Marla Carlson
381 First Street
Brooklyn, NY 11215
(718) 768-2915
mcarlso1@email.gc.cuny.edu
Impassive Bodies: Hrotsvit Stages Martyrdom
When tenth-century dramatist Hrotsvit places the tormented body at center stage, what the pagans intend as torture is translated into ordeal. 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.(1) 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 sign is what makes it so valuable in the service 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.(2) The Ottonian empire depended upon the compliance of both the Church and ruling-class women.(3) Hrotsvit makes an ideal agent of covert persuasion, since she belongs to both groups. I argue that the erasure of pain from her picture of martyrdom ultimately serves the consolidation of power by Otto the Great.
I read Hrotsvit's dramas through two filters: the history of ordeal, and
twentieth-century writings on torture, terror, and representation. In order to
keep torture (the infliction of bodily pain with the goal of producing
"true" speech, such as recantation or confession) distinct from ordeal
(the manifestation of truth, usually interpreted as God's will, by means of
bodily signs), I will use the term torment for the actions that
constitute torture or ordeal.
Critical framework
When feminists began to evaluate Hrotsvit's dramas, they tended to hear "the strong voice of Gandersheim"(4) 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 slighted female writers.(5) Katharina Wilson, for example, identified 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.(6) Sue Ellen Case assimilated Gandersheim to a modern separatist collective and argued persuasively for seeing Hrotsvit as the first woman to revise dramatic roles for women.(7) More recently, Barbara Gold (like Case, who 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.(8) Case and Gold imagine a context for Hrotsvit and locate a voice appropriate to that context. While I believe their analyses to be both sound and valuable as far as they go, they fail to address the tenth-century context of production for these texts.(9) Gold wants to find Hrotsvit, the individual, and she looks for this woman in the texts she wrote.(10)
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. After all, Hrotsvit did not write about her own experience, but about anchorites and martyrs in second- to fourth-century Rome. Why did she choose this subject matter, and why did she give it a particular dramatic form? We cannot expect a definitive answer, but 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. In particular, I will address the question of 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. Yet because this very inadequacy is a source of illumination, Elaine Scarry's analysis remains central to my inquiry.(11) She says that the torturer reduces the scope of the victim's consciousness until nothing remains but the body in pain, thereby destroying her world and forcing her to accept his world in its place. Ideally, the victim's recantation or confession will affirm that the torturer's version of reality is true. In this sense, as Scarry points out, the torturer aims to appropriate the victim's voice. Even without such "true" speech, the victim's scream, grimace, or other sign of pain serves as an alternative form of speech acknowledging the superior power of the torturer. For those who survive torture in the modern world, the ability to resist commonly includes not only a powerful belief system but also a psychological splitting off of the essential self from bodily experience. We might presume that the Christian faith enabled the fourth-century martyr to employ similar tactics, but this would be to impose patterns of thought quite foreign to Hrotsvit and her contemporaries, in part because it relies upon a conception of psychology as something internal to and contained by the individual body. Both the history of ordeal and Hrotsvit's dramatic structure can help us construct an understanding of martyrdom more appropriate to the tenth-century.
My discussion addresses the relation between bodily torment as a social
practice and the dramatic representation of the tormented body, and I believe a
close reading of medieval representations and practices can contribute to our
understanding of twentieth-century phenomena. Frances Mascia-Lees and Patricia
Sharpe suggest that "current interest in the body might be understood as
nostalgic longing for the simple and knowable in a world were scientific and
medical advances have broken down traditional boundaries."(12)
I have no nostalgic longing for martyrdom and ordeal, however. Rather, textual
evidence from a period before the modern "natural" body took its place in
Western thought suggests that we can survive the "demise of the body."
Different, pre-modern conceptions of the body provide reassurance that "we" and
"our bodies" can survive the uncertainty into which even the terms of discussion
are plunged.
Hrotsvit's tormented bodies
In search of such different conceptions, I turn to The Martyrdom of the Holy Virgins Fides, Spes, and Karitas, a play also known as Sapientia. The Emperor Hadrian orders the following torments for the daughters of Sapientia (Wisdom): Fides (Faith) is flogged by twelve centurions, then her nipples are cut off, she is thrown on a hot grill, and swims in a pot of boiling wax and pitch. She feels no pain. Triumphant, she is beheaded (136-38). With the first girl dead, the pagans turn to Spes (Hope). As with her sister, the beating merely exhausts those who administer it, so Hadrian orders her "suspended in mid-air and torn to pieces with claws so that when her bowels have been severed/ and her bones have been bared,/ cracking, limb by limb, she dies." But she doesn't die--yet. Instead, her lacerated flesh gives off a wonderful fragrance (140-41). She is also thrown into a pot, this time with oil and fat added to the hot wax and pitch. Rather than harming her, the mixture bursts the bronze pot and kills the servants. The Romans give up and cut off her head. The youngest girl, Karitas (Charity), is taken away to be hung on a rack and lashed, then thrown into a furnace that has been heated for three nights and days (144). As you might predict, she comes through unscathed and her head must be lopped off as well.
