The Plays of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim

by Hrotsvitha (Translator), Geoff Wilson (Editor)

Roswitha, also known as Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, was a tenth century German canoness, dramatist, and poet. A remarkable woman, she has been called the first Western playwright since antiquity as well as the first known woman playwright. She was inspired by the Roman comic playwright Terence, who wrote six farces filled with disguises, misunderstandings, and pagan debauchery. Upset by Terence’s immoral subject matter but also inspired by his well-crafted plays, Roswitha sought to “Christianize” his work by writing six plays of her own.Roswitha wrote six dramas in Latin. Two are concerned with the conversation of nonbelievers (Gallicanus and Callimachus), two are concerned with the repentance of sinners (Abraham and Paphnutius), and two are concerned with the martyrdom of virgins (Dulcitus and Sapientia).This edition, originally published in 1923, includes an introduction by Cardinal Francis Aidan Gasquet (an English Benedictine monk and scholar), a critical preface by the translator (Christopher St. John), and prefaces written by Roswitha herself.

Genres: Plays, Classics, Religion, German Literature, Medieval, 10th Century, Fiction

158 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 980

About the author

On ancient Roman plays, German nun and poet Roswitha (Hrotsvitha) (circa 935-circa 1000) modeled dialogs that represent an early stage in the revival of European drama.

With a name also spelled Hroswitha, Hrotsvit, or Hrosvit, this a 10th-century German secular canoness and dramatist, born into nobility, lived and worked in a community, the abbey of Bad Gandersheim in modern-day Lower Saxony, Germany. She attests her name as Saxon for "strong voice."

After antiquity, some critics consider her, who wrote in Latin, as the first person to compose drama in Latin-influenced western Europe.

Hrotsvit studied under Rikkardis and Gerberg, daughter of Henry the Fowler, king. Otto I the Great, emperor and brother of Gerberg, penned a history, one of poetical subjects of Hrotsvit in her Carmen de Gestis Oddonis Imperatoris , which encompasses the period to the coronation of Otto I in 962.

Gerberg introduced her, noted for her great learning, to Roman writers. Work of Hrotsvit shows familiarity with the Church Fathers and classical poetry, including that of Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Plautus, and she modellded her own verse on that of Terence. Several of her plays draw on the "Apocryphal gospels." Her works form part of the renaissance of Otto.

Reviews

[Oblomov · Rating 4 out of 5]

You wouldn't think 10thC plays that essentially boil down to 'Jesus good, sex bad' would be hilarious, but Roswitha manages it and I'm still unsure if that was her intention (Roswitha is an acceptable version of the author's name and doesn't give me an aneurysm when I try to spell it).

Most of the humour comes from the odd delivery, sudden tonal shifts and the borderline sociopathic reaction of the characters, my favourite ridiculous example of all three being:

Dulcitius: I'm in love! Do you think they will fall in love with me?
Soldiers: From what we know, you will have little success.
Dulcitius: Why?
Soldiers: Their faith is too strong.
Dulcitius: A few sweet words will work wonders!
Soldiers: They despise flattery.
Dulcitius: Then I shall woo in another fashion -- with torture!

Aside from making me laugh my arse off (or uncomfortably grimace), Roswitha does have some genuinely interesting ideas and words on religion and there is an early feminist tilt to her plays, with women usually being the bastion of grace or piety long before the men convert (and even if they aren't, they always are by the end). Most of the plays are uplifting in their message and the moral is usually that anyone can be forgiven, no matter how badly they think they've sinned, which is easier to stomach than the 'cast you into hellfire!' route Roswitha could have taken.

The plays:

Dilcitius 3/5
A bumbling Roman desperately wants to bang three Christian women, threatening torture and death. All three spurn his advances to keep their chastity, and are (sort of) saved by divine intervention. Includes the above mentioned quote, along with another moment where I was 100% sure Roswitha intentionally wrote a comedy scene, and it's not only the least funny and most nonsensical moment in any of her plays, but also the most racist.

