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What Hrotsvit Did to Virgil: Expanding the Boundaries of the Classical Epic in Tenth-Century Ottonian Saxony

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Women and Medieval Epic

Part of the book series: The New Middle Ages ((TNMA))

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Abstract

In her choice of rhyme and diction… she shows much individuality. By adapting new themes to the leonine hexameter, she inaugurated an entirely new type of poetry which found many imitators in her own day. Beauty and vivacity are not wanting and her fondness for diminutives gives her work a distinctive feminine cast.1

In the introductory comments to her 1942 edition of the epics of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim (ca. 940—ca. 1003), the earliest female author of an extant epic in the West, Sister Mary Bernardine Bergman describes the tenth-century Saxon canoness ’ style thus:

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Notes

  1. Sister Mary Bernadine Bergman, trans., Hrosvithae Liber Tertius: A Text with Translation, Introduction and Commentary (Covington, KY: The Sisters of Saint Benedict, 1943), p. xix.

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  2. Barbara H. Rosenwein, A Short History of the Middle Ages (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002), p. 99.

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  3. John W. Bernhardt, Itinerant Kingship and Royal Monasteries in Early Medieval Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 4.

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  4. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 40–41.

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  5. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 78.

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  6. Katharina M. Wilson, Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: The Ethics of Authorial Stance (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988), p. 114.

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Authors
  1. Kate Olson
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Princeton University, USA

    Sara S. Poor (Associate Professor of German) (Associate Professor of German)

  2. English Department, Western Michigan University, USA

    Jana K. Schulman (associate professor) (associate professor)

Copyright information

© 2007 Sara S. Poor and Jana K. Schulman

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Olson, K. (2007). What Hrotsvit Did to Virgil: Expanding the Boundaries of the Classical Epic in Tenth-Century Ottonian Saxony. In: Poor, S.S., Schulman, J.K. (eds) Women and Medieval Epic. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-06637-4_6

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