These girls are under attack because they persist in speaking as Christians. They will neither be quiet nor will they praise pagan gods (with either word or action). Because Hadrian sees Christianity as a threat to the social order, he has Sapientia arrested. He hopes to bring about a recantation, but is willing to stop her subversion at any cost. After persuasion, threats, and detention fail to effect a change, Hadrian takes the advice of Antiochus: "let them be killed so that their rebellious mother may be tormented all the more acutely by their pain" (135). Sapientia is thus positioned as the ultimate target of these torments. Both Hadrian's aims and his methods are familiar from modern accounts of torture: he seeks to inflict monstrous pain; he describes each torture in advance (a variant of "showing the instruments"); and he forces his primary victim to watch the torture of family members. Although he never succeeds, Hadrian aims to produce pagan speech from the Christians, who he would free if they consented to praise the Roman gods. By the end, Karitas needs only say the words "Great Diana" to be spared.
This play constructs martyrdom as a battle over the voice. Hrotsvit repeats a single dramatic pattern for the two oldest daughters: First Hadrian describes a torture, often with verbal support from his advisor Antiochus. Then the girl--presumably while undergoing the torment--redescribes it, stressing her freedom from pain. After several such exchanges, Hadrian orders death by beheading. A lengthy leave-taking between the martyr and her family separates his order from her death, minimizing the dramatic impact of his speech even though the girl is indeed killed. Sapientia witnesses Hadrian's fruitless attempts to produce pain. Within the text, this is played out as a contest over representation. In each case, the girl's description overwrites the emperor's.
The pattern is compressed for the third girl, and includes Hadrian's explicit instruction to carry out the torments offstage. Hadrian again prescribes lashing. Antiochus, rather than the martyr, voices certainty that it will have no effect. Hadrian responds with a second measure (burning), after which the girl herself asserts that she will feel no pain. Unlike her sisters, she makes this assertion in advance of the torments. Events are then reported by Antiochus after they have occurred and before Karitas returns to the scene for her death. In this case, the pagans give up the battle of words at the outset, and lose faith in their methods. They also inflict greater harm upon themselves with each successive martyrdom. When Fides swims happily in the fiery pot the pagans are unharmed, but later the mixture into which they put Spes kills the servants. Finally, Karitas sings hymns in the furnace accompanied by angels, while the flame explodes and burns five thousand men. The Christians, in contrast, maintain their faith and their power of speech. Earthly death is for them the route to eternal life--a reward, not a punishment.
We can read the drama as an allegory that uses separate dramatic figures to
manifest the Christian virtues: Wisdom remains steadfast through brutal attacks
on Faith, Hope, and Charity--as do the virtues themselves. In the drama's
devotional ending, a contented Sapientia prays on her daughters' graves for a
quick release from the "fetters of [her] earthly body" (149). Her prayer ties
the martyrdom of Fides, Spes, and Karitas to that of Christ. From this
perspective, Sapientia seems to anticipate later morality plays such as
Wisdom, Mankind, and The Castle of Perseverance. On
the other hand, a dramatist creates figures and events to be embodied, and does
so within a cultural and historical context that includes reading practices, a
particular understanding of causation, and knowledge of real-world events and
their action upon real bodies that exist in time and space. For reasons of
scope, I intend to sidestep the performance issue by taking the position that
even a solitary reader can imagine a staging, and I won't distinguish between
the real and the imagined body on stage.(13)
By "reading," I mean any process of reception and interpretation, and I will use
the terms "reader" and "spectator" as equivalents. In any event, Hrotsvit's use
of Hadrian, a historical figure, situates the drama in time and space, implying
a connection to bodies as they exist in the material world even though some
figures can be read allegorically. Without entirely rejecting allegory, I will
propose alternative readings that take into account three possible audiences:
the canonesses at Gandersheim, the (male) Ottonian rulers, and female members of
the ruling families. I believe all three audiences are plausible, and that the
readings can co-exist and be variously contained within one another. After all,
any spectator can also imagine the interpretation of a different spectator.
Before we can understand how any tenth-century audience might have interpreted
Hrotsvit's dramas, however, we need to know more about their cultural reading
practices with respect to bodies and events.