Gallicanus 4/5
Based on St Gallicanus, a Roman general who converted to Christianity. Roswitha has him wanting to a marry the Christian daughter of Constantine. Since a simple no would apparently be impolite, the daughter half agrees and gets Gallicanus to take two of her Christian mentors to war with him, and he converts when they convince him to pray to God and win a losing battle. Everyone agrees to give up nasty, squelchy sexual congress for the Lord (a theme which reoccurs throughout the rest of the plays) and then everything goes wrong when the new heathen Emporer takes the throne.
There's also a brief mention of a mystical character on the battlefield, of immense stature with a sword in one hand and a cross over his shoulder, and all I could think of was Camouflage Jesus and so proceeded to giggle myself silly again.

Callimachus 5/5
My absolute favourite, this is so wonderfully dumb. Man wants to bang woman, she wants to be chaste, next verse same as the first, but this play's got monsters, angels, attempted necrophilia and characters literally dropping dead so they don't have to deal with other people, all in one zany procession of utter nonsense. I'd love to quote my favourite bits and talk at length about how fantastically stupid this play is, but since it's so short and in the public domain, I'll just add the online version here so you can enjoy it yourself without my spoilers, and if you only read one of Roswitha's plays, make it this glorious mess.

Abraham 2/5
Least funny and frankly just creepy.
Grandfather has a discussion with his grandaughter about how good it is to remain a virgin so she can marry Jesus when she dies. She's eight years old. Eh....
Girl joins a convent, but some years later she's "seduced" by a shithead pretending to be a monk, and she runs away in shame. She's twelve at this point. Ehhhh...
Grandfather hears she's become a highly sort after prostitute, so seeks her out 'pretending to be a lover' so he can get close to her, bring her home and have her repent her lustfulness. She's fourteen at this point. EHHHHH...!
As "nice" as Roswitha's argument is, that the grandaughter shouldn't be kicked out the door like she's somehow soiled and it's Grandad's duty to help and love her, everything about this play just made me feel nauseous.

Paphnutius 2/5
Also not that funny.
Paphnutius hears of Thais, a beautiful and highly successful prostitute, and decides he must save her soul. Talks a lot about Thais' lustful admirers, who regularly beat the crap out of each other to get near her, and there's some very Freudian phrasing from Paphnutius, who's supposed to be above the whole sex thing:

'I would that you could be shaken with fear to your very bowels! I would like to see your delicate body impregnated with terror in every vein, and every fibre, if that would keep you from yielding to the dangerous delights of the flesh'.

The play trundles along at a decent and steady speed for awhile, but rams into a litter of puppies at the end with a moment of unexpected horror:
To save her soul, Thais enters a convent to pray and repent. Ok, fair enough, if that's what she wants.
She's given a cell, which she can't leave and it has only one small window, through which she's given bread and water. Far less ok, but she chooses it freely, I guess?
Thais says this:

Good father, what could be more repugnant than to have to attend to all the needs of the body in this one little room. . . . It will soon be uninhabitable

Turns out, for her repentence, she will literally be living in her own piss and dung inside this one room. She unsurprisingly dies later, but her soul is saved. What the Jesus loving Hell, Roswitha?

Sapientia 3/5
Antiochus is angered by the Christian Sapientia and her three daughters, so has them all brought before him and given an ultimatium: worship the Roman Gods or suffer.
The masochistic gore story. Whipping, boiling in oil and ripping off nipples, all of which doesn't hurt, doesn't work or kills the torturers and all thanks to Jesus, the max level white mage.
There's also a protracted maths lesson, which is so out of place and dull that even the translator apologised for it, and said Roswitha probably included it as a middle finger to her male contemporaries as a 'see, women understand complex learning just fine, now figure out this mathematical riddle, arseholes' sort of thing.
As much as this play is about disproving Antiochus' stated belief that women are weak and easily swayed, with daughters and mother sassing the shit out of him, one bit that really stood out for me was this less than flattering line about Christianity:

Sapientia: The word of Christ forbids us to take thought as to what we ought to say. His wisdom is sufficient for us.

Well, you said it, not me.

The plays swing between the uncomfortable and the laugh riot. I had to keep reading because I genuinely had no idea where Roswitha would be going with the next scene (other than Jesus coming out on top), whether someone would be tortured, hump kitchenware or die from shock while being able to loudly announce they are dying from shock.

