnessed at least now and then. This does not necessarily imply that, when her own scene was read aloud, it too was fully mimed; but we can be sure that she would not have shaped her scene in this particular way if she had never herself watched a mime.

At the Ottonian court, too, she will have witnessed many ceremonies that involved elaborate rôle-playing. This, it is well known, was taken to extravagant lengths by Otto III in his years in Rome (996-1002), the young dreamer who played out the life of a Roman emperor in all its grandeur, conjuring up endless imperial offices, rituals and charades.¹⁶ But already with Otto the Great and his son Otto II one has the sense that for them the imperium they strove to realize implied replaying a Roman emperor and court, though in a Christian mode. Something of this emerges in the resplendent Ottonian miniatures that survive: men and women are portrayed with grave refinement; the high and low—kings and shepherds—are subtly differentiated in their looks; gestures are stylized and hieratic; costumes and settings often deliberately classicizing. Each episode in the illustrations is solemnly set in its own space, which tends to be demarcated by pillars or curtains. It is a consciously exquisite, even precious, world—like that of Hrotsvitha's plays and poems, with which the work of the Ottonian painters has close affinity. In her dramas especially, Hrotsvitha, like the Ottonian family, wanted to replay the Roman world in a Christian mode. She was not cut off from the imperial renovatio by belonging to Gandersheim: on the contrary, this put her in a position to play a key part among the élite who shaped that renovatio. Two of her poems, on the exploits of Otto and on the origins of Gandersheim, are indeed overtly celebrations of the dynasty. But in her poetic legends and plays, too, Hrotsvitha was aware of helping to refashion, for the Ottonians, a culture worthy of the rôle they had chosen—worthy of Charlemagne, of Constantine, and of the myth of Rome.

The double cycle, of poetic legends and plays, gradually became in Hrotsvitha's conception a single magnum opus, with vast and elaborate internal symmetries. This was shown in a superb essay by Hugo Kuhn.¹⁷ Readers familiar with Kuhn's argument will see at once how much the following suggestions about Hrotsvitha's larger design owe to him, though I also propose certain qualifications and developments of Kuhn's ideas, and do not re-examine every parallel that he indicated.

Let us consider the two cycles side by side:

LEGENDS	PLAYS
Maria/Ascension	Gallicanus I-11
Gongolf	Agape, Chionia and Hirena
Pelagius	Drusiana and Calimachus
Theophilus	Mary the Niece of Abraham
Basilius	The Conversion of Thais
Dionysius	The Passion of the Holy Maidens
Agnes	Apocalypse

If we look at them from the vantage of works completed rather than of works in the making, certain parallelisms are at once evident, others become apparent only gradually.

The fifth composition in each cycle is a thematic reprise of the fourth: the story of Thais is a variation on that of Abraham's niece Mary,¹⁸ just as the story of Basil (or better, of Proterius' slave) is a variation on that of Theophilus. Central to the series of plays as to that of legends is the treatment of two women and two men, each of whom sinks to the depths by renouncing God, and rises again at last, through repentance, to win heavenly bliss. This theme, with its deep optimism, meant so much to Hrotsvitha that she illustrated it, with the help of deliberate echoes and analogies, in four different ways.

The next parallels that emerge distinctly are those at the beginning of each cycle. It is not hard to see that the first two legends (the life of the Virgin and the ascension of Christ) form a diptych, as do the two Gallicanus plays. In each case a long composition is followed by a briefer coda. Like Gallicanus in the sequel to his play, Mary continues as an important figure in the tale of Christ's ascent—indeed his speech of farewell to her, promising her own assumption into heaven, is central to the second piece. There is also a clear thematic parallel between Maria and Gallicanus I—each concerns the conflict between virginity and marriage, and shows the conflict resolved—though I find it harder to see one between the sequels.

Gongolf and Agape, Chionia and Hirena stand out in each series by their remarkable conjunction of tragic and burlesque elements. Each unfolds a story that ends in the hero's or heroine's death by martyrdom, yet the most memorable moments in each, poetically and dramatically, are filled with comedy and farce. Hrotsvitha's full title for the legend tells us that Gongolf s story is the Passio Sancti Gongolfi Martiris; but he is the martyr of marriage—he dies not at the hands of a pagan executioner, but through a plot hatched by his own wanton wife. At the close of this Passio the high-spirited tone of many of the earlier episodes becomes outright fabliau, though Hrotsvitha, while heightening the ribaldry in her source, conveys it by means of elaborate, mock-decorous circumlocutions. Gongolf s wife scoffs at the idea that her late husband has become a saint:¹

  'Miracles occur at Gongolf s tomb?—
only the way that signs and miracles
  occur out of the back of my behind!'
Thus spoke she,²⁰ and a wondrous sign
   followed her words,
  one congruent with that corporeal part:
thence she brought forth a sound of sordid
   music
  such as my little tongue is ashamed to tell.
And after this, whenever she formed a word,
 as often did she sound that graceless note.

In the play of the martyrdom of Agape and her sisters, the villains at each turn are made to look absurd. Always they lose their dignity, routed by the beneficent 'sorcery (maleficia)' of the Christian God. It is this that makes Dulcitius deflower pots and pans instead of maidens, that makes the clothes stick to the girls' bodies as they are about to be stripped naked, or that sends the youngest, Hirena, to a mountain-top, made magically inaccessible, instead of to the brothel planned for her. The illusions that seem 'malefic' to the pagans are in fact innocent, and always in a comic mode. I shall return to this point later.

The story of Pelagius and the drama of Drusiana and Calimachus again show a link in theme: both treat of an illicit love. The Caliph's attempt to seduce the beautiful Christian boy (Pel. 227-70) is portrayed with insight and daring realism; his words to the reluctant Pelagius—'o lascive puer, iactas te posse licenter / spernere …' 21—are worthy of the epigrams in the Greek Anthology. So too, Hrotsvitha's presentation of Calimachus, about to violate the dead Drusiana in her tomb—'I had been happy had I never learnt that her body was still perfect'—shows an imaginative penetration that has no counterpart in her source.

After the 'double bill' in each cycle—the tales of rejecting God and rediscovering him—come two treatments of martyrdom in a serious mode: the legend of Dionysius and the play of Sapientia's three daughters. These too show parallels of theme: the martyred ones are sages—Dionysius, the great philosopher and mystagogue, and Sapientia, the mother who even by her name embodies wisdom, who taunts her judge, the Emperor Hadrian, with the enigmas of Boethian mathematics.

The concluding parallel that Kuhn suggested is in my view correct, though still deeply problematic. The legends conclude with the story of Agnes, the virgin martyr who died refusing marriage, and whose steadfastness led to the conversion of her wooer and his father. Thus this tale both closes the first cycle—reverting to the theme of virginity and marriage in the life of Mary—and foreshadows the first play, where the chaste Constantia's refusal to consummate her marriage brings about Gallicanus' conversion. But what of the counterpiece—if such it is—at the end of the plays, thirty-five hexameters depicting scenes from the Apocalypse? Kuhn noted perceptively how the first line—'The virgin John saw heaven laid open (Iohannes caelum virgo vidit patefactum)'—brought back once more the virginity-motif that is sounded at the opening and close of both series (from Mary to Agnes, from Gallicanus to John), making each series truly cyclic. He added that, while the first and last protagonist in the legends is a woman, and in the plays a man, all the intervening legends have heroes, but all the other plays have heroines.²² He also suggested that the scenes from the end of time so swiftly evoked here are a meaningful conclusion to the twofold cycle, which had begun with the nativities of Mary and Christ, and with Christ's promise, at the ascension, that he would protect his own till the end of time. Christ coming again, to bind the dragon and open the book of life, is the fulfilment of the cycle of events that began with Mary's birth; and Hrotsvitha, in her own invocation to Mary before she begins to tell of that birth, looks forward to the apocalyptic moment, when she, 'joining the hosts of virgins, may achieve the praise of the crimson-clad Lamb perpetually' (Maria 43-4).

What remains unexplained is the use to which this brief hexameter composition was put. Those, like Homeyer, who have reflected on it, can think of these verses only as a group of tituli—inscriptions to be placed under book-illuminations or frescoes in a church.²³ Indeed the wording resembles that of tituli: 'Here the angel, seeking someone worthy, finds nobody … Behold, the secrets of the book lie open … Behold, heaven's habitants are silent as at noon. Here he stood with a censer before the holy altar … '

Yet the paradox is that these thirty-five lines, which in a sense fit so well thematically as a conclusion to the double cycle of legends and of dramas, could not serve as their conclusion if they were planned for an illustrated sacred text or for a church wall, and not as directly related to the plays. In that case their position after the plays in the manuscript would be fortuitous, and, if we nonetheless accept the idea that Hrotsvitha planned a double cycle, with many precise symmetries between the legends and dramas and between the structures of each cycle, we should also have to say that the second cycle is incomplete—that a final play on the theme of virginity and marriage, or perhaps on the end of time, is lost, or else was planned but never written.

Or is it possible that the apocalyptic verses were performed? In principle there is nothing implausible about this. From the decade 965-75—a time when Hrotsvitha was at the height of her powers—we have the first surviving detailed instructions, set down at Winchester, about how the resurrection-ceremony, Quem quaeritis, should be mimed.²⁴ We also know that the Sibyl's evocation of the fifteen Signs of Judgment—a piece that in length and form (twenty-seven hexameters) as well as content is very close to Hrotsvitha's apocalyptic poem—was performed, both at the climax of the Ordo prophetarum and independently, at least from the tenth century onwards.²⁵ Yet the wording of Hrotsvitha's composition suggests something for which I know no precise parallel in tenth- or eleventh-century sacred performances: a reader who, with expressions such as 'here' and 'behold' (hic, ecce), is pointing to and explaining events which, if they were enacted, must have been so silently. If that was the conclusion of Hrotsvitha's dramatic cycle—and it is a big 'if'—does it imply that in the plays themselves there was, after all, more movement than the minimal amount which I believe is all that our other evidence would lead us to suppose? Hrotsvitha's Apocalypse raises problems which, in our present state of knowledge, remain unanswerable.