Reading bodies in Ottonian culture
In the tenth century, Saxony was on the frontier of a Christian Europe that had been fragmented since the end of the Carolingian empire. The imperial project of Otto the Great entailed an internal consolidation of power as well as expansion to the east by means of conquest and conversion. In this kind of borderland, ritual was an especially important means to communicate ideas and sentiments, and also to direct attention to crucial events and to control public reception of them.(14) To cement alliances, warriors prayed together, swore oaths, and sang certain portions of the liturgy before battle. Gestural communication was taken very seriously and could in turn have serious consequences. Widukind of Corvey tells of Wichmann, who was defeated in battle and needed to perform the ritual gesture of vassalage, "giving his hands," in order to surrender. Unfortunately, because the Slavs who defeated him were his social inferiors, Wichmann refused. They sent for their lord so Wichmann could surrender to him. In the meantime the fighting continued, and Wichmann was killed. Leyser notes that such incidents are strikingly present in turn-of-the-millennium chronicles by both Widukind and Theitmar of Merseburg, yet they were largely absent from Carolingian histories.(15) Ritual was an equally important channel of communication within the empire. In 937, Otto required each participant in a rebellion led by Duke Eberhard of Franconia to carry a dog for a great distance as ritual penance, after which he gave them presents. Leyser concludes that by virtue of this last "piece of theatre," Otto's rule over Saxony was strengthened, nobility was warned against rebellion, and those who were punished "won identity as a result, set themselves off from the mass of unknown warriors."(16) At Steel in 938, Otto ordered a ritual combat for the explicit purpose of avoiding public debate.(17) In 967, he directly recommended trial by battle (duel)--a form of joint ordeal--to resolve property disputes in Italy, because the authenticity of documents was in question and too many false oaths were being sworn.(18)
Both oath and ordeal require a belief in immanent justice: that God is involved in the material world to such a degree that he will make the truth manifest in the human body.(19) Ordeal was a special kind of ritual performance by means of which a dramatic--and violent--gesture could demonstrate guilt or vindicate innocence. During its heyday (roughly 800 to 1200), the ordeal was especially popular to resolve disputes about paternity and inheritance, crimes of stealth, and charges of adultery--all cases where the facts might not be visible but resolution was of great importance to the parties.(20) In the twelfth-century, writers arguing against ordeal complained that the outcome was inherently ambiguous and open to manipulation by the participants. For example, after a participant grasped the red hot iron, normal healing of the hand was a sign of God's judgment for the participant; however, the hand was unbandaged and "read" after three days, a period likely to leave the condition of such a wound as open to interpretation as an inkblot.(21) Judicial combat could have surprisingly ambiguous results as well. In the case of duels fought on islands, the combatants fought alone, under the eye of God, so that death was read as a divine judgment cut off from any temporal connection. Yet in 979, when one Waldo died during such a duel on an island in the Elbe, he could still be considered the victor. Before he died, his opponent Gero had already said he couldn't go on fighting. As a result, Gero was held to have lost and was beheaded.(22)
Ordeal had been a central component of "criminal law" since classical Greece.(23) An injured party was responsible to bring his case before the appropriate authorities, who needed to have jurisdiction over both parties. If both the accuser and the accused were oath-worthy, each would swear an oath as to the truth of the charges. (I should mention that women weren't oath-worthy--a male relative would swear for a woman. On the other hand, a woman's body could be depended upon to reveal the truth even if her voice could not. She was ordeal-worthy.) Witnesses were called to support the worthiness of the parties, rather than to testify about matters of fact. In a case where the accused couldn't produce sufficient witnesses, s/he could be subjected to the ordeal.
After 1215, inquisition took the place of accusation, confession rather than
the bodily sign became the "queen of proofs," and the use of torment shifted
from ordeal to torture. Pain might be inflicted to produce a confession, but the
body subserved the voice. One result was to more clearly establish the "victim"
role, since voluntary confession would (at least in theory) preclude torture.
Prior to this shift, ordeal was the road to truth when a party's oath was not
sufficient, but anyone might offer to undergo an ordeal. (Of course,
such an offer might be made as the result of considerable pressure in a case
where an uncertain outcome couldn't be tolerated.)(24)
In a deadlock, offering to undergo an ordeal heightened the atmosphere and at
the same time removed the issue from its immediate context. In the end, the
spectacle not only resolved the conflict and contained its energy, but also made
a lasting imprint on the public memory.(25)
Whether the textual evidence for ordeal and other forms of ritual gesture tells
us more about social practices, about the way Ottonian culture wished to be
memorialized, or about what the eleventh century chose to remember,(26)
we can safely assume that Hrotsvit lived and wrote in a culture accustomed to
reading bodily signs as evidence of divine intervention in the world.(27)
Throughout Hrotsvit's dramas, as in ordeal, events are taken for signs and
outward appearance necessarily reveals virtue.