With Roswitha inspired by the Roman playwrites, notably the notable knobend Terence, I like to think there's self awareness in her works and she's going overboard to keep our attention, which certainly worked for me. Despite some discomforting moments, the plays are mostly entertaining, imaginative and considerably more engaging than some of the morality plays written half a millenium later.

[Suzanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Glad to have read it from a Feminist perspective - Roswitha literally means "Strong Voice of God", and if you look at her writing within an historical framework, she was writing about women's lives, albeit through the lens of Catholicism, when no one else was. Her leading ladies, while always looking for spiritual meaning in a confusing medieval world are also strong mothers, daughters, wives and stewards.

[Sherwood Smith]

Was fuer ein Mut gehoerte aber in zehnten Jahrhundert schon allein dazu, ein Drama zu dichten! Was fuer ein Wagnis war es darueber hinaus fuer eine Nonne, hierbei den Stoff und das Milieu des Terenz aufzugreifen! Es ist ja unglaublich, Hrosvitha kannte ja kein Theater, nichtdestoweniger . . . so unternahm sie etwas damals ungewohnt Neues, womit sie allein stand--und allein blieb.

[Sasha]

Check it out, tenth-century playwriting nun! Oh hell yes. From http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2011/0...

[Lukerik · Rating 3 out of 5]

At their best, there’s an innocent frankness to these plays and some amusing moments, not all of them intentional. Her achievement is really quite amazing. Taking an art-form dead for 550 years and using it to tell the legends of her own religion. The results are not always successful, but considering the immensity of the task it’s hard to criticise her. So let’s do it anyway.

If you look at her model, Terence, his stories are such that the action takes place in one place over a short period of time. If something takes place elsewhere it’s reported in some way. I think it’s an effective way of doing things. Hrotsvitha does not. She imports the stories wholesale, scene by scene, without recasting them into an appropriate whole, so sometimes we jump hundreds of miles for someone to say one line before jumping back to the original setting. I think it’s a real shame she didn’t know Euripides as he’s having to import stories in much the same way and I wonder if she might have been better working in the format of tragedy. She could really do with a messenger or two. Some of Euripides’ best scenes involve messengers. Look at Iphigeneia’s killing for instance.

But for better or worse, Terence is her model and in her play Abraham we have a direct response to Terence’s Eunuchus. To briefly summarise Eunuchus: the heroine is Pamphila. Abducted as a toddler, repeatedly bought and sold as a slave, used by the one woman she should have been able to trust, raped, and finally married to her rapist as no-one else will have her. She’s basically the tragic figure that suffers, not because of her own flaws, but because of the flaws of those around her.

In Hrotsvitha’s Abraham, the hero is Abraham, an old man who gains control of a rich eight year old girl called Mary. He imprisons her and uses her money for his own ends. She is groomed and abducted by a paedophile. After a few days Abraham realises she is missing and eventually finds her working as a child prostitute. He returns her to her cell where she apologies profusely for all the men she has caused to sin. Just to make it clear, Abraham is the hero of the play.

It’s the inhumanity that bothers me. I understand that Hrotsvitha is bothered by Pamphila’s licentiousness: she never apologies for being raped. In fact, Pamphila is a silent character who never says anything at all. Terence, a former slave himself, uses his play to condemn the institution and makes a comment about the human condition. Abraham allows us to condemn the human condition, but in the example of the author herself. This is a bit of a problem.

However, not all the plays are like this. Most of them are fun.

[Amaranta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hrotsvitha se lució con el prefacio y la carta a "los sabios".
"Así pues, si a alguien le agrada mi dedicación, me alegraré. Pero si, sea por mi torpeza, sea por la tosquedad de mi estilo defectuoso, no agrada a ninguno, a mí, sin embargo, me contenta lo que hice."

Bueno, empecemos.

