Hrotsvit of Gandersheim : : Contexts, Identities, Affinities, and Performances / / Phyllis Brown, Katharina Wilson, Linda A. McMillin.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter UTP eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2015
• TeilnehmendeR: Brown, Phyllis,; McMillin, Linda A.,; Wilson, Katharina,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2016]; ©2004
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

Hrotsvit was the first dramatist of Christianity, the first female Saxon poet, the first Germanic author to employ the Faust theme, and one of the first Western writers to compose a Christian epic. The essays in Hrotsvit of Gandersheim examine the historical, cultural, legal, and political contexts of Hrotsvit's works, locating her opus within the tenth-century aristocratic and clerical intellectual milieu.This collection contextualizes Hrotsvit's works with respect to heroic, sexual, domestic, behavioural, linguistic, theological, and hierarchical aspects of early medieval and patristic literary traditions. It also explores other literary texts that inform Hrotsvit's works and discusses the performance history and theatricality of Hrotsvit's plays.Hrotsvit's keen awareness of contemporary issues and her determination, within the parameters of monastic-aristocratic ideological constraints, to provide her readers with a rich variety of exemplary female heroes and acts of personal courage, offer twenty-first-century readers a powerful model of responsibility and agency.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction / Wilson, Katharina M. -- Section 1. Constructing a Context -- Hrotsvit of Gandersheim and the Problem of Royal Succession in the East Frankish Kingdom / Lees, Jay T. -- The Iudex Aequus: Legality and Equity in Hrotsvit's Basilius / Day, David -- 'Weighed down with a thousand evils': Images of Muslims in Hrotsvit's Pelagius / McMillin, Linda A. -- Section 2. Forming Identities -- Violence and Virginity in Hrotsvit's Dramas / Newman, Florence -- Kids Say the Darndest Things: Irascible Children in Hrotsvit's Sapientia / Kline, Daniel T. -- The Construction of the Desiring Subject in Hrotsvit's Pelagius and Agnes / Stottlemyer, Ronald -- Pulchrum Signum? Sexuality and the Politics of Religion in the Works of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim Composed between 963 and 973 / Wiethaus, Ulrike -- Section 3. Creating Affinities -- Hrotsvit's Dramas: Is There a Roman in These Texts? / Talbot, Robert -- Hrotsvit's Sapientia as a Foreign Woman / Brown, Phyllis R. -- Hrotsvit and the Devil / Silber, Patricia -- Hrotsvit's Latin Drama Gallicanus and the Old English Epic Elene: Intercultural Founding Narratives of a Feminized Church / Chance, Jane -- Section 4. Conducting Performances -- Hrotsvit's Literary Legacy / Stoudt, Debra L. -- 'Bring me a soldier's garb and a good horse': Embedded Stage Directions in the Dramas of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim / Snyder, Janet -- Dramatic Convergence in Times Square: Hrotsvit's Sapientia and Collapsable Giraffe's 3 Virgins / Jeffrey, Jane E. -- Playing with Hrotsvit: Adventures in Contemporary Performance / Zampelli, Michael A. -- Works Cited -- Contributors -- Index