Reading bodies in Hrotsvit's dramas
In The Martyrdom of the Holy Virgins Agape, Chionia, and Hirena, beauty is a transparent sign of virtue. Like Sapientia, the play (also known as Dulcitius) centers on a family group of three Christian virgins martyred at the behest of a Roman emperor. Dulcitius begins with an ironic contrast: the pagan Emperor Diocletian manifests the rage and madness he attributes to the virgins, while they remain impassive. The girls' bodies function as foci of desire but are themselves free from desire. By contrast, the non-Christian men are represented as desiring subjects, which also means they are subject to their bodies. Diocletian wants to direct the disposal of the girls in marriage. Governor Dulcitius wants to use and possess them himself and his desire produces his downfall. After Dulcitius is blackened in the kitchen by making love to the pots and pans he mistakes for the virgins, Agape observes that now his body corresponds to his mind (42).(28) On the other side of the balance, although the physical beauty of the girls is a visible manifestation of their virtue, pagan interpreters misread it as a sign of commodity exchange value, beginning with Diocletian's demand that the girls bring offerings to the Roman gods in order to be married well (the last thing they'd want!) (37). But while the signs can be misread, Christian virtue cannot be degraded. When Dulcitius orders Agape, Chionia, and Hirena stripped for display, their clothes magically adhere to their bodies and cannot be removed (43). Hirena is threatened with sexual degradation in a brothel, and retorts: "Lust deserves punishment, but forced compliance the crown; neither is one considered guilty,/ unless the soul consents freely" (46). All the same, God prevents her body from being defiled, and although Agape and Chionia are thrown into a fire and their souls depart at once, their physical bodies remain unharmed. In this play, death is not a sign of pagan power but of God's grace, and at the final Resurrection, the martyr's beautiful body will again serve as the proper sign of the pure soul.
The construction "as a sign of," however, posits a gap between the sign and the signified utterly foreign to tenth-century thought. After Saussure we may understand signification to be conventional, but no gap or caprice would have been seen by Hrotsvit or other tenth-century Christians. Perhaps work was required to arrive at the truth, but that truth was available and unambiguous. You might be wrong, but there was no other "possible world." Everything was part of God's creation. As Augustine said,
I have sufficiently argued that it is possible for living creatures to remain alive in the fire, being burnt without being consumed, feeling pain without incurring death; and this is by means of the omnipotent Creator. Anyone who says that this is impossible for the Creator does not realize who is responsible for whatever marvels he finds in the whole world of nature. It is, in fact, God himself who has created all that is wonderful in this world, the great miracles as well as the minor marvels I have mentioned; and he has included them all in that unique wonder, that miracle of miracles, the world itself.(29)
Miracles (and Augustine considered ordinary events to be miracles by virtue of being part of God's creation) might be difficult to understand, so exegesis is required. Just as exegesis is an essential component of ordeal, it determines the structure of Hrotsvit's dramatic action.
The Conversion of General Gallicanus and The Resurrection of Drusiana and Calimachus provide clear examples of this structure. Gallicanus is defeated in battle and deserted by the tribunes under his command, but the moment he promises to convert we see the enemy surrender in despair. Calimachus is frightened to death by a serpent during his attempt at necrophilia, but then resurrected as a Christian. In each of these two plays, the conversion of the male protagonist is instantaneous. This in itself is not noteworthy--Augustine's conversion was also sudden and required lengthy explanation by means of his Confession, well after the fact.(30) My interest here is in the way Hrotsvit merely marks the moment of conversion with a sort of condensed, iconic reference when it occurs within the dramatic action. When the heros later recount these events, they not only explain what happened, as we might expect. They also include significant action that was in no way suggested when the moment was staged: the physical manifestation of divine intervention that makes conversion possible. Gallicanus says that after his tribunes surrendered and he himself fled (earlier mentioned as possibilities but not actualized), a heavenly brigade came to his aid led by a cross-bearing youth. In similar fashion, Calimachus relates the appearance of a terrifying youth who covered Drusiana's corpse, rained sparks from his face, and told the necrophiliac that he must die in order to live. Hrotsvit's dramatic structure can look "untheatrical" to the modern reader or viewer, but it fits a conception of dramatic action constituted by the soul's movement. The body manifests the soul, but visibility is not sufficient for understanding.(31) We might expect to see the angelic intervention staged, or at least to have it taken into account, but we are accustomed to make judgments on the basis of visible evidence. The scientific method is fundamental to our mental habits. Rather than arguing against stagings or an understanding of theatrical representation in the tenth century, Hrotsvit's dramatic structure shows a different conception of causality or at least of how causation can be perceived: one sees causation not by looking at the event itself, but by means of contemplation, particularly contemplation under the guidance of one's spiritual superiors. God acts fast but man understands slowly, after repeated explanation. The structure of these plays also ensures that neither the listener within the dramatic frame nor the spectator can possibly understand the dramatic sign until the now-Christian hero supplies his reading.