How did Hrotsvitha arrive at her notion of structural and thematic parallels? It is tempting to think of possible iconographic inspiration. The great bronze door of Bernward of Hildesheim, with its subtle parallelisms, was not completed till 1015, a date at which almost certainly Hrotsvitha was no longer alive.²⁶ Perhaps the likeliest place at which she could have seen paintings or sculptures ordered in series was if she was ever with the court during one of its sojoums in the palace at Ingelheim. This palace had a cycle of reliefs of heroes that began with Cyrus, Romulus and Remus, Hannibal, and Alexander, and went on to Constantine, Theodoric, Charles Martel, Pippin, and Charlemagne.

To what extent the cycle showed parallelism is not clear from the description in Ermoldus Nigellus' poem," though the juxtaposition of ancient pagan hero-rulers with the Christian ones, who founded the empire that the Ottonians inherited, must have struck the eye. The church next to the imperial palace had two series of frescoes, twelve Old Testament scenes (from the creation of Adam to Solomon) on the left wall, twelve New Testament ones (from Annunciation to Ascension) on the right. But while there was symmetry, there seems to have been no interrelation, such as could have been achieved by use of figura.

In short, Hrotsvitha's scheme for her legends and plays almost certainly went well beyond any visual patternings that she might have beheld. In the harmonies of theme and structure that she succeeded in establishing, she achieved the boldest and most elaborate compositional design in Carolingian or Ottonian literature and art, at least as far as the surviving monuments can show.

It is important to add that the unity Hrotsvitha envisioned comprises the legends and plays, culminating (as on balance I incline to believe) in the apocalyptic verses—but not her other works. Between the legends and plays comes her brief transitional note, headed 'Explicit liber primus, incipit secundus'. The editors, from Winterfeld onwards, have given the erroneous impression that the Gesta Ottonis constituted Book III of Hrotsvitha's work, and scholars have often referred to this poem as 'the third book'. But neither is it called 'liber tertius' in the manuscript nor has it thematically any link with the double cycle: its links are, if anything, with the poem on Gandersheim, which likewise sets narrative in the service of dynastic commemoration.

At what stage in her writing Hrotsvitha began to think out a sweeping overall design for her legends and plays, and when she committed herself to that design decisively, can no longer be fully ascertained. From the close of Theophilus, and the new dedication to Gerberga preceding Basilius, it is evident that Hrots-vitha had first submitted to Gerberga the group of poems from Maria to Theophilus, and added the rest later. So when writing Theophilus, it seems, she had not yet thought of returning to the motif of renouncing God with a second tale. From the epistle to her favourers it looks as if there may have been a comparable break (what Kuhn called a 'Schaffenspause') in her playwriting, after the drama of Abraham's niece, when once more she felt uncertain whether or not to go on. Yet the notion of a larger design must have been in Hrotsvitha's mind before she determined on her second reprise, with The Conversion of Thais. Beyond this we are reduced to conjecture.

What we can still trace with some precision, however, especially in Hrotsvitha's Prefaces, is her growing—and changing—awareness of herself as artist. These Prefaces are written in the most artificial prose of which Hrotsvitha felt capable—yet paradoxically they are also full of self-revelations, at least between the lines. If we can look beyond Hrotsvitha's overwrought façades, beyond her topoi of humility that become almost presumptuous through sheer over-insistence, we can discover what was really on her mind.

In the discussion that follows, I shall quote from the Prefaces and the Epistle substantially, in translation. With the first Preface, it seemed relatively easy to give at least some impression of Hrotsvitha's mode of rhyming as well as an accurate picture of what she says; with the others, conveying her convolutions and nuances of expression was so demanding that rhyme-effects would only have diminished precision, and hence were not attempted.

The Preface to the series of legends begins:²⁸

This small book, adorned with little grace of beauty but elaborated with no little loving care, I offer to the benevolent gaze of all who are wise for correction, or at least to those who take no delight in belittling one who errs, but rather in the corsrecting of the errors.

I confess, indeed, to more than average erring—not only in discerning the length of syllables, but also in the forging of poetic style—and many things in this series of poems should go in hiding, as deserving blame; yet forgiveness is easily given to one who admits her errors, and faults merit the correction that's their due.

But if it is objected that certain things in this work are drawn from writings that some hold apocryphal, there's no blame here for sinister presumption, only an ignorant assumption: for, when I began to weave the thread of this chain, I did not know that things I resolved to work on were held up to doubt. And when I came to know it, I refused to undo the work—since what seems falsity may perhaps prove truth.

This being so, I am the more in need of many champions for my finished work, inasmuch as, at its inception, I could rely on too little strength of my own: I was not yet mature enough in years, or advanced enough in knowledge. But I did not dare to lay bare my impulse and intention to any of the wise by asking for advice, lest I be forbidden to write because of my clownishness. So in complete secrecy, as it were furtively, now toiling at my compositions alone, now destroying work that was badly done, I tried as best I might to produce a text of even the slightest use, based on passages in writings I had gathered to store on the threshing-floor of our Gandersheim foundation.

There follows a tribute to the guidance of Rikkardis, and of Gerberga, who, 'though younger than I, was more advanced in learning, as behoved an emperor's niece'. Hrotsvitha continues:

Though metrical composition seems difficult and arduous for women, frail as we are, 1, relying only on the help of the ever-merciful grace on high, never on my own strength, decided to harmonize the songs in this trifling work in dactylic measures. The talent of a little imagination, entrusted to me, was not to lie sluggish in the heart's dark cavern and be destroyed by the rust of negligence, but rather, struck by the hammer of unfailing diligence, was to echo some small ringing note of divine praise, whereby, if no chance came to win more, by commerce with it, it could still be transformed into an instrument of some—however paltry—profit.

The Preface concludes by asking the indulgence of the reader, who should ascribe to God whatever in the work might perchance prove well-composed.

It was one of the much-worn topoi of prefaces and dedications, from the first century onwards, to offer one's work to a reader, or readers, for improvement, asking that they correct the imperfections which remained.²⁹ Hrotsvitha, playing upon such a device, makes many asseverations of her inadequacy—yet each is immediately in some way qualified, the rhymes pointing her dialectic of balance and antithesis.

If there are errors of prosody and style, there should also be easy pardon for them, as she admits them freely; if she has erred in her choice of subject-matter, drawing on apocryphal texts, is not the concept 'apocryphal' itself something relative? Or perhaps Hrotsvitha is saying: Can legends not be true in their own way, in that they ring true imaginatively? (As we shall see, she reverted to this troubling question several times.) There is a particular double edge to Hrotsvitha's next 'modest proposal'. She was only a beginner when she started her poems, too timid to ask advice from experts at the time; yet the reason she was too timid, it at once emerges, was because she feared experts might hinder her from composing—and she was determined, come what might, to compose. Her writing secretly was grounded as much in inner resolution as in fear.

Whenever Hrotsvitha alludes (as she often does) to womanly weakness, she is saying something rich in ambiguities. Here the suggestion that writing in classical metres is especially hard for women, because they are frail, is deliberately preposterous, and is said tongue in cheek. At the same time, there is a sly recognition that the 'dactylic measure', the hexameter, was generally deemed the heroic metre par excellence, and that the heroic was a masculine prerogative. (This also suggests at least one reason why Hrotsvitha later dwelt so often on the heroism of women.)

Once more the feigned doubt has its answer ready: writing hexameters seems hard for fragile women—yet (relying on God's help) I chose to write them nonetheless. The reason that Hrotsvitha alleges again plays upon a topos: one writes so as not to be accused of idleness. She gives the thought a subtle, individual modulation by her use of the image of the talent. Here she does not quite claim ingenium—an imaginative gift, or imaginative genius—as she was to do in her later Prefaces: only ingeniolum, a 'little genius'. Yet this too is a 'talent' in the biblical sense, a coin that must not be buried but be used with profit. She sustains the metaphor: the coin-talent can be hammered and sound forth in praise of God. Even if it acquires no wordly surplus-value, it is not valueless: it can be made into an instrument, on which divine jubilations can be played.

Thus in this Preface each admission of weakness is inseparable from an impulse of self-assurance, or self-reassurance. Partly Hrotsvitha is diffident about her venture, partly she pretends to be. It is the wavering between real and pretended diffidence that reveals to us the Hrotsvitha beyond the topoi, the woman who says, in effect: 'Some of my legends are apocryphal? But there's no absolute certainty in such matters … I didn't ask the advice of sages? No, I was too shy—and I was so determined to write anyway, that I did so secretly. Hexameters are too hard for weak women to compose? Perhaps, but, weak as I was, I still decided to.'

This preface is followed by a verse dedication to Ger-berga, more conventional in tone: the abbess of royal race is to correct and polish Hrotsvitha's graceless compositions. That this here is formula rather than reality is indicated, I think, by the next lines:

When you are weary, after your varied
 labours,
 deign to read these songs by way of play.³⁰

If reading Hrotsvitha's verses is to be relaxing (ludens) for Gerberga, the task of refining them (purgare) cannot be meant too strenuously.

Certain moments in the course of the legends should perhaps also be noted for the self-awareness they display. The heading of the first, Maria, contains a strong hint of self-justification: it is 'the story … of the immaculate mother of God, which I found in written form under the name of St James (quam scriptam repperi sub nomine Sancti Iacobi), the brother of the Lord'. After completing the poem, Hrotsvitha had been told that this text was not by St James at all. Yet her rejoinder in the Preface implies that, even if the ascription to James seems to be falsitas, it may nonetheless emerge (through the rediscovery of other early documents?) that this text contained truth. Possibly Hrotsvitha's wording here in the heading even suggests an implicit challenge: how do such ascriptions, if they are incorrect, arise?

