In the tenth century, inside a Benedictine convent in Saxony, a woman named Hrotsvitha sat down and wrote six plays. She was the first known playwright in Europe since the fall of Rome. She wrote comedies. She wrote them in Latin. She wrote them about virgins outwitting pagans, prostitutes finding redemption, and women being considerably smarter than the men trying to control them. Then the plays disappeared for six hundred years.

She Rewrote Terence and Made It Feminist

Hrotsvitha's stated purpose was to write Christian alternatives to the Roman playwright Terence, whose comedies were standard reading in medieval education but contained what she delicately described as shameful content. Terence's women were seductresses and fools. Hrotsvitha's women were the heroes. Medieval literature scholars at the University of Cambridge have noted that this was a remarkably sophisticated act of literary subversion. She did not reject the classical tradition. She adopted its forms and replaced its values. She used the same dramatic structures Terence used but put women at the center who were intelligent, brave, and in control of their own stories. The comedy came from the men who underestimated them. Her play Dulcitius features a Roman governor who tries to assault three Christian women and instead, through divine intervention, ends up embracing pots and pans in a kitchen, covering himself in soot while believing he is kissing the women. He walks into court the next morning blackened and ridiculous. The guards do not recognize him. The women watch from their cell and laugh.

She Called Herself the Strong Voice of Gandersheim

Hrotsvitha's name means strong voice in Old Saxon, and scholars debate whether this was her given name or a name she chose for herself. Either way, she used it. She wrote prefaces to her work that are remarkably self-aware for any era. She acknowledged her limitations, described her working methods, and stated clearly that she was writing to glorify the strength of women. Research from the International Hrotsvit Society has shown that her works circulated within her convent and possibly among other monasteries during her lifetime, but they were lost to the wider world until 1494, when the humanist Conrad Celtis discovered a manuscript in the Benedictine monastery of St. Emmeram in Regensburg. He published them in 1501. The discovery rewrote the history of European drama. Before Hrotsvitha was found, scholars believed that theatrical writing had essentially ceased in Europe between the fall of Rome and the mystery plays of the twelfth century. She filled a gap of several hundred years by herself. She wrote in a convent because that was where educated women could write. She wrote plays because plays were the form that interested her. She wrote about women outsmarting men because that was the story she wanted to tell. That the world forgot her for six centuries and then found her again is the kind of plot she would have appreciated.