Keeping this dramatic framework in mind, how can we read the bodies of Hrotsvit's martyrs? In Dulcitius, the body--and in particular, its sexual properties--focuses the conflict between Christian female and pagan male. Agape, Chionia, and Hirena withstand the threat of bodily harm and degradation, and are rewarded with death--they are freed from their bodies--but those bodies are protected from harm. In Sapientia, Hrotsvit shifts the power struggle from the body to the voice. Although Hadrian is overcome by the girls' beauty and wants to "mollify them first with flattering speech" (127), they are never positioned as tenable objects for male sexual desire. Far to the contrary: as the play opens, Hadrian is informed that these Christian women have managed to effect an unthought-of disruption in Rome: wives are alienated and will no longer eat or sleep with men (126). The bodies of Fides, Spes, and Karitas are not, however, miraculously protected from attack. These girls withstand remarkably brutal treatment but retain control of their voices. Not only do they impassively assert their Christian faith throughout, but their tormented bodies continue to manifest God's grace, culminating in a blessed death. Significantly, they feel no pain, and this is what makes possible their translation of torture into ordeal. Because they don't experience pain, the girls don't simply endure but are protected from torture. We might say that the torture does produce true speech: but not in the way the pagans intend, and the truth is not what they believe. In Hrotsvit's version of martyrdom, God appropriates the voice of the torturer.
Scarry says "to bring pain into the world by objectifying it in language, is
to destroy one of them," because pain and the world are absolutely
incompatible.(32)
The torturer aims to objectify the pain and thereby destroy the victim's world.
But anyone who gives voice to the victim, who gives an accurate account of the
pain, can project the image of the sufferer's subjective experience out into the
world. At the very least, Scarry sees this as a mitigation of torture.(33)
So whenever we stage the body in pain, we bring the victim's suffering into
public. We make a spectacle of suffering and by doing so honor it. Can we
possibly see Hrotsvit's staging of martyrdom in Ottonian culture as this sort of
subversive remediation?
Hypothetical audiences
If Hrotsvit's plays were indeed read (or staged) at Gandersheim, how could this community of women interpret her picture of horrifying but painless bodily torment? At first glance, I might suggest the following message: be faithful and endure anything you're subjected to; God is on your side and will protect you. Yet nothing suggests that a canoness or even a consecrated nun was subjected to much unpleasantness at Gandersheim.(34) Hrotsvit did not write about her own experience. She modelled her six plays on Terence, and reworked Roman martyrology to substitute virtuous Christians for his lascivious pagans. Her choice of Terence as a model is not surprising--his texts were used for learning Latin throughout the middle ages.(35) But why did she choose the martyrdom of Christian virgins in imperial Rome as subject matter? I find one plausible answer in Augustine, who explains in The City of God that although both the good and the wicked suffer, they (and their suffering) are different. Good men are tested and purified by suffering, whereas bad men are ruined by it. In Augustine's words, "Stir a cesspit, and a foul stench arises; stir a perfume, and a delightful fragrance ascends. But the movement is the same."(36) The primary reason for God to punish the good as well as the bad is that the good also (although to a lesser degree) love this temporal life rather than despising it. If they despised it, they would not be afraid to reform others even if they were endangered by doing so.
Freedom from pain thus signifies the martyr's purity, and a play about the painless torment of Roman virgins could serve to direct women within a relatively porous religious enclosure away from worldly concerns. There is every reason to think that Gandersheim was particularly susceptible to temporal distraction, because of its close relation to the ruling family.(37) As a Christian speaking to other Christian women, perhaps Hrotsvit chose female martyrs in order to all the more clearly position her spectator through identification. If I imagine this to be the case, I can argue against reading Hrotsvit's rehabilitation of female weakness as the utterance of a proto-feminist, resistant voice. The meaning of martyrdom in these dramas is controlled by its location within a pagan regime, and I can argue further that Hrotsvit depicts oppressive gender roles and relations within a decadent Roman empire precisely so that her spectator will contrast them with the relatively powerful position of women in the ascendant Ottonian empire. Her depiction of gender oppression in a pagan culture would thus serve to reinforce the female spectator's preference for the Christian world.