A further, almost defiant, allusion to the question of apocrypha comes within the poem—in a passage that Hrotsvitha left unchanged, or perhaps even deliberately added, when she felt it necessary to defend her choice of subject-matter. She does not need, she says, to dwell on Joseph's suspicion of Mary, or on his dream, for these things are known to all from the Gospels, and they surpass her own frail powers to tell: 'I shall base my composition only on those things which are held to be too rarely told in church' (Maria 541-2). Hrotsvitha uses the generalized passive construction (Rarius in templo quae creduntur fore dicta)—but who else thought the apocrypha were too much neglected in church? Does not the impersonal creduntur conceal a very personal credo?

The Marian diptych closes (Ascensio 147ff) with Hrotsvitha expressing her conviction that poetry is for her a means of winning bliss in heaven. Whoever reads these verses should call down God's mercy on her, so that she may continue celestially, in divine songs, the songs she has composed about God's awesome deeds ("tua facta stupenda'). A similar phrase ('facta dei') occurs in the renewed dedication to Gerberga before Basilius, and here it is a sign of greater confidence than before. Offering Gerberga her 'new little verses', Hrotsvitha says:

Do not despise them, even though they're full
 of faults,
 but, with your gentle heart, praise the deeds
 of God.³¹

Does the last line imply that it is one of God's deeds to have made Hrotsvitha a poet, or that her poems themselves are 'facta dei', in that they are designed as a means of giving glory to God? On either interpretation, Hrotsvitha's growing sense of a divine calling to compose poetry is unmistakable.

It emerges, too, in the Prelude of Basilius itself: now Hrotsvitha insists that the matter of her story, the illustration of forgiveness and of the generosity of divine compassion, is so important that she summons her reader to 'peruse these little verses with submissive heart'—

And let him not scorn the frail sex of the
 woman of no importance
 who played these melodies on a frail reed
 pipe,
but rather let him praise Christ's heavenly
 mercy:
 he does not want to destroy sinners … ³²

The sinner recovering from his or her total rejection of God is, as we have noted, the major theme that Hrotsvitha chose to portray in four different plots in the legends and dramas.

In her brief transitional note between the two series, Hrotsvitha reverts once more to the question of sources and their reliability:

All the subject-matter of this little work [the plays], as of the preceding one, I have taken from ancient books transmitted under the names of certain authors (sub certis auctorum nominibus conscriptis), except for the passion of St Pelagius [for which, as she had told, she relied on a firsthand report] … So if in either book I have included anything false in my composing, I have not misled of my own account, but only by incautiously imitating misleading sources.³³

If the texts used by Hrotsvitha reached her as the works 'of certain authors', much depended on whether the ascriptions were correct: if so, then the texts were indeed by witnesses in a position to know. But were the ascriptions 'certain' in the sense of admitting no doubt? Or could some of the texts Hrotsvitha used be imaginative reconstructions, or fabrications, of more recent date and authorship? Abelard, as is well known, set a cat among the pigeons when he questioned the status of the sources concerning Dionysius—the same sources for the most part as Hrotsvitha used.³⁴ Had she too a suspicion that for instance Hilduin, writing the life of Dionysius only a century before her own birth, was perhaps not the best authority on things said to have occurred at the time of Christ's death? At all events Hrotsvitha's levelheaded and decisive contrast between the eye-witness account from Cordova, of which she had no doubt, and the written sources, where she cannot vouch for greater veracity than that of the materials available to her, is subtle and acute.

Where the use of apocrypha posed problems for the legends, the use of Terence did so for the dramas. This comes out in Hrotsvitha's astonishing tactics in her Preface to the plays, where she says little of what she really means and means almost nothing of what she says.—

Many Catholics can be found who prefer the vanity of pagan books to the utility of holy Scripture, because of the pagans' greater eloquence and grace of style—nor can I clear myself wholly of having such a preference. There are others again who cling to the sacred page and who, though they spurn other works by pagan authors, still rather often tend to read the fictive creations of Terence; and while they take delight in the mellifluence of the style, they become tainted by coming to know an impious subject-matter.

So I, the 'Mighty Voice of Gandersheim', have not demurred at imitating Terence in composing, while others cultivate him in their reading—so that, in the same genre of composition in which the shameless unchaste actions of sensual women were portrayed, the laudable chastity of holy maidens might be celebrated, inasmuch as my little imaginative gift has power to do so.

Not rarely does it cause embarrassment, and suffuse me with a deep blush, that, compelled by the nature of this mode of composing, I have had to ponder while writing and to set down with my pen the loathsome lunacy of the love-struck and their wickedly sweet conversations, which our ears are not allowed even to entertain. Yet had I passed such matters over bashfully, I could never have done justice to my plan: I should not even have set forth the praise of the innocent as fully as I was able; for, the more seductive the caresses with which the love-maddened ones allure, the more sublime the glory of the helper on high, the more glorious the victory of those shown triumphing, especially when womanly frailty emerges victorious and virile force, confounded, is laid low.

I do not doubt that some will raise the objection with me, that the poorness of this composition is far inferior to the writing of him whom I resolved to imitate—more limited, and altogether unlike him. I admit it; yet I would explain to objectors that they cannot rightfully reproach me on the ground that I was trying perversely to compete with those who have far outstripped my want of art in loftier knowledge. I am not of such boastfulness as to presume to compare myself with even the least of their pupils. I aspire only to this, that, though I can by no means do so fittingly, still with submissive devotedness of spirit I might redirect the gift of genius I have received back to the Giver. I am not so filled with self-love, then, that—in order to avoid human reproach—I would cease to proclaim. the power of Christ, manifest in the saints, in whatever way he himself empowers me.

If my labour of love gives pleasure to anyone, I'll be glad; but if, because of my worthlessness or the boorishness of my flawed style, it pleases no one, what I have created still gives delight to me—because, while in the other little works that spring from my ignorance, I gathered my poor efforts bound in a chaplet of heroic verse, here I have plaited them in a dramatic chain, avoiding the baleful delights of the pagans by keeping them at arm's length.

It has not I think been pointed out before that none of what Hrotsvitha claims, ostensibly solemnly, at the opening of this Preface can conceivably be literally true. In the fourth century there were, to be sure, some Christian men of letters who preferred reading pagan authors, because of their more elegant style, to reading the Bible—Augustine's and Jerome's admissions of weakness in this matter are especially well known. And it is possible that a handful of the most literate people at Otto's court once again made such a stylistic comparison and came down in favour of pagans—Bruno perhaps, or Rather or Liutprand," and (as she concedes, with feigned reluctance, in a knowing aside) Hrotsvitha herself. But that 'many Catholics (plures … catholici)' showed this preference in Hrotsvitha's time, or had the knowledge to discriminate among styles in this way, is at least a wild exaggeration, and almost certainly a joke. The joking becomes patent, and more outrageous, in the next sentence: could anyone seriously imagine readers who, out of sheer devoutness, spum for instance Vergil and Cicero, but still cling to Terence because he is so great a stylist? This may indeed be a teasing allusion to Chancellor Bruno's fondness for Terence, a mischievous hyperbole, pretending that this was his exclusive taste, his addiction. But the sentence can no more be taken straight than if we were to read, in a history of modern literature, that twentieth-century England was full of High Anglicans who rejected all non-sacred writing, yet who could never stop themselves from reading Congreve.

Those who read Terence (naturally only for his style!), Hrotsvitha adds, become corrupted. The question that occurs irresistibly—was she then not corrupted by reading Terence?—is the one that, by this mock-serious statement, she wittily passes by.

Or we might say, she redirects the question: she reads Terence in order to save those litterati, those delicate stylists who are so easily corruptible, from themselves! With her ironically placed Latin equivalent for her name—Clamor Validus = Old Saxon Hrôthsuith³⁶—she even intimates that writing chaste, Christian plays in the Terentian genre, and thereby redeeming the genre, was a kind of prophetic mission she took on. Hers is the 'mighty voice': the expression 'ego Clamor Validus' can hardly help carrying a reminiscence of John the Baptist's 'ego vox clamantis'. At the same time, clamor can have an objective as well as subjective force: then her Latinization of the name would suggest something more like 'the big noise of Gandersheim', and be a self-mocking recognition that the spreading rumour of her composing was making her known as a prodigy—or a freak. Once more the diminutive ingeniolum comes—her 'little genius' will celebrate chaste maidens, where Terence's great genius had turned to lascivious women. It sounds irreproachable—until we recall that at the centre of her dramatic series are two plays which are not about chaste maidens at all, but which have two zestfully lascivious heroines.

Yet at once Hrotsvitha concedes this: she had to portray sexual love and love-talk, however embarrassing to do so, for the sake of her greater aim—to show the workings of redemption. In order to value chastity, one must first know what love-madness is, and not be so shocked by the very idea that one fails to understand it. Only by showing love, 'wickedly sweet', in all its attractiveness, and lovers in all their lunacy, will the heroic nature of repentance become clear. Hrotsvitha's word-plays here—'amantium dementiam … male dulcia … amentium'—are characteristic of a pagan way of talking about love. These are Plautine, Terentian and Ovidian turns of phrase,³⁷ that were still to have a long fortune after Hrotsvitha, and ones that she uses lightly, hardly with prophetic fervour. Yet here, arguing that sin must be shown in all its seductiveness in order to show the sublimity of recovering from it, she is fashioning her own counterpart to the ancient paradox of human love:³⁸ to experience love's blissful sweetness, the lover must know its bitter sorrow first. She is also touching seriously on that process of redemption which she depicts in her central pair of legends and of plays: the ultimate victory of virtue is a triumph of God, but Hrotsvitha also sees it 'especially (praesertim)' as a feminist triumph. Weak women show their power, strong men go under.