Conversión de Galicano, jefe de los ejércitos Cuatro estrellas
Esta obra trata sobre el duque Galicano estando enamorado de Constancia, la quiere como recompensa para ir a luchar con los escitas. Me gustó cuando Contantino, después de las súplicas de Galicano para casarse con Constancia (su hija), le dice que primero esperará la aprobación de ella. Constancia crea un plan para que su padre no quede mal con el duque, porque ella en realidad no quiere casarse con Galicano por asuntos de su virginidad (yep, es una obra de la edad media). Las hijas de Galicano deberán ir con ella, y sus funcioarios Juan y Pablo con él, ella les da órdenes de persuadirlo y converirlo poco a poco. Al final del primer acto, tanto Galicano como sus hijas, entran a la religión de Constancia.
En el segundo acto vemos a Juan y Pablo negándose a rendir ofrenda al dios del emperador Juliano, entonces éste los manda a matar por cristianos, a través de Terenciano, y los entierran en su propia casa.
Y bueno qué más decir, pensé que las obras medievales serían más aburridas. Bravo Hrostvitha.

Pasión de las santas vírgenes Agape, Quionia e Irene (Dulcidio) Cuatro estrellas.
En esta obra tenemos a Agape que se niega a casarse con alguien, pues ella es ¿cómo-se-dice? de Cristo, Diocleciano la toma como loca, y entonces Quionia e Irene la defienden, siendo esta última la que debate más con Diocleciano. Entonces él las manda a la cárcel, para que las procese Dulcidio, quien queda asombrado por la belleza de las mujeres. Las manda a encerrar en el cuarto de la despensa y cuando decide ir a verlas, resulta que abraza y besa a ollas llenándose de hollín. Después de quedar ridiculizado, decide exhibirlas desnudas. Esta tarea se la encomienda a Sisinio, Agape y Quionia mueren quemadas. Irene al ser la más joven, tiene "una oportunidad" pero ella (que me recuerda un poco a Antígona pues prefiere morir que cambiar sus ideales) se niega a dejar de creer en Cristo y entonces muere por una flecha de los soldados de Sisinio, pero feliz porque estará en el cielo.
¡Ah! me están gustando bastante las obras de Hrostvitha.

Resurrección de Drusiaa y Calímaco (Calímaco)
Chan chan chan. Cada vez me gustan más las obras de Hrostvitha, ¿por qué? No sé, odio la religión a ese punto, eso es cierto. Odio el fanatismo, pero las obras aunque traten de eso me gustan.
En esta pobra podemos ver a Calímaco enamorado de Drusiana, ella muere para no verse afectada por él, pues se ha bautizado y está en abstinencia. Entonces Fortunato convence a Calímaco de violar su cadáver (ya sé) acto seguido, una serpiente los mata. Para después resucitar a los tres, pero ahora Calímaco ha sido convertido en un discípulo de Cristo. Y Fortunato al saber esto, y que Drusiana ha resucitado también, se suicida.
¿Ven? Cuando les digo que me gustan las obras de Hrosvitha, es porque tengo motivos, para ser sobre la religión son muy entretenidas, suponngo que si hubiera vivido en la época, me hubieran convencido de permanecer virgen.

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

The editor notes that Hrotwitha’s plays were performed by puppets in the 19th century France, and that seems rather appropriate. I don’t mean that as a slight. Hrotwitha’s non-naturalistic plays with their miraculous events and character types would be very well suited to a puppet play rather than a stage.

These are interesting as historical pieces, but not so much as compelling drama.

Callimachus *** -- It’s noted that Hrotswitha wanted the grace and beauty of Terence, but with better morals. That’s not difficult to imagine since all of Terence’s comedies center around a woman being raped. (It’s true. Check it out.)

So Hrotswitha converts a story about the rape of a woman into a story about the rape of a woman’s corpse – huh? What the --? Frankly, I must admit I wasn’t ready for that plot twist. Not in a play written around 900 AD.

If it’s any consolation, Callimachus, the man in question, dies before he’s able to get to business with the corpse. (People just suddenly die a lot in this play.) But then he’s saved and goes to heaven.

(Meanwhile, the guy Callimachus paid to access the tomb goes to hell. It appears to me that guy sees Callimachus going to heaven and says “Uh, maybe that’s not the right place for me.”)

Jesus makes an appearance and there are some very uplifting remarks about forgiveness.

Sapienta ** -- So, figuring the necrophilia was an unusual quirk, I looked forward to reading another play Hrotswitha and so I opened Sapienta. This martyr play opens nicely enough, but soon devolves in a tortuous spectacle of torture.