Nothing proves that Hrotsvit's plays remained within the convent, however. Peter Dronke maintains that Hrotsvit addressed the preface to her dramas to Archbishop Brun of Cologne, the younger brother of Otto I.(38) He goes on to suggest that the plays of Terence and later of Hrotsvit were read aloud at court, with distribution of parts. How might Brun--or Otto himself, for that matter--view Hrotsvit's picture of martyrdom? Under Brun, the Church became an integral administrative agency of the empire, in what C. Stephen Jaeger calls the "imperial church system."(39) His influence was not limited to the appointment of bishops, although this was an important function. As archbishop he had military as well as ecclesiastic power, and after his crucial assistance to Otto in suppressing an intra-dynastic rebellion, Brun became archduke of Lotharingia as well. Timothy Reuter sees this as an anomaly deriving not from the power of the episcopate but from Brun's position as Otto's younger brother, noting that this combination of clerical and secular power didn't become common until the early eleventh century. Finally, although Otto II, the only legitimate son of Otto the Great, was elected king and crowned in 961 and became co-emperor in 967, he had no real independent power while his father lived. While Otto I spent roughly 963-73 south of the Alps, the empire was maintained in Saxony by Brun together with his (and Otto's) mother Mathilda and Otto's illegitimate son, Archbishop William of Mainz.(40)
This empire was explicitly modelled on Rome, and like Rome had to manage internal power struggles even while expanding its borders. Unlike their pagan predecessors, the Christian emperors practiced forcible conversion. The inhabitants of any conquered region could convert or lose their heads--a situation uncomfortably close to that in which Sapientia's daughters find themselves. The crucial difference, of course, is the nature of the regime in which they are martyred. What happens to the message when their martyrdom is represented inside a just, Christian empire? Should the Christian emperor (or his right-hand man) compare his actions to those of his unjust, pagan predecessors? Although I think the question needs to be asked, I find nothing to justify this interpretation. Hrotsvit draws no parallel between the Roman treatment of Christians and the Ottonian conversion of conquered pagans. A much more likely implication is that if Otto were unjust, God would grant the same sort of resistant triumph to the Slavs as he granted the Christians in Rome. This construction matches the pattern Leyser identifies in the Res Gestae Saxonicae by Hrotsvit's contemporary, Widukind of Corvey: "At great crises and in desperate situations it was God who saved Otto I from his enemies and gave him victory against all odds, but Widukind also dwelt on the king's iron nerve and unshakable resolve."(41) To push this reading even further, each battle becomes an ordeal with victory a manifestation of divine favor. If the vanquished suffer pain, this serves as an equally clear sign of their wickedness.
Although this reading supports Otto and/or Brun, it seems unlikely that they would need reassurance from Hrotsvit. On the other hand, they would benefit greatly by the reception of such a message by other members of the aristocracy who we could reasonably expect to be present at court. The empire faced constant threats from within. Leyser says, "Between 938 and 1002 all the major upheavals in the homeland of the Saxon dynasty had one common characteristic: disaffected nobles with very few exceptions rose only when a member of the royal house equally resentful collected and led them."(42) For the ruling family, Hrotsvit's dramas could serve the same function as ordeal and other forms of ritual gesture in constructing social memory. The absence of pain on the part of Hrotsvit's stage martyrs supports a system of signification vital to the Ottonian imperial project, a system wherein military victory is a sign of divine favor. Within this system, each unsuccessful rebellion could be read as further evidence that God was with the emperor (and his surrogates).
Whether the plays were staged in the court or the convent, however,
female members of the aristocracy would be present. Not only were they
frequent visitors to Gandersheim, but the abbesses and most of the canonesses
were themselves the unmarried daughters and widowed mothers of the ruling
families. Women may have been unusually important in tenth-century Saxony, but
their importance in Ottonian texts (and not only those written by Hrotsvit) can
cover over their function as objects of exchange, necessary to cement alliances,
and as agents in the transfer of power and land to the emperor. Inheritance
practices made aristocratic women a potentially divisive force that needed to be
kept under control within the court and within the Church hierarchy for the sake
of imperial consolidation. For this audience, who I imagine could read in
Hrotsvit's staging of martyrdom any or all of the messages I've proposed thus
far, the exegetical structure of the dramas adds another message, equally
useful: Do what the Imperial Church tells you to do, because the Church knows
what God means.
Conclusion
Unlike twentieth-century dramatists who depict torture, Hrotsvit does not stage the body in pain. She makes it quite explicit that her virgins are protected from the experience of bodily pain. Their ordeal is a power struggle between pagan rulers (who can be understood as manifestations of the Devil) and God, carried out in the martyr's body. By erasing pain from her representation of martyrdom, Hrotsvit appropriates the voice of the victim to serve as a sign of the imperial Church's power.
