Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: contexts, identities, affinities, and performances

Medieval Literature and Culture Brown, Phyllis R., Linda A. McMillin, and Katharina M. Wilson, eds. Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: Contexts, Identities, Affinities, and Performances. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. vii+313 pp. 160 cloth. As every reader of the Canoness Hrotsvit of Gandersheim's dramatic works and her various verse narratives and poems has agreed, she defies all expectations in a premodern woman writer and especially in a tenth-century convent woman who was actively involved in producing outstanding literary works. Not surprisingly, scholarship has made many efforts to establish a reliable, historical-critical edition, to publish translations, and to provide numerous interpretations of her works. Hrotsvit was also the topic at a NEH Summer Institute directed by Jane Chance at Rice University in 1997. participants continued with their discussions on Hrotsvit since then and finally translated those into publishable essays that are presented in this volume. It is divided into four sections: I. Constructing a Context; II: Forming Identities; III. Creating Affinities; and IV: Conducting Performances. Beginning in the first section, Jay T. Lees studies Hrotsvit's epic poem Gesta Ottonis as a remarkable poetic document in which Hrotsvit energetically defended the dynastic claims of the Ottonians to rule over Germany against Henry of Bavaria, almost serving as a propagandist for the royal family to which she belonged as well. Focusing on Hrotsvit's verse narrative Basilius, but also on the fourteenth-century English Piers Plowman, David Day highlights the principle concept of fraud versus faith (29) through which the Devil is regularly made a fool who cannot achieve his goals with a strong Christian. Linda A. McMillin examines the surprisingly detailed information about Muslim Spain as portrayed in Hrotsvit's legend Pelagius, although the poet deliberately recast the character of the ruler Abd al-Rahman III as an evil figure fighting the Christians (see also Lisa Weston, The Saracen and the Marty, Meeting the Foreign in the Middle Ages, ed. A. Classen, 2002; here not consulted). Florence Newman demonstrates that the poet presents the erotic female not as a threat to holy women's spirituality, but rather, as a means of illustrating the spiritual strength women exercise through the body (72). Daniel T Kline alerts us to the phenomenon that Hrotsvit specifically plays on the motif of childhood in her religious play Sapientia where the young martyred girls serve as instruments to ridicule the pagan Emperor Hadrian. But Kline seems to misread the religious framework of Sapientia, treating it as a historical document which reflects on medieval attitudes toward children as expandable (91)-definitely a specious revival of Philippe Aries's old thesis (1960). Although Sayientia's, children are terribly martyred, this does not mean at all, as Kline sees it, that the mother and her children do not enjoy an intimate, emotional relationship, particularly in face of death. Moreover, it seems problematic to argue, as Kline does, that the children's martyrdom is closely related to the preparation of a feast, and that hence the audience witnesses a kind of Eucharist. …

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