It’s not long before a young woman is furiously whipped, has her breasts cut off and is cast into boiling oil. (Mind you, she expresses her satisfaction with the treatment throughout.) Her two younger sisters follow suit with more flogging and more boiled oil, and the younger is thrown into a raging fire. Beheading seems to be the only way to silence these young women.

This is a martyr play, so maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. However, the graphic violence and the cheery dialogue (the mother of these young women seems positively jealous) lends it the quality of a very, very dark comedy.

Psychologists will have a field day analyzing this play.

Dulcitius *** -- Well, this doesn’t have any sex with corpses, and no breasts being cut off on stage, but it does have women being burned alive. And a guy presumably having sex with pots and pans. Uh, you have to read it.

It does include some magic. Apparently, angels can fool a few guards and make a man have sex with pots and pans, but can’t save women from fires or being shot with an arrow.

Does this qualify as a comedy?

[Rachi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quitemos de en medio que son dramas de la época medieval, que lo Cristiano es ley y que la castidad es la máxima. Las mujeres son los personajes principales y las figuras con la moral más alta, son ellas las que ascienden y los hombres los que son engañados y condenados al infierno. Hay madres solteras, la religión no está peleada con la ciencia. Las mujeres convertidas a la religión cristiana repudian a sus esposos paganos.
Aún así faltan cosas características de los textos teatrales, acotaciones, introducción de personajes, actos, etc.

[Jazzy Lemon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Christian propaganda, fairy tale like qualities strongly emphasising the need for penitence - sometimes for YEARS! Wearing hair shirts, happily being put to death. Plays set out like a jolly Fox's Book of Martyrs by a nun who wrote what she believed to be the truth. I didn't like it, but gave it two stars for the poetic writing.

[PastelKos · Rating 3 out of 5]

Νομίζω έχω πλέον πεισθεί ότι θέλω να κάνω την πτυχιακή μου πάνω στο έργο της Ροσβίθας, οπότε περιμέντε την κριτική μου σε 2 χρόνια!!!1!1!!1!1!1

[Darrell · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, a tenth-century German nun, is the first known female playwright. As you'd expect from a nun, her plays often praise virginity and martyrdom.

I felt the dialogue was rather simple with characters frequently agreeing with each other and repeatedly saying things like, "That's true." Since the characters are often either pure good or pure evil, they aren't very interesting as people. The scenes often feel too short and the plays overall go by quickly without enough time to build up any tension.

In Gallicanus, a Roman converts to Christianity, and gets martyred off stage. Dulcitius problematically equates black skin with sinfulness and ends abruptly. The fact the Christian characters rejoice at the prospect of being tortured and killed makes their deaths seem more like suicide than martyrdom.

I found Callimachus more interesting, perhaps because I was already familiar with the story (it's found in the second-century Acts of John). Having the main character be a repentant sinner makes him less two-dimensional than the typical hero or villain we've seen so far.

In Abraham, the title character convinces his eight-year-old niece to be a lifelong virgin. However, once she gets older, she gets seduced and becomes a harlot, before finally being redeemed. Torturing yourself by doing things like wearing a hair shirt are praised, which makes me wonder if the playwright herself engaged in such activities.

Paphnutius felt like a rewrite of Abraham. As in the previous story, a hermit disguises himself as a lover to redeem a harlot. It's longer than the previous plays due to some philosophical musings thrown in. The harlot is punished by being confined to a cell no wider than a grave to wallow in her own filth for three years. Unlike the necrophile Callimachus who is forgiven instantly, former harlots apparently need to suffer for quite a while before they can be forgiven.

In Sapienta, a Roman emperor martyrs a woman and her virgin daughters for preaching Christianity. There's a long mathematical discussion thrown in for no reason. Perhaps the playwright just wanted to impress the audience with how clever she was. Virginity is once again praised, and martyrdom eagerly anticipated. It's surprising that the torture takes place on stage and that most of it is directed at children. Sapienta is gleeful when her child gets beheaded because that means she's in heaven now.

The writer of the preface is insistent that these plays were meant to be performed, not just read, which makes me wonder how they did the torture scenes. There's more over-the-top violence when we're told five thousand men off stage somehow die from being near a furnace.