The appropriation of Hrotsvit's work for narrow ideological projects
typically operates by restricting her to a single voice. In the twentieth
century Hrotsvit has been increasing read as the first woman playwright
rather than the first German dramatist. But that Hrotsvit speaks with
multiple voices can be clearly seen in the widely divergent purposes according
to which she has been interpreted.(43)
In locating and concentrating their analysis upon a "resistant" voice in
Hrotsvit, twentieth-century feminist interpreters overlook the mechanisms by
which that voice is re-inscribed by the patriarchal (and colonial)
discourse to which it talks back. Admittedly, she couches her intent in
gender-coded terms, referring to the "victories of triumphant innocence," made
particularly glorious when "female weakness triumphs in conclusion/ and male
strength succumbs in confusion" (3). Yet on many levels Hrotsvit's dramatization
of passive female triumph serves to reinforce male strength in
action.
1. References to the dramas and prefaces will be from The Plays of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, trans. Katharina Wilson (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1989) and will be included in the text.
2. See Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress, Social Semiotics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 58-59.
3. See Patrick Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Karl Leyser, Rule and Conflict in an Early Medieval Society (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1979); and Timothy Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages c. 800-1056 (London and New York: Longman, 1991).
4. This is Hrotsvit's play on her name. See Katharina M. Wilson, Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: The Ethics of Authorial Stance (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1988), 146-147.
5. See Sydney Janet Kaplan, "Varieties of Feminist Criticism," in Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. Gayle Green and Coppélia Kahn (London: Methuen, 1985), 37-58. See also Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988), especially 1-18 for the distinction between liberal, cultural, and materialist feminist approaches; and 19-21 for the relation of feminism to the canon.
6. See Wilson's introduction to her translation of the plays, esp. xxi.
7. Sue-Ellen Case, "Re-Viewing Hrotsvit," Theatre Journal 35 (December 1983): 536.
8. Barbara K. Gold, "Hrotswitha Writes Herself: Clamor Validus Gandersheimensis," in Sex and Gender in Medieval and Renaissance Texts: The Latin Tradition, ed. Barbara Gold, Paul Allen Miller, and Charles Platter (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 57.
9. Case notes the importance of semiotics and reception theory for understanding the relation of any drama to social conventions and social consciousness (533), but her concern remains with twentieth-century reception and signification. Gold does note the importance of cultural context in understanding Hrotsvit, but her essay does not inquire very deeply into what that context might be have been. Although Gold's command of the critical literature is superb, she cites only two works for background on the tenth century: Eleanor Shipley Duckett, Death and Life in the Tenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967); and R. S. Lopez, The Tenth Century (New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1959).
10. Gold maintains "if we read both the personal narratives and dramas together, we receive from Hrotswitha what might be called an autobiography" (45).
11. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), esp. 45-51. Also see Edward Peters, Torture (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985). For analyses that make use of Scarry, see Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's "Dirty War" (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Laura E. Tanner, Intimate Violence: Reading Rape and Torture in Twentieth-Century Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Frances E. Mascia-Lees and Patricia Sharpe, ed., Tattoo, Torture, Mutilation, and Adornment: The Denaturalization of the Body in Culture and Text (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992). For an interesting application to performance studies, see Joseph R. Roach, "The Inscription of Morality as Style," in Interpreting the Theatrical Past, ed. Thomas Postlewait and Bruce McConachie (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989): 110-111.
12. Mascia-Lees and Sharpe, 5, citing Emily Martin, "The End of the Body?" Keynote address at the Annual Meeting of the American Ethnological Society, Atlanta, Georgia, April 1990. The motivation for nostalgic longing is described, following Lévi-Strauss, as "the illusion of something which no longer exists but should exist." An active awareness that this "body" (which we think we ought to have known but are quite sure we never did) is not essential works to overcome the terror occasioned by a collapse of boundaries. Mascia-Lees and Sharpe mention the currently threatened boundaries between inner and outer (as medical technology makes the inside of the body equivalent to outer space, both of which have become strange worlds to be perceived with the aid of scientific instruments, citing Martin) and between nature and culture (as both medical and cosmetic bodily modifications become more and more commonplace, citing Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s," Socialist Review 80 (1986): 65-107).
13. Hrotsvit's plays might have been fully staged in the tenth century, at Gandersheim or at court. They might have been read aloud with the roles distributed but not fully enacted. They might have been read silently, in solitude. The question has been widely debated.
14. Karl Leyser, Communications and Power in Medieval Europe: The Carolingian and Ottonian Centuries (London: The Hambledon Press, 1994), 194-95.
17. Peter Brown, "Society and the Supernatural: A Medieval Change," Daedalus 104:2 (1975): 149, n.31.
18. Robert Bartlett, Trial by Fire and Water: Medieval Judicial Ordeal (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 105.
19. Edward Peters, Torture (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 42.
21. Brown: 139, citing Petrus Cantor, Verbum abbreviatum, chap. 78. See also Benedicta Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory, Record and Event 1000-1215, revd ed. (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1987 [1982]), 18-19.
