SOURCE: "Hroswitha—Tenth-Century Margaret Wester," The Theatre Annual, Vol. XIII, 1955, pp. 16-31.

In the following essay, Sprague surveys Hroswitha's life and works, focusing on the author's development in her six dramas.

From the far away past emerges a picture of a nun, with habit tucked up to her ankles and with manuscript in hand, striding up and down a great hall in a convent directing her sisters in a play she herself has written. This is Sister Hroswitha, the pride of the Benedictine Convent of Gandersheim, Saxony, who wrote, as far as can be ascertained, the very first plays in the Western world after the collapse of the Roman Empire. She is not the figment of some pseudo-historian's imagination. There is incontrovertible proof of her existence in the History of Gandersheim compiled by Henricus Bodo in 1025¹, and in Munich there is a manuscript codex which proves that she...