Mary and Thais show their strength by renouncing their lives as courtesans (lives in which, Hrotsvitha makes clear, they both enjoyed themselves immensely). Does Hrotsvitha herself, another weak woman, display a power comparable with theirs by renouncing the philosophy of Terence's plays, replacing it by celebrations of Christian mercy? Or is her power merely an arrogant pretence—like that of Terence's Delusor in the Altercation—as if she could vanquish a great ancient author? This is the objection to which she next turns.

Again her extravagant protestations of modestry have a twinkle about them. Of course she does not write as well as Terence, she assures—yet even in saying that her plays are 'altogether unlike' his (penitusque dissimilis), is she not also making an implicit claim for their originality? And when she goes on to affirm, I am not competing with those (living scholars) who are far wiser than I, does she not equally mean, I am attempting something they have not attempted? Theirs is the 'loftier knowledge (scientia sublimior)' of theology, ethics, sciences—yet they never thought of composing in the Terentian mode.

The pair of justifications that follow ('Nec enim tantae sum iactantiae … Ideoque non sum adeo amatrix mei … ') likewise contain both an affirmative and a negative element. Anticipating criticisms that she is boastful, or full of self-love, she both abases herself and insists that her ingenium (now no longer diminutive) must—like the talent in the parable—be moved serviceably towards the God who gave it to her, and, even, that her ingenium is itself a proclamation of Christ's power, one that no censure of human beings ought to silence.

With the last sally in the Preface, an impish sense of self-possession gains the ascendant. Hrotsvitha says in effect: you can take my work or leave it—I'm glad if you like it, and if you don't, at least I've given myself some pleasure. Yet the sentence continues craftily, with 'because': 'memet ipsam tamen iuvat quod feci, quia …' The reason Hrotsvitha alleges that her work helps, or delights, her (even if it's no good as literature) is because writing it was for her an effective antidote against pagan delights! In this last sentence the wit directed, not against pagan delights but against Christian hypocrisies, is devastating. It is (to resume my analogy) as if the High Anglican who disapproved of secular writing wrote his own plays, ones that kept Congreve constantly in view, and then answered charges of inconsistency by saying: 'But I write them as my protection against Congreve!'

Admittedly, Hrotsvitha claimed she had gone to Terence for style and form, changing the content completely. And yet it is not hard to see that this is disingenuous. Her stylistic debt to Terence is not in fact large. She copies a number of Terentian mannerisms and phrases (exclamations such as 'Pro Juppiter!', 'Ridiculum!', 'Eccam!', 'Atat!' are obvious examples).³⁹ She likewise imitates certain techniques: the use of rapid exchanges and repartee, or the device of bringing on characters in the first scene of a play to provide needed background information. Yet Hrotsvitha does not imitate Terence metrically, and her diction owes more to Vergil and Prudentius than to him.⁴⁰ Where her debt to Terence is far-reaching is not in style but in subject-matter.

For Terence, like Hrotsvitha, had presented with imaginative sympathy a number of young women who were innocent victims.⁴¹ The girls in the Andria, Eunuchus or Adelphoi do not speak, yet in each case they are the focal point of the play's plot. Always the victimized girl triumphs at the close: she wins her freedom, wins her love-match. In the Andria and Eunuchus the girls, like Hrotsvitha's heroines, are even hedged by 'miracles'—wondrous revelations that lead to the discovery of their true identity and their distinguished birth. In the Adelphoi we see a young girl being rescued, like Hrotsvitha's Mary, from a brothel. In the Terentian plays, as in Hrotsvitha's, we often witness trickery, deception and disguise employed in a good cause, in order to confound the men who think themselves mighty—the blustering, boastful or tyrannic ones. As in Hrotsvitha's scenes of confrontation and martyrdom, there are continual threats of whipping and torture, which hardly ever have any effect: in Terence as in Hrotsvitha, there is a hair's breadth between the comic and the horrible. Terence's emotional gamut—the spheres of tenderness, of trickery, and of blustering force nimbly defeated—is (if we leave the specifically Christian motifs out of account) humanly close to Hrotsvitha's.

I am certain that Hrotsvitha was fully aware of this, and that she couched her elusive defence for having tumed to Terence in a deliberately misleading way. To carry off the coup she intended, she created her own weapon of literary coquetry. Her shape-shifting, her 'weak little woman' pose, her headily exaggerated modesty-topoi, her diminutives, her graceful to-and-fro of affirmation and negation, can all be seen as in the service of that coquetry: all are witty, skilled means of commanding recognition and respect for her way of looking.

Hrotsvitha was aware of double standards throughout the world of her experience. First and foremost, a different range of expectations for men and women, and for their capacities. Here her coquetry takes the form of comically stressing women's weakness, never minimizing it, yet always pointing it in such a way as to foil expectations and paradoxically show women's strength.

She is equally conscious of other anomalies: between the values of Terence and those of hagiographic writers; between the counsels of perfection of the Christian life and the lapses from it in the world of court and Church; between the demands of entertainment and those of edification. I am not suggesting that her wit resolved these anomalies in complete relativism (such as we might ascribe, far later, to someone like Jean de Meun). Hrotsvitha is indeed committed to the Christian life, the hagiographic goal and the didactic aim; at the same time, she never for one moment ignores their profane and wicked counterparts. Her art is, while pursuing the first, to keep the second constantly in view—to allow for confrontations that can range from violent clashes for the sake of an ideal (the pagan persecutors versus the martyr-heroines) to humorous recognitions of real frailty (as when St Gongolf, with his magic fountain, out-tricks—rather than punishes—his unfaithful wife). And wherever Hrotsvitha dwells most ardently on the 'higher' values, she cannot help hearing echoes of the 'lower': in this sense both Terence and the Christian antidote delight her simultaneously.

Even her frequent condemnations of lasciviousness in the poems and plays are not incompatible with her fascination with it. Hrotsvitha is well aware that the one sheep which is lost and found again is more interesting than the ninety-nine which have no need of penance ('quanto extitit foedior, tanto appareat nitidior'), and that it gives more delight ('magis delectatur').⁴² Chastity becomes an absorbing theme for her as much for its penumbra of wantonness as for its own radiance. The many scholars who have seen Hrotsvitha's aim only in terms of a 'straight' didactic and ascetic intention have not read her Prefaces or her writings sensitively.

The Preface to the plays is followed by the letter to her wise fautores.43 In her relief and joyful gratitude that her work has found a welcoming echo among them, Hrotsvitha's euphuism and overacted womanly submissiveness at first seem boundless:

I can scarcely marvel sufficiently at the magnitude of your praiseworthy condescension,⁴⁴ nor can I fittingly requite, with recompense of condign thanks, the plenitude of your magnificent benignity and charity towards my inadequacy: for, even though you are nurtured above all in spiritual study and are of surpassing excellence in knowledge, you have thought the paltry work of me, a worthless little woman, worthy of your admiration, and, rejoicing with brotherly affection, have praised in me the Giver of operative grace: you think to find in me some little knowledge of the arts, the subtlety of which far exceeds my womanly genius.

In a word, hitherto I hardly dared to show the clownishness of my little composition⁴⁵ even to a few people, and if at all, then only to intimate friends. So the task of composing something further of this nature almost ceased.

Now, however, Hrotsvitha says she has found the confidence she needed to continue, to complete the greater design she had projected, for (playfully she gives her patrons a biblical auctoritas, from Deuteronomy 19: 15) 'what is confirmed by three witnesses is true'. In what follows, Hrotsvitha makes her most serious analysis of her calling as poet: she is convinced there is a divine element in human creativity:

In the midst of this I am torn between diverse impulses—joy and fear: indeed I feel joy deep in my heart that God, through whose grace I am what I am, is praised in me; yet I am afraid to seem greater than I am—I have no doubt that both denying the spontaneously given gift of God and pretending to have received what was not received are equally wrongful.

She is genuinely awestruck by the burden that such a gift imposes; yet she is also unafraid to adapt to herself the words that Paul had used (1 Corinthians 15: 10): 'by the grace of God I am what I am'. Hrotsvitha's fautores (unlike her editors) will have recognized her Pauline citation and been aware of its context—a mingled pride and humility close to Hrotsvitha's, as Paul passes from 'I am the least of the apostles, I who am not worthy to be called an apostle' to 'but I laboured more abundantly than all the apostles—not I, however, but the grace of God with me'.

A moment later, with renewed excessive declarations of her own inadequacy, her sense of humour returns irrepressibly:

Hence I do not deny that through the Creator's grace I have knowledge of the arts potentially (per dynamin), since I am a living being with the capacity to learn; yet I confess I am utterly ignorant in actuality (per energian). I realize that a penetrating imaginative insight was divinely conferred on me, yet when the loving care of my teachers (magistrorum)⁴⁶ ended, it remained uncultivated.

Hrotsvitha 'demonstrates' her ignoranceh by using deliberately recherché language—the Greek philosophical expressions per dynamin … per energian—that she will have drawn from a letter by St Jerome.⁴⁷ Here we are not far from the games-playing of Wolfram von Eschenbach two and a half centuries later—Wolfram who, after claiming that he can neither read nor write, proceeds to record the names of the planets in Arabic!⁴⁸

Again there is much in the thoughts that follow that is not what it seems:

Therefore, lest God's gift be annulled in me through my own negligence, I have tried to tear some threads, or even shreds, of cloth, snatching them from Philosophia's robe, to interweave them with the present work, so that the wretchedness of my ignorance be illumined by the intermingling of nobler stuff, and that the bestower of genius be praised rightfully, and the more copiously in that women's understanding is held to be more retarded.