None of these plays are what I would call masterpieces, but they are still a significant piece of literary history and give us a window into the way people from a previous era thought.

[Aaron Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent (and free) edition of this book, useful for its inclusion of the prefaces. The anadorned translation of Hrotswitha's Latin is also commendable. It's much preferable to something that tries to zhoozh up the simplicity and directness of her writing.

It is also worth saying that although the translator here tells us that Dulcitius is the least accomplished of Hrotswitha's six plays, Dulcitius is the most frequently anthologized of these texts. One might well wonder why this is. The reason is as frustrating as it is typical of theatre historiography: Hrotswitha says that she was inspired by the 2nd century playwright Terence. And although it is very clear when reading the plays that she did not remotely copy Terence in any formal way (St. John himself notes that in this edition), Dulcitius does include a few scenes of broad comedy. So anthologists include Hrotswitha's weakest play as a way of connecting her to a classical tradition from which her work mostly departs.

Hrotswitha was not copying Terence. And we would do better to look at her other plays in order to assess her work fairly. Comparing her to Terence makes her work look like some kind of a failure when, in fact, the very existence of these six plays is extraordinary.

[Max · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's important to read these because of their seminality in western drama and women's literature. And beyond that, they have literary merit in their own right, and more still in a history and literature sense--that is, tracing how ideas developed and were adapted in different historical contexts. Other critics, both professional and amateur (including other goodreads readers) can illuminate those better than I can. I'll only add that, loaded with caveats like the ones above, they're not particularly fun, enjoyable, or engrossing to read. The plots are similar (martyrdom and/or conversion), and the moralizing heavy throughout. We might take interest in the spin put on older stories or some small rhetorical touches sprinkled here and there, and if we take them seriously, theater artists might find inspiration for adaptation if they look for it (I first encountered the plays in a theater history class with an assignment to adapt one). But even within the genre of medieval drama, there are more engaging works.

[Nina ( picturetalk321 ) · Rating 4 out of 5]

My review is in another edition of this book.

[ant · Rating 4 out of 5]

rosy saremmo state buone amiche suppongo

[Amanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short religious plays by a 10th century German nun. Think she must have been quite a character!

[margot]

For THE 198 (just read Dulcitius)

Would love to learn more about Hrosvitha. Would love more if people didn't spell her name two thousand different ways.

[lampia · Rating 1 out of 5]

jako proud a vsetko na prvu dramaticku ale jak som sa jak nasralaaaa uuuuufffff. proste manipulacna technika vlv bambilion toto

[julia!! · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read Spaientia only but I am planning on getting through her other plays at some point as well.

[Isabelle Lahaie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating perspective into women's roles in Medieval Christianity, written by the first playwright since antiquity. Hrotswitha of Gandersheim, a nun at the abbey of Gandersheim, uses popular Christian figures from the Roman Empire to positively reflect the role of women as Christians. She documents the conversion of two different prostitutes; the conversion of Roman wives and their influence over their husbands and Roman armies; and the roles of a Christian mother. Notably, the prostitutes, despite the weight of their sins, have a path to forgiveness, and the mother demonstrates the role of a woman whose virginity has already been lost. This book should be read by students of the classics, of the Middle Ages, and of modernity for its unique (and positive!) perspective of women.

[lizzie mcguire · Rating 2 out of 5]

aunque no soy una persona religiosa y no concuerdo con la imagen de castidad y pureza con la que hroswitha habla de las mujeres e intenta convertir a quienes la leen al cristianismo, fue la primera dramaturga que dio una verdadera voz a las mujeres en el teatro, usándolas como protagonistas y siendo ellas los seres de superioridad moral, así que: grande hroswitha! “calímaco” me sacó un par de risas, de ahí en fuera no sé si fui particularmente fan de sus obras, pero de igual forma creo que es importante conocerla.

[Mir · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not positive at this late date which of Hrotswitha's plays I read, but I think it was "Sapientia."

[Lulu]

Late 10th Born 930- 935, Died 973-1002


The whore as Imago Dei: being and abjection in Hrotzvit's rewriting of Thais / Helene Scheck --
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...