Canonizing the canoness: Anthologizing Hrotsvit

College Literature, Spring 2001 by Witt, Elizabeth Ann

For most of us who teach college literature, anthologies are a fact of life; they are convenient, compact, and often less expensive for students than purchasing separate texts. As part of my participation in the 1997 NEH Summer Institute on the Literary Traditions of Medieval Women, I had the opportunity to look at a number of anthologies of works by medieval women in which the works, particularly the plays, of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim are represented. If inclusion in anthologies can be seen as an indicator of a writer's place in an accepted canon, then Hrotsvit has surely arrived, at least in terms of the study of women writers.

But if one looks at other kinds of anthologies, particularly those