Hrotsvitha is indicating that, encouraged by the reception of her earlier plays (presumably those from Gallicanus to Mary the Niece of Abraham, which survive as a group in the twelfth-century Cologne manuscript), she felt emboldened to try to give her last ones a further, philosophical dimension, with the help especially of Boethian materials. Yet the way she says this is characteristically double-edged. She knew well enough that in Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy those who tore shreds from Philosophia's dress were blindly skirmishing sects of pseudo-philosophers, men who thereby degraded Philosophia, grabbing at her dress as if she were a meretrix.⁴⁹ It is another expression of mock-humility to suggest that she, in her use of Boethius, had done no more than that. But her follow-up—that through the borrowed shreds in the fabric of her work God will be magnified the more, 'in that women's understanding is held to be more retarded'—alludes not only to the common masculine stereotype of women, but indirectly, with telling irony, to Philosophia herself (who in Hrotsvitha's time was mostly identified with Sapientia—divine Wisdom). In the very moment she plays upon the chimera of women's intellectual inferiority, Hrotsvitha reminds her sages that philosophers have always been inspired by Philosophia, she who could be called 'womanly understanding' incarnate.

At the close Hrotsvitha, with the established gesture of submissiveness, asks her patrons to correct and improve her work. Yet even here she slips in a remarkable phrase—'it behoves you to examine and emend [my little book] with no less affectionate solicitude than if it were a product of your own labour'—that deliberately leaves the reader guessing whether it is meant to be charming or challenging. If Hrotsvitha's fautores still had any illusions about women's weakness, reading this letter of hers must have been a chastening experience.

There is one other Preface by Hrotsvitha, accompanying the Gesta Ottonis, which Gerberga had charged her to write. The Gesta, composed ca. 965 and concluded before 968, are generally held to be later than both the legends and the plays. If this is correct, we can say that by the time she was thirty Hrotsvitha had completed her magnum opus, her twofold cycle, and that she had won full recognition by her fautores at the imperial court. Thus it is not surprising that Hrotsvitha was then asked, as the price of her reputation, to do something expected in many ages of court poets, or poets laureate: to celebrate her sovereign in the epic manner. The commission, her Preface tells, was given her directly by Gerberga, Otto's niece; but in some dedicatory verses to Otto II, still only of schoolboy age when the poem was completed, Hrotsvitha recalls that he too had asked her for it personally: 'if you deign to remember, you yourself, your eyes sparkling, recently bade that the text be presented to you'. In a verse Prologue to his father, Otto I, we see Hrotsvitha's characteristic ambiguity, half-concealing both humility and pride:

Even though many books praising you fittingly may be written after this, books that will deservedly give pleasure, yet let this little book not be the last in rank, for it was clearly written first, without a model.⁵⁰

Hrotsvitha's play on the close of the parable-—the last shall be first—here implies a shrewd claim to originality: her work is the lowliest, and yet, in another sense, it takes precedence over all others.

Nonetheless Hrotsvitha was not entirely happy in her commission, or in her rôle as imperial panegyrist. Unlike the Archpoet, who, two centuries later, was asked in vain for an epic on the gesta of Frederick Barbarossa, she at least tried to do as she was bidden. Yet she felt—in this instance quite genuinely—unsure of herself. Principally because, for the first time in her composing, she had to work without the help of written sources,⁵" or indeed, for many major episodes, without detailed firsthand reports, such as she had had for Pelagius. Amid the flourishes that open her Preface for Gerberga, Hrotsvitha is plaintive about the situation in which she had been placed, as well as wonderfully perceptive about the problems involved in composing official gesta:⁵²

My sovereign lady, you that shed light with the sparkling iridescence⁵³ of your spiritual wisdom, may it not irk"⁵⁴ your benignity to look through what, you are not unaware, has been fashioned at your command. Indeed it was you who imposed this burden, that I set forth the deeds of great Caesar in poetic form—deeds that I could not assemble comprehensively enough, even orally. You can ima-gine how much difficulty I in my ignorance encountered in the toil of this process of composition, for neither did I find these matters previously written down, nor could I elicit an account of them from anyone in a well-ordered and sufficiently full way.

I journeyed like one who, not knowing the route, is about to travel through a vast unknown ravine, where every path lies concealed, covered by thick snow: led on by no guide, only by signals of direction received beforehand, such a one would now stray onto by-paths, now unexpectedly hit the right path again, until at last, having reached the midpoint of the densely crowding trees, he would choose a spot for his longed-for rest, and there, staying his step, would not dare continue, until another came across him and could guide him, or he found a previous traveller's footprints he could follow. No otherwise did l, commanded to penetrate the vast region of glorious events, traverse the manifold paths of the royal deeds faltering and wavering, very ill at ease, and, utterly exhausted by them, sink to rest in silence in a suitable spot; nor do I undertake to climb the pinnacle of imperial excellence without guidance.

Here too Hrotsvitha's diffidence has as its obverse her positive sense of doing something wholly new. Yet the last clause, where she is overtly claiming she is too lowly to celebrate, unaided, Otto's deeds as emperor, after his coronation at Rome in 962, is in effect more of a recusatio, comparable to the Archpoet's when he was asked to magnify his emperor's deeds." She has, she implies, written the 'epic' composition that was demanded (though indeed she kept it relatively brief); and she is not prepared to go on, unless she were provided with a coherent written prose account from which to work. In the poem itself, typically, it is always 'womanly weakness' that is offered as pretext: Hrotsvitha refuses to attempt battle-scenes, because a frail woman cannot hope to do them justice, especially not one who leads as sheltered a life as she (Gesta 237ff). And at the close (1487ff) Hrotsvitha revels in a mock-solemn device of praecisio: she has sung the deeds of Otto as king, but she is afraid to touch his deeds as emperor, 'for I am forbidden by my womanly nature'. Yet at once Hrotsvitha goes on to tell all the things she is 'forbidden' to write about: how Otto was able to defeat and banish King Berengarius and his odious queen, Willa, to depose one pope and install another in Rome, and to arrange for the imperial coronation of his son. Perhaps this close gives the best pointer to what did not come fully alive in the course of the poem: Hrotsvitha's ingeniolum was too mercurial, too much accustomed to mingling the comic and the serious, to adapt well to the kind of panegyric expected from a poet laureate. Like the Archpoet, she could not keep a straight face quite so long.

Finally, I should like to suggest that other aspects of Hrotsvitha's self-awareness become clear if we scan her writings for what I would call indirectly autobiographic moments. This is perhaps a precarious undertaking, yet at times it too can lead to illuminating insights. I shall illustrate by looking closely at three moments: two are chosen from Hrotsvitha's best-known plays, and one from the poem on the origins of Ganders-heim, which is virtually unknown save to a few specialists.

Hrotsvitha's play about Agape, Chionia and Hirena (generally, but erroneously, called Dulcitius) draws on a strange source, a late Roman Passion ofSt Anastasia, which troubled its twentieth-century editor, the great Bollandist Delehaye, because of the amount of 'fantasy' and 'audacious fiction' that had contaminated what was doubtless a 'good' original.⁵⁶ The very features that disquieted Delehaye were those that attracted Hrotsvitha: in fact, she chose to focus on these and ignore all else, discarding even the figure of St Anastasia, the protagonist in the source. Hrotsvitha selected, and brought to life, especially the three sisters (whom her source introduced only as minor characters, protégées of Anastasia) and the villain-buffoons, Dulcitius and Sisinnius, who are mocked and confounded by those girls.

The implicit self-references in the play can, I submit, be perceived by way of a series of verbal echoes that link it with Hrotsvitha's Preface and Epistle at the opening of the dramatic cycle. There Hrotsvitha tried to excuse her concern with the deeds 'of lascivious women (lascivarum … feminarum)'; she admitted to blushing with shame ('verecundari gravique rubore perfundi … erubescendo') when she turned to such matters as lasciviousness, and yet, she stresses, she was trying to show how 'womanly frailty emerges victorious and virile force, confounded, is laid low (femi-nea fragilitas vinceret et virilis robur confusioni subia-ceret)'. And in the epistle she speaks of her work as that 'of a worthless little woman (vilis mulierculae)'. All these thoughts return, with identical or very similar expressions, in a different modulation in the play of the three maidens. For the Emperor Diocletian, these maidens are 'viles mulierculae' (IX); for the deluded villains, the prison governor Dulcitius and Count Sisin-nius, they are 'lascivae puellae' (VII, IX). And at the close it is the men—Sisinnius and his soldiery—whom Hirena provokes to blush ('erubesce … erubesce'), as their show of might is set at naught by a tenella virgun-cula.

Hrotsvitha lays special stress on the strength-in-weakness of the youngest of the three girls, Hirena. At the opening, the Emperor expects her to be more amenable than her sisters, because of her youth; instead, punning on her own name ('Peace'), she cries out: 'You'll find the third rebellious and utterly resistant!' She, the littlest, argues the most ferociously and magniloquently ('Conquiniscant idolis, qui velint incurrere iram celsitonantis!'),⁵⁷ and at the close she launches her supreme defiance against pagan 'virile force':

Unhappy man, blush—blush, Sisinnius, and groan at being vanquished ignominiously: for you could not defeat a tender little girl's youth without a panoply of arms … You shall be damned in Tartarus; but 1, about to receive the palm of martyrdom and the crown of virginity, shall enter the ethereal bed-chamber of the eternal King.⁵⁸

Thus Hirena, like Hrotsvitha the author, turns the language of the aggressive male world to her advantage.

