After the Roman Empire collapsed in Western Europe, the literature that had flourished went into abeyance. For instance, the entire genre of playwriting just went out of existence. It was finally a tenth-century woman named Roswitha of Gandersheim who revived this art. Her plays today read charmingly clunky, like fourth-grade presentations. As with much about history, though, when you poke a little at them they yield a lot more about the past than they seem at first glance.
Roswitha wrote her stuff in the Ottonian world of modern Germany and environs, an area later called the Holy Roman Empire. We know little about her, but she was highly educated, writing in Latin and drawing on great familiarity with Ancient Roman pagan authors, such as the playwright Terrence.
Roswithas’s play, “Dulcitius,” features the Christian female martyrs Agape, Chionia, and Irena (shown here in a Byzantine manuscript from 1000). Instead of writing a comedic love story like Terrence did, she used his style to tell the tale of three wealthy sisters who refuse to marry a pagan ruler and are killed for their beliefs. However, when Roswitha spins her yarn, the sisters call all the shots — they talk back to male authority figures, they ridicule a man who tries to rape them (God casts a spell that has the evil Dulcitius get it on with filthy pots and pans instead), and they end up getting what they want — bodies untouched by men, and glorious martyrs’ deaths.
In a world where her fellow aristocratic women frequently had little choice about their marital partners, whose bodies were often out of their own control, who never could speak their minds or talk back to powerful men, Roswitha lets us see an unusual perspective. She died about 1002.
Sources: You can read “Dulcitius” yourself for free on Fordham University’s Internet Medieval Sourcebook. Image is from the Menologion of Basil II
