Impassive Bodies: Hrotsvit Stages Martyrdom

When feminists began to evaluate Hrotsvit’s dramas, they tended to hear “the strong voice of Gandersheim” ¹ speaking from the literary wilderness of the tenth century, and to listen for a story about women’s experience. This approach supported the important project of revising the dramatic canon to include previously neglected (and even derided) female writers. ² Katharina Wilson, for example, identifies a typological transfer of ideals, expectations, and accomplishments from a male to a female context, tracing the typology through Hrotsvit’s prefatory epistles and legends as well as the dramas, and analyzing the structural relationships among the various texts. ³ Sue-Ellen Case assimilates Gandersheim to a modern separatist collective and argues persuasively for seeing Hrotsvit as the first woman to revise dramatic roles for women. ⁴ More recently, Barbara Gold (like Case, whom she repeatedly cites) assumes that Hrotsvit’s plays were performed for an audience of nuns within Gandersheim. Gold asserts that Hrotsvit wrote with this audience in mind, and that she and they “identified” with the characters and with one another. ⁵ Case and Gold imagine a context for Hrotsvit and locate a voice appropriate to that context. While their analyses make valuable contributions to the project of reassessing the work of early women writers, they unfortunately dehistoricize both the dramatist and her dramas. ⁶ Because the tenth century is a low point for the production of original literature or even the copying of manuscripts, Hrotsvit is all too easily interpreted as if she lived in the twelfth century. ⁷ I argue that an understanding of Ottonian imperial history is essential in order to lift Hrotsvit out of a generically imagined “Middle Ages” and place her within a specific context.

We can learn a great deal about Hrotsvit’s dramas if we think of them not as self-expression but as acts of communicative exchange. Gold wants to find Hrotsvit, the individual, and she looks for this woman in the texts she wrote. ⁸ Rather than reading back through Hrotsvit’s various textual masks in search of an authentic and unified authorial self, I ask why these masks were chosen and what they might have accomplished. What cultural work might have been performed in tenth-century Saxony by Hrotsvit’s staging of martyrdom? Twentieth-century writings on torture, terror, and representation are largely inadequate to explain this staging, because Hrotsvit does not stage the body in pain. When she places the tormented body at center stage, what the pagans intend as torture is translated into ordeal. ⁹ What does this translation accomplish?

I argue that by configuring martyrdom as a species of ordeal, Hrotsvit’s dramas work to contain and neutralize a potentially subversive energy. In these plays, as in ordeal, the body displays signs of divine intervention, but these signs cannot be interpreted without proper exegesis. The very ambiguity of the signs makes them particularly valuable in support of social solidarity. Martyrdom appears to locate power in passivity or weakness, and the ability to withstand pain could be construed as a victory for the belief system of the individual who suffers under tyranny. Yet the dominant social group typically employs just such an apparent inversion of power in order to maintain bonds of solidarity with the subordinate, whose cooperation is essential. ¹⁰ Hrotsvit makes an ideal agent of covert persuasion, since she belongs to two groups upon whose compliance the Ottonian empire depended: the Church and ruling-class women. ¹¹ I will argue for the importance of her relation with the second group, mostly disregarded by previous considerations of her work.

Marriage and religious houses for women were important tools for imperial expansion and consolidation. New wealth came into East Saxony during the Ottonian period in the form of tribute, gifts, plunder, and silver mining, all due to the conquest of Slav lands. Saxon women often enough outlived not only their husbands but their sons as well. ¹² Although inheritance laws generally favored men, a surviving wife might well end up with more land than her husband had possessed, and she could protect an estate from...