The pagan men continually ascribe their powerlessness against the Christian girls to the girls' witchcraft (maleficia). Thus the soldiers lament (XIV): 'We are all "illuded" in wondrous ways (Miris modis omnes illudimur)'. In that notion of illusion, too, there may be a poetic connotation relevant to Hrotsvitha herself. The worthless little women, whose defeat of male strength the men see as wantonness and evil illusion, are seen by Hrotsvitha as the blessed, innocent ones, whose illuding is divine grace, and whose 'lasciviousness' is satisfied in the bed-chamber of the divine lover. And here the implicit parallel between the innocent virgin-fighter, Peace, and Hrotsvitha the dramatist, emerges in its full complexity: Hrotsvitha designates herself a vilis muliercula as regards her writing; she knows she could be censured as lasciva for her fascination with Terence and for some of her own choices of subject-matter; yet she also knows that the intention of her lascivia is a blessed one, a celebration of the girls' divine love-union, not of earthly delights—a voluptuousness through chastity. But like the girls, she too 'illudes in wondrous ways', by means of her art: in place of maleficia, she achieves the innocent magic of dramatic fiction, and her power in this she, like the heroines in the play, attributes to God's grace. Like Hirena, she stresses (in her Preface to the legends) how young she was when, by beginning to write, she in her own way issued a challenge to the masculine world of her time.⁵⁹ But it is precisely the young, fragile girl, Hirena-Hrotsvitha, who, with the help of grace, can conquer the frightening world of men, whether that means the real court of Emperor Otto or the imagined one of Emperor Diocletian. There—in the real as in the imagined court—she can win a moral victory over the mighty pagan (Sisinnius or Terence), she can substitute for the pagan's sexual ruses (the humiliation of the girl-victim, her being sent to a brothel) the 'ethereal bed-chamber' of the Song of Songs.

From Hrotsvitha's play Mary the Niece of Abraham I would single out a moment that is filled with borrowed language and literary allusion and is at the same time one of the most moving and personal in all her work. Abraham, who came to the brothel disguised as a lover, so as to rescue his fallen niece, Mary, has persuaded her to repent and return to the desert with him. With a phrase that is close to the lyrical albas, where lovers part at dawn, he says to her: 'Dawn grows bright; light is coming; let us leave.'⁶⁰ (Where secret lovers in the lyrics must sorrowfully go their separate ways, here the pair, bound by a different love, depart serenely together.) Submissively Mary says she will walk behind him; but Abraham rejoins:

Not so: I shall walk, but set you on the horse, lest the roughness of the way should cut your tender feet (secet teneras plantas).

She answers:

Oh what name can I give you (O quem te memorem)? What reward of thanks can I offer you, you who do not force me by terror, even though I deserve no pity …

Into this exchange Hrotsvitha has set a key-phrase from Vergil's Eclogues and another from the Aeneid.⁶¹ She could be sure that some of her first audience—Gerberga and Bruno among the imperial family, and the finest scholars who had come to the Ottonian court—knew Vergil well enough to recall the original contexts and perceive the full symbolic value of their use here. In the tenth Eclogue, Gallus laments that his beloved Lycoris had (like Mary) become wanton—she had followed the soldiers to the Rhine, far from her home; yet, still in love with Lycoris, he feels nothing but compassion, and imagines how harsh the journey along the Rhine will be for her, 'cutting her tender feet'; for Gallus (like Abraham) is one in whose thoughts 'Love conquers everything.' Hrotsvitha has transformed Gallus' fantasy, his sublimation of sensual obsession, into Abraham's fatherly tenderness. And Mary answers, overcome, in the words Aeneas had used to Venus, as she appeared to him disguised ('O quam te memorem?'). Like Aeneas, Mary has at this moment the sense of a superhuman destiny revealing itself to her in human semblance: the journey back into the wilderness with Abraham ('asperitas itineris') is her life.

As Hrotsvitha tried to 'redeem' Terentian episodes—the girls who are victimized, the brothel-scenes—so here she is 'redeeming' Vergilian language. For her it is no longer Gallus' erotic reverie, or the appearance of a pagan goddess to Aeneas: she has taken the language and transmuted it in her own design. We might say that, in the whole process by which Abraham rescues Mary, Hrotsvitha identified imaginatively with both parts. As Mary left her monastic cell to go and live in Alexandria, Hrotsvitha is in fantasy a Mary, who had deliberately decided to dwell in the lupanar of Terence's world. While (as her Preface hints) many churchmen of her time will have found that decision shocking, she was exhilarated and happy in the Terentian world, just as Mary is in her house of sin. She is fond of Terence, as Mary is of the innkeeper for whom she works, the host who, amazed to see her weeping suddenly, says 'Haven't you lived here for two years, and never a moan or a sad word escaped you?' At the same time, Hrotsvitha sees herself in imagination as someone stronger—as an Abraham who temporarily pretends to be of that wanton world, but who has not really succumbed to it. Like Abraham, she enters the world of wantonness in order to challenge it, or at least to redeem from it what she—or Abraham—holds most dear.

The last of Hrotsvitha's extant works, the poem on the origins of Gandersheim, composed in 973 or slightly later, is the only one without a Preface. Perhaps there was a Preface, which has been lost (the poem no longer exists in manuscripts; its text survived only in the editio princeps); yet it is also possible that Hrotsvitha had now gained sufficient reassurance and recognition to be able to open with tranquil directness:

Behold, my spirit, lowly and submissive,
breaks forth to tell the origins of blissful
   Gandersheim.

The site for Gandersheim came to be chosen, Hrotsvitha relates, because of an inexplicable repeated apparition of lights in the depths of a forest, an apparition that was held to be a sign from heaven:⁶²

As the report of many well-informed people
   tells,
near our foundation there was then a small
   forest, circled
by shadowing hills—that circle us even today.
There in that wood was set a little farm
where Liudolf s swineherds used to lodge
in the farmer's fenced enclosure, letting their
   weary
bodies sink into rest in the hours of the night,
while the swine in their charge were pasturing.
Here, once upon a time, two days before the
   high
feast of All Saints was to be celebrated,
the swineherds saw many bright lamps in the
   wood,
blazing in the dark of the night.
Perceiving this, awestruck, they wondered
what the new vision of sparkling light could
   mean,
that cleft night's blackness with strange
   radiance.

Trembling, they told the owner of the
   homestead,
pointing to the place the light had flooded.
He, eager to verify what he had heard,
determined the next night to stay awake,
joining the men in the open, beyond the
   eaves:
he would not shut his eyes, heavy with sleep's
   persuasion,
till they had seen the lit lanterns glint again.
They saw them, vanquishing the first in
   number,
in the same spot as before, though earlier.
Scarcely had Phoebus shed his first beams
   from heaven
when this sign of happy omen, so serene,
was made known, with jocund Rumour telling
   all.
Nor could it be kept hidden from great Duke
   Liudolf—
swiftly it reached his ears.
And he himself, on holy Halloween,
went with a crowd to keep vigil in that forest,
keenly scanning to see if the apparition
would again betoken something heavenly.
At once, as thick night covered the land with
   mist,
all around, circling the wooded valley
where the surpassing noble temple was to be
   built,
many lights were beheld, set in harmonious
   order:
they cleft the tree-shadows, and the dark night
   too,
with their radiantly penetrating gleam.
All affirmed that this spot should be made
   holy,
in the service of him who had filled it with
   such light.

While there are parallels to wondrous visions of light in hagiography,⁶³ I think there can be little doubt that the primary inspiration for this episode lies in the Gospel account of the birth of Christ. Hrotsvitha, telling of the swineherds, assuredly has in mind the shepherds (Luke 2: 8ff) who kept the night vigil guarding their flocks, when a divine radiance flashed round about them, filling them with fear. This fear turned to joy when the radiance was revealed as a divine omen, the shepherds then telling it to the people all around (2: 18). That the supernatural light is seen first by the lowly and only then by kings (the Magi of Matthew 2) is not stated in the Gospels, yet this was the clear implication of the 'synoptic' account, which became the basis for Christmas homilies.

As in illo tempore, in the Christmas night, the harbinger of the divine event was beheld first by shepherds, so with the gleams of light in the darkness that betokened the birth of Gandersheim. The foundation that was destined to have such regal splendour is first seen augured by the humblest folk, and it is their telling what they see that makes the fulfilment of the lights possible.

Yet the Gandersheim of 852 is the same place, Hrotsvitha insists, as the Gandersheim of her own day. Still there is a dark forest, and shadowing hills. Can there still be lights in that forest, heralding a special divine grace? The secret answer lies, I believe, in Hrotsvitha's conception of her own rôle. She constantly affirms herself to be the lowliest, 'last of the last (ultima ultimarum)'"⁶⁴ of those who dwell at Gandersheim; yet may it not be because of this that she, like the swineherds, is the first to be blessed by descrying new lights? Gradually the greater world learns of what the lowly one has seen—it reaches the ears of Otto, as the first apparition of lights reached those of his ancestor Liudolf. Then the great themselves begin to watch, and the lights appear 'set in harmonious order': an implicit—even if not fully conscious—equivalent to that ordo, that symmetrical twofold cycle, which Hrotsvitha came to present. The lights, that is, were once symbols of Gandersheim the foundation, but they are also—at least potentially—symbols of the chronicler of Gandersheim, Hrotsvitha herself. She is the vilis muliercula who, in a special, divinely granted way, receives illumination.

Deep within, Hrotsvitha was certain she had been blessed with this illumination—or better, she became increasingly certain of this as her writing progressed. So in a sense, despite all her protestations, she is not humble—except in the way of the poet who says 'Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me'.⁶⁵ Her insistences on her frailty, lowly submissiveness, and incompetence all contain an element of deliberate overacting: they can be seen as so many ironic glances at the double standards of the world she knew, and especially of the powerful male-dominated world. So, too, her constant use of diminutives is more than a stylistic mannerism. They reveal an aspect of her thought: they are self-assured, even self-assertive, by being self-deprecating. When she speaks of her ingeniolum, or of the gratiola she receives, she is saying in effect, these may be of little moment in the world of warriors, sovereigns and popes, yet she is also hinting that she has imaginative genius (ingenium) and does receive true grace for writing.

