Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: Contexts, Identities, Affinities, and Performances, and: The Gendered Pulpit: Preaching in American Protestant Spaces (review)

Despite the apparently divergent material, the only substantial difference between Hrotsvit of Gandersheim and The Gendered Pulpit is one thousand years. Both books explore the contexts and issues surrounding the raising of a female voice in a patriarchal culture. The first centers on the famed tenth-century German abbess, while the second investigates three contemporary female Christian preachers. However, each delves into important concerns surrounding identity and agency, rhetoric and performance.

The collection of essays on Hrotsvit stems from a February 2000 millennial symposium on the abbess held at Santa Clara University. The book contains four sections, with the vast majority of essays dealing with Hrotsvit's dramas. The first section, "Constructing a Context," examines the historic, cultural, legal, and political environs of Hrotsvit's writings, such as an essay on her historiocity of royal succession. These essays, the furthest afield from theatre studies, indicate the book's primary audience as other Hrotsvit or medieval scholars. All quotes appear in Latin, followed by an English translation.

The second section, "Forming Identities," seeks to contextualize early medieval and patristic literary traditions. One particularly illuminating essay by Ulrike Wiethaus explores the forces that shaped Hrotsvit's age. This essay exemplifies many of the book's overall strengths: providing more in-depth analysis than previously published material on Hrotsvit, and using an awareness of contemporary critical lenses. Wiethaus shows how Hrotsvit's writing worked within its own culture: "Hrotsvit's choices of stories thus mirrors her and her audience's social environment. Underneath the cover of Christian martyrdom, another world emerges: that of the Ottonian nobility" (128). He offers the absence of any female social groups besides nobility as an example of the need for clarifications between "feminist" notions of Hrotsvit's writings and her historical and cultural circumstances writing under the rule of Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor (962-973) whose niece was abbess of Gandersheim.

"Creating Affinities," the third section, connects Hrotsvit's writings with other literary texts. These essays deal with her biblical sources, her use of the Devil, and an essay on the growing feminization of the early church "reflected by the reliance on female rather than male agency and on process as spiritual rather than martial" (7). One essay of particular relevance to theatre scholars investigates the Terentian influence on Hrotsvit's dramas. While commonly acknowledged that Hrotsvit sought to "re-write" Terence, Robert Talbot sees her plays more as allegorical rereadings. He shows the similarities between the roles played by Terence's sons and Hrotsvit's virgins: "Indeed, the family dynamic of Terentian drama provides Hrotsvit with a fitting image of the radical incommensurability of Christian and worldly desire, as Terence's sons are no more likely to find common ground with their father's than are Christian virgins with their pagan persecutors" (152). This essay looks beyond structuralist connections between Hrotsvit and Terence, offering a richer engagement of how she exploited Terence's secular theatre for religious purposes.

The book's final section, "Conducting Performance," will probably resonate the most with theatre scholars. Here, essays on Hrotsvit's literary legacy and her use of embedded stage directions are paired with ones on contemporary performances of her work. Jane Jeffrey's brilliant essay explores Collapsable Giraffe's 3 Virgins within the context of New York mayor Rudolph Giulliani's Disney-fication of Times Square. She states that the "European Middle Ages is implicated in the performance of violence against women in contemporary Western culture" (257). She cites that a thousand years after Hrotsvit "women are still experiencing defilement in public places, not only in strip clubs but also in all sorts of publicly sanctioned activities, from beauty contests to seances to judicial hearings" (257). Her powerful arguments cite the...