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Then at Gandersheim, as we have already said, the occasional visits of princely travellers brought interest and diversion from the outside world. It was in an atmosphere such as this that Roswitha passed her days. Of her work, the metrical legends seem her earliest effort. In these, though they are mainly based on well-known themes, Roswitha shows much originality in description.
Emboldened by this pious hope, Roswitha shrinks from no difficulties or details, details which might well have made her hesitate, and which, betraying a knowledge of the world, have raised the question as to whether she made her profession as early as was customary. This solicitude of Roswitha for the welfare of frail and all too human mankind recalls St.
Thus does Roswitha tell how the work of the new Foundation was begun, the Duke Liudolf and his wife having already journeyed to Rome to ask of the Pope his blessing, as well as to beg of him, as a token of his favour, some sacred relics to deposit there. The Pope, giving them his blessing, thus makes answer to their request:
The first appears to have been taken by Roswitha from a Latin translation of a fourth-century Greek legend.
It begins with the nun Roswitha, or Helen von Rossow, who flourished at the end of the tenth century, and won renown by her poetry, some of which she set to music. But in modern times many important names are found in Germany at a time when few or none appear in other countries.
It is by these dramas that Roswitha has distinguished herself in the world of letters; for although the legends contain points of interest, and are treated with skill, they are naturally not so unique as the dramas, nor do they reflect her personality in the same way.
"Worse luck to her if she invented Sapphics," added Herbert. "One of womankind's torments for mankind, eh?" said his neighbour. "And there are plenty more such," asserted Mrs. "It is only that one can't recollect and the men have suppressed them." "I think men praised them," said Jenny, "and that we remember the praise, not the works. For instance, Roswitha, or Olympia Morata, or Vittoria Colonna.
The subject which dominates her horizon is that of Chastity. Treated by her with didactic intent, this really resolves itself into a conflict between Christianity and Paganism, in other words, between Chastity and Passion, in which Christianity triumphs through the virtue of Woman. But at the same time Roswitha neither contemns marriage nor generally advocates celibacy.
Roswitha tells us how much she herself owed to the two successive abbesses under whose rule she lived, for suggestion, information, and encouragement in her literary work. The convents of Saxony, as many elsewhere in the tenth and eleventh centuries, were centres of culture in the nature of endowed colleges.
It is in a spirit far different from that of her panegyric on the emperor Otho that Roswitha writes her dramas. Fear and mental perplexity no longer possess her. Though humbly begging the reader not to “despise these strains drawn from a fragile reed,” she has no misgiving, for she feels that herein lies her mission.
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