The evaluation of that writing poses many problems. It has sparkling moments, and profound ones; it can be cherished for the complex—and I think attractive—personality it reveals. One can admire both Hrotsvitha's many-sided resourcefulness and the high aspirations revealed by the design of her double cycle of legends and plays. Yet technically that design remained imperfect. This is chiefly because Hrotsvitha never came to feel wholly at ease in the classical metres (as the finest Carolingian poets had done); nor, on the other hand, did she take experiment a step further and transform classical verse into a medium wholly her own (as the author of Ruodlieb was to do some decades later). The hexameters cited in translation from the Primordia coenobii Gandesheimensis are among the freshest, most unforced in her writing; yet even here a slight stiffness of movement and somewhat repetitive wording suggest that in quantitative measures Hrotsvitha never reached the flexibility and vivacity of expression that came to her so readily in her rhymed prose, and especially in dialogues.

Hrotsvitha's finest qualities and her limitations are comparable to those encountered among the painters who were her contemporaries. We might say, especially with her poetry in ancient forms, that she tried to press too much of her own thoughts and feelings into frames as classically elegant, and as confining, as those used by the Ottonian miniaturists, where, for all the finesse, something a little aloof and rigid tends to remain.

She began her twofold cycle with Marian legends and ended it with an apocalyptic tableau. It is worth recalling that in the seventh century an unpredictable artist, whose stylistic sources are still in many aspects enigmatic,⁶⁶ had painted at Castelseprio a double series of frescoes—Marian and apocalyptic. It is this artist's immediacy, his fluid and dynamic qualities, that neither Hrotsvitha nor the illuminators of her time recaptured. True, they did not aim to—but that does not prevent one from sometimes longing for it.

Hrotsvitha remained, by and large, without influence in the later Middle Ages. Yet some of her plays were copied several times in the eleventh and twelfth centuries,⁶⁷ and once Gallicanus was even furnished with stage-directions. Hrotsvitha's distinctive literary coquetry, however, has parallels in the eleventh century, among some of the women poets to whom we shall now turn: Constance's way with Ovid's Heroides, for instance,⁶⁸ comes very close to Hrotsvitha's with Terence. And one intriguing possibility of Hrotsvitha's direct influence must at least be broached. The unique comprehensive manuscript of her writings, copied in the late tenth or early eleventh century, was preserved at St Emmeram in Regensburg, where Gerberga had been educated. Did the learned young women at Regensburg who, in the later eleventh century, wrote verses of love, flirtation and teasing wit,⁶⁹ ever look at Hrotsvitha's writings? Was their particular brand of coquetry learnt as well as cultivated spontaneously? Did they find their oscillations between deference and proud assurance wholly for themselves—or (as I suspect) with a little help from the ingeniolum of their supersubtle predecessor?

Notes

¹ See especially B. Nagel, Hrotsvit von Gandersheim, and, for more recent work, the fine survey by D. Schaller, 'Hrotsvit' pp. 105-14. Since Schaller's essay, the most important work has been that of two Italian scholars: G. Vinay, Alto medioevo latino pp. 483-554, and F. Bertini, Il 'teatro' di Rosvita.

² This claim is based on the closing lines of the legend Theophilus, which Homeyer (Opera p. 152), following Lehmann (Erforschung des Mittelalters III (Stuttgart 1960) 126), sees as a 'grace after meals (Tischsegen)'. While the legends could indeed have been read aloud at meals, both in the refectory at Gandersheim and elsewhere, I do not think this can be safely inferred from the Theophilus lines. In these, Hrotsvitha plays on the language of a Tischsegen, but even more on the much-cherished metaphorics of 'spiritual food' (see esp. K. Lange, 'Geistliche Speise', ZfdA XCV (1966) 81-122). That is, when Hrotsvitha bids Christ to 'benignly consecrate the dishes of the table I have proffered, making these banquets wholesome for those who taste them' (Theophilus 452-3), the primary meaning of the dishes and the banquets is the metaphorical one: they are Hrotsvitha's compositions.

³ Bertini p. 9.

⁴ That she should have the same name as Hrotsvitha I by pure coincidence, or by adoption, seems less probable. It may also be significant that she concludes her last poem, on the 'primordia Gandesheimensis … coenobii', with the reign of Hrotsvitha I's predecessor, Cristina (896-919), the youngest daughter of the founders, Liudolf and Oda: a certain reticence to go on to celebrate her own namesake would be understandable if she was also a kinswoman.

⁵ R. R. Bezzola, Les origines I 248.

⁶ On Hrotsvitha's rhymed prose, the discussion in K. Polheim, Die lateinische Reimprosa (1925), remains, in its wealth of detail, unsuperseded. There are many extensive, though unsystematic, uses of rhymed prose in earlier centuries—in Apuleius, in Augustine (especially the homilies), in Venantius Fortunatus' Vita Radegundis, in the sermons of Hrabanus Maurus, and in the brilliant homily of Scotus Eriugena on the Prologue of John (cf. Jean Scot Erigène et l 'histoire de la philosophie, ed. R. Roques (Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, Paris 1977), pp. 243-52). Yet no one before Hrotsvitha employed rhymed prose so elaborately and consistently, and with such lavish use of 'rich' rhymes as well as assonances. It is in this last point that the link with Rather is particularly interesting. Compare, for example, in his Excerptum ex dialogo confessionali (P.L. 136, 397 C-398 C, line-arrangement P.D.):

Confiteor etiam ipsi Domino Deo omnipotenti, quod his et plus his omnibus voluptatum foedatus flagitiis, et contagionibus fuscatus omnimodis, semper sine ulla mentis sinceritate, corporis et sanguinis sacramentum Domini, fateor, percipi indigne …

Praeter haec peccavi iocando, equitando, ambulando, stando, sedendo sive iacendo, et in his et in aliis omnibus vitiis …

On rhymed prose in Rather's letters, see F. Weigle, 'Die Briefe Rathers von Verona, DA I (1937) 147-94; some letters—notably Epp. 1-6, 19, 20-3—have consistent rhyme throughout ('völlig durchgereimt', p. 187). On Hrotsvitha's having received tuition from men (magistri) as well as women teachers, see n 46 below.

⁷Opera p. 227. Cf. E. Cerulli, Studia Islamica XXXII (1970) 69-76.

⁸ In view of Hrotsvitha's precise wording, it is out of the question that she received the information 'through the mediation of her abbess'—as Homeyer (Opera, p. 124) thought possible; it is also highly unlikely that Hrotsvitha had, as Homeyer claims, 'not the oral report alone' but written information on the background of the events: this would make nonsense of Hrotsvitha's levelheaded and decisive contrast between oral and written sources.

⁹ Unfortunately Hrotsvitha's informant seems not to have explained to her the precise nature of Islamic religious observance, for when she touches on this in her poem she merely adopts Christian caricatures (e.g. making the Moslems into idol-worshippers), such as she would have found in polemic writings, or indeed could have picked up by hearsay in northern Europe, without the help of a Cordovan.

¹⁰Ruotgeri Vita S. Brunonis 8, in Lebensbeschreibungen einiger Bischöfe des 10.-12. Jahrhunderts, ed. I. Ott, tr. H. Kallfelz (Darmstadt 1973) p. 190.

¹¹ Despite the long customary tradition of naming several of Hrotsvitha's plays after men and not women characters (Dulcitius; Calimachus; Abraham; Pafnutius), I believe it is important, because of Hrotsvitha's emphasis on feminine protagonists, to return to her own nomenclature. Her second, third, fourth and fifth plays are entitled, respectively, Passio sanctarum virginum Agapis Chioniae et Hirenae; Resuscitatio Drusianae et Calimachi; Lapsus et conversio Mariae neptis Habrahae heremicolae; and Conversio Thaidis meretricis; the last play, commonly known as Sapientia, is entitled Passio sanctarum virginum Fidei Spei et Karitatis.

¹² Ed. K. Strecker, MGH Poetae IV 1088-90; the text is also in Winterfeld pp. xx-xxiii.

¹³'Nunc Terentius exit foras audiens haec et ait.'

¹⁴ Cit. W. Creizenach, Geschichte des neueren Dramas (3 vols., Halle ²1911-23), I 3. The passage occurs in the Prologue of a Life of St Mary of Cappadocia, written ca. 1180 by a monk Reinerus, at St Laurent in Liège (ed. B. Pez, Thesaurus Anecdotorum Novissimus (Augsburg 1721) IV iii, 83ff). Reiner (p. 85) claims that 'Frater etenim quidam pueris sive adolescentibus Terentium legebat. Sed scenica lectio plus obesse quam prodesse auditoribus infirmis solet.' In delirium (extasis), the master receives a warning threat from St Laurence, 'quod ludicris sordidaretur, dum comico uteretur'. This last phrase in particular suggests that the scenica lectio was no dispassionate textual study, but that the possibilities of ludicra were indeed exploited.

¹⁵ Bertini p. 108 (Homeyer, following Winterfeld, emends 'Expaveo' to 'Expavete').

¹⁶ See esp. the fine study by E.-R. Labande, 'Mirabilia mundi: Essai sur la personnalité d'Otton III', CCM VI (1963) 297-313, 455-76.

¹⁷Dichtung pp. 91-104.

¹⁸ The two plays, however, are very different in characterization and tone. The holy man of the desert, shown as gently doting and fatherly in the first play, is a relentless, tormenting crusader in the second. Where Mary, the first heroine, is converted lovingly, Thais is humiliated and crushed. The second play is also distinguished by its didactic opening, Pafnutius teaching his disciples the theory of musical harmony; this at first sight irrelevant prelude serves to enrich the close with the theme of cosmic harmony ('caeli concentus', XII 6), extending to the Neoplatonic 'return' of souls ('felici reditu ad te reverti… repetere principium sui originis', XIII 2-3—cf. Boethius Cons. III m. 9, 20-1).