22. Leyser, Communications and Power, 209-210.
23. The following summarizes Peters, 41.
25. Bartlett, 14; Brown: 138. For the paradigm used by both see Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982).
26. The period during which Hrotsvit wrote is thought of as
a low point for the production of original literature or even the copying of
manuscripts. Given the scarcity of extant texts from the tenth century, we might
be surprised to find dramas by a cloistered woman among the survivors. Patrick
Geary gives two primary reasons that so few manuscripts remain:
First, the sparse evidence of documentation quite likely comes from a
different understanding of the purposes and uses of writing and the relationship
between text, action, and object rather than from a lack of writing. Second,
. . . the paucity of evidence at our disposal today is the result of
losses of written evidence, much of which is attributable to decisions made in
the eleventh century about the utility of the masses of written material
inherited from previous centuries. (Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and
Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1994), 15.)
Geary sees this period (roughly 950-1059) as in many ways more concerned with selective forgetting than with remembering, because forgetting makes change possible: Arnold of Regensburg used the image of a "mental clearing of the forest" (18-20). Geary explores the active reconstruction of the past, or the construction of an alternative past, around the millennium.
27. See also, for an analysis of "virtue made visible" and its role in tenth-century charismatic pedagogy, C. Steven Jaeger, The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideas in Medieval Europe, 950-1200 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 76-117. Brun, who I will discuss later, is Jaeger's central example.
28. The transformation of Dulcitius shows that the Devil cannot remain concealed. On the Christian symbolism of Dulcitius, see Sandro Sticca, "Hrotswitha's Dulcitius and Christian Symbolism," Mediaeval Studies 32 (1970): 108-27.
29. De Civitate Dei 21.9, trans. Henry Bettenson as The City of God (London: Penguin Books, 1972), 985.
30. I thank Tony Dardis for pointing out the model provided by Augustine.
31. For the rhetorical construction of medical evidence beginning with Vesalius, see T. Hugh Crawford, "Imaging the Human Body: Quasi Objects, Quasi Texts, and the Theater of Proof," Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America 111:1 (January 1996): 66-79. Brigitte Cazelles treats the medical theatre of proof in conjunction with the medieval representation of torture in "Bodies on Stage and the Production of Meaning," Yale French Studies 86 (1994): 56-74. For another (and compatible) look at one of Cazelles' objects of study, see Leslie Abend Callahan, "The Torture of Saint Apollonia: Deconstructing Fouquet's Martyrdom Stage," Studies in Iconography 16 (1994): 119-138.
34. For general information about canonesses in the tenth century, including references to Gandersheim, see Jo Ann McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns Through Two Millennia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 176-201; and Heinrich Fichtenau, Living in the Tenth Century: Mentalities and Social Orders, trans. Peter Geary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), esp. 223-230. For more focus on Gandersheim but less focus on the life of a canoness, see Leyser, Rule and Conflict.
35. Terence continued to be read and copied throughout the
medieval period because Latin (including linguistic forms, expressions, and
rhetorical devices) was best learned by reading classical texts--Christian texts
were stylistically inferior. Although Peter Dronke considers Hrotsvit's
prefatory reference to many Catholics reading Terence a joke, the evidence is
against him. Women Writers of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984), 70. For a recent consideration of the issue, see Julia
Bolton Holloway, "Slaves and Princes: Terence Through Time," in The
Influence of the Classical World on Medieval Literature, Architecture, Music,
and Culture, ed. Fidel Fajardo-Acosta (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1992): 34-53.
Holloway demonstrates "the continuing reception, appropriation and subversion"
of Terence in both monastery and court, to teach not only Latin but also
"humanity and humility."
Terence also teaches something useful about the negotiation of authority between fathers and sons (e.g., both Adelphoe and Heautontimorenus) and the fulfillment of desire by means of its concealment (especially Eunuchus)--lessons of great practical value for the Ottonian empire. John Henderson asks, "Was it important to the production of Romans that Terence's texts be utilized in teaching in ways that precluded learning from them what they teach about teaching? Perhaps their design already predestined them for this role--the naturalization of a society's tacit covenant about what it has determined not to know." "Entertaining Arguments: Terence Adelphoe," in Post-Structuralist Classics, ed. Andrew Benjamin (New York: Routledge, 1988), 193.
37. The house was founded in 852 by Otto's great-grandfather and Gerberga, the abbess of Gandersheim at the time Hrotsvit wrote, was Brun's niece.
41. Leyser, Communications and Power, 27.
42. Leyser, Rule and Conflict, 29.
43. My argument about multivoiced discourse relies in particular on M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); Problems in Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). See also Barbara Herrnstein Smith, "Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories," Critical Inquiry 7.1 (Autumn 1980): 213-236.