¹⁹Gong. 570ff (Opera p. 122). In the Merovingian Vita Gangulfi Martyris Varennensis (ed. W. Levison, Script. Rer. Merov., MGH, VII 142ff), Gongolf s wife speaks her mocking vow on a Friday, and thereafter every Friday must fart as many times as the words she speaks (p. 167).

²⁰ 'Dixerat'—Hrotsvitha here parodies epic style (cf. e.g. Aen. IV 331).

²¹ 'Oh wanton boy, with impunity you make a boast of spuming …' (cf. e.g. Anth. Graeca XII 22).

²²Dichtung pp. 98f

²³Opera p. 376.

²⁴ See esp. 0. B. Hardison Jr, Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages (Baltimore 1965) pp. 192ff; J. Drumbl, Quem quaeritis (Roma 1981) pp. 82ff.

²⁵ See P. Aebischer, 'Le "Cant de la Sibil la" … ', in his Neuf études sur le théâtre médiéval (Genève 1972), esp. pp. 23f.

²⁶ While we do not know the date of her death, there is no record of Hrotsvitha later than 973. It is ironic to recall that in 1007 Gandersheim, after sixty years of full independence under the rule of its abbesses, was made—despite fierce resistance—a dependency of the diocese of Hildesheim.

²⁷In honorem Hludowici (Ermold le Noir, ed. and tr. E. Faral (Paris ²1964)) 2062-3.

²⁸Opera pp. 37-9.

²⁹ Cf. T. Janson, Latin Prose Prefaces p. 141.

³⁰1. Dedicatio 7-8 (Opera p. 40).

³¹2. Dedicatio 5-6 (Opera p. 176).

³²Basilius 9-13 (Opera p. 177).

³³Opera p. 227.

³⁴ Cf. E. Jeauneau, "'Pierre Abélard à Saint-Denis"', in Abélard en son temps: Actes du colloque international … (Paris 1981) pp. 161-73.

³⁵ A detailed study of the presence of classical authors in the works of Rather and Liutprand would be rewarding. Whilst for Rather's letters there is a fine 'Verzeichnis der Zitate' in F. Weigle's edition (MGH, pp. 205-9), there is nothing comparable for Liutprand, though the recent edition of his works (in A. Bauer and R. Rau, Quellen zur Geschichte der sächs. Kaiserzeit (Darmstadt 1971)) has a number of valuable parallels in the notes, signalling, inter alia, the Terentian adaptations in the Legatio.

³⁶ Cf. J. Grimm, A. Schmeller, Lateinische Gedichte des X. und XI. Jh. (Göttingen 1838), p. ix.

³⁷ It is not likely that Hrotsvitha had read Plautus (though see also n 57 below); but her play on Terence's phrase, Andria 218—amentium, haud amantium—is deliberate, and should be noted in the editions.

³⁸ I have gathered a range of classical and medieval examples in Medium Aevum XXXIII (1964) 50.

³⁹ Cf. Opera p. 496.

⁴⁰ Cf. Opera pp. 494ff; some interesting new parallels between Hrotsvitha and earlier poets (including Lucan, Ovid, Venantius Fortunatus, and several Carolingians) are suggested in Schaller, 'Hrotsvit.'

⁴¹ This point was well observed by Vinay p. 511.

⁴²Lapsus et conversio Mariae (= Abraham) IX 5.

⁴³Opera pp. 235-7.

⁴⁴ The word is 'humilitas' (glossed by Winterfeld, p. 346, as 'Herablassung'). It is the earliest recorded instance of this 'courtly' sense, which was to become widespread in vernacular love-poetry (see the excursus 'The Concept umiltà' in my Medieval Latin I 158-62).

⁴⁵ 'Dictatiuncula' appears to be attested before Hrotsvitha only in Jerome, Contra Vig. 3 (P.L. 23, 341-2), in a context of violent polemic about clerical chastity. Hrotsvitha will have known the passage, and sensed the mock-modesty of Jerome's diminutives, 'dictatiuncula' and 'lucubratiuncula' (ibid.).

⁴⁶ This key-word, 'magistrorum', must on no account be emended to 'magistrarum' (K. Strecker Hrotsvithae Opera (Leipzig ²1930) ad loc.), or translated 'Lehrerinnen' (Homeyer ad loc.). Even if in this context we construe it as being of common rather than masc. gender, it is surely a testimony not to be rejected that Hrotsvitha had received tuition from men as well as women teachers. This point of text and translation is a small but revealing instance of how the 'cloistered nun' image could blind even distinguished specialists.

⁴⁷ Jerome to Paulinus of Nola, Ep. 53, 2-3 (not only the occurrence of the two Greek words but also the context makes Hrotsvitha's knowledge of this passage likely).

⁴⁸Parzival 115, 21-34; 782, 5-12.

⁴⁹Cons. I pr. I, 5 ('Eandem tamen vestem violentorum quorundam sciderant manus, et particulas quas quisque potuit abstulerant').

⁵⁰Prologus 26-9 (Opera pp. 387f).

⁵¹ I suggest there is no good reason for disbelieving Hrotsvitha's central statement in her letter to Gerberga, that she had no written sources for the Gesta Ottonis. Homeyer (Opera p. 390) argues that 'for the events in a time-span of over forty years she could not have relied on oral tradition alone; the correct chronological ordering of the events suggests that she used a chronicle', even if this was complemented by oral reports. In my view this, apart from doing violence to Hrotsvitha's explicit testimony, underestimates her powers of organizing material independently. It also takes no account of the possibility of her presence at - court. Insofar, for instance, as some passages in the Gesta are paralleled in the works of Liutprand, the reason for this could be personal acquaintance rather than literary borrowing.

⁵²Opera pp. 385-6.

⁵³ 'Varietate': cf. Ps. 44: 10.

⁵⁴ 'Pigescat': the frequentative pigescere appears to be unrecorded elsewhere.

⁵⁵Archicancellarie, vir discrete mentis (Die Gedichte des Archipoeta, ed. H. Watenphul and H. Krefeld (Heidelberg 1958) IV). As E. H. Zeydel ('Knowledge of Hrotswitha's Works' p. 383) pointed out, a note in the Chronicle of the Bishops of Hildesheim states that Hrotsvitha wrote a poem about all the deeds of the three Ottonian emperors (Scriptorum Brunsvicensia … illustrantium, ed. G. W. Leibniz (Hanover 1710) II 787: 'scripsit … trium Imperatorum Ottonum res gestas omnes'). Yet this chronicle is not from the eleventh century, as Zeydel claimed: its entries go as late as 1573 (ibid. II 806); thus there is no compelling reason to trust this detail and postulate a continuation of the Gesta Ottonis that has not survived. Again, the testimony might tempt one to speculate about Hrotsvitha's possible authorship of the lyrical sequence, 'Modus Ottinc' (Carmina Cantabrigiensia, ed. K. Strecker, MGH, no. II), which in fact dwells on all three Ottos; on the other hand, it is far too brief a composition to be said to cover 'res gestas omnes'.

⁵⁶ H. Delehaye, Etude sur le légendier romain (Bruxelles 1936), pp. 163, 168f.

⁵⁷Passio … Agapis (= Dulcitius) I 6; cf. also Passio … Fidei (= Sapientia) V 17. The word conquiniscere (to crouch, cower, or bow the head) occurs twice in Plautus, once in Priscian, citing verses from the oldest fabula atellana, and once in an epitome of Julius Valerius on Alexander; it does not seem to be attested elsewhere (see TLL, s.v.). In terms of transmission of texts, it is clearly likelier that Hrotsvitha had seen Priscian or the Alexander epitome than Plautus—but much that regards the sources of her diction still awaits detailed investigation.

⁵⁸Passio … Agapis XIV 3 (Opera p. 277).

⁵⁹Praef. 5 (quia nec matura adhuc aetate vigens, / nec scientia fui proficiens).

⁶⁰Lapsus (= Abraham) VII 15ff. Did Hrotsvitha get her unusual expression for 'dawn' (matuta) from Odo of Cluny's Occupatio, where it occurs twice (see NG, s.v.), rather than from Prudentius (Symm. II 562) or Ovid (Fasti VI 479)? The occurrence in Lucretius (V 656), cited by Homeyer along with Prudentius, should be discounted.

⁶¹Ecl. x 49 (first noted by Vinay, p. 551); Aen. I 327.

⁶²Primordia 185-226 (Opera pp. 457-8).

⁶³ Cf. Homeyer, Opera p. 457.

⁶⁴Gesta Ottonis, Praef. I (Opera p. 385).

⁶⁵ D. H. Lawrence, 'Song of a man who has come through' (Collected Poems, 1932).

⁶⁶ Cf. esp. M. Schapiro, Late Antique, Early Christian and Medieval Art (New York 1979) pp. 67-142.

⁶⁷ H. Menhardt, 'Eine unbekannte Hrotsvitha-hs.' 233-6; B. Jarcho, Speculum II (1927) 343f; Zeydel pp. 382-5.

⁶⁸ See below, pp. 85ff.

⁶⁹ See below, pp. 91ff, and my discussion of the new edition of the Carmina Ratisponensia, ed. A. Paravicini (Heidelberg 1979), in Sandalion V (1982) 109-17.

Abbreviations

CCM:

Cahiers de civilisation médiévale

DA:

Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters

NG:

F. Blatt, Novum Glossarium Mediae Latinitatis (København 1957ff)

ZfdA:

Zeitschrift für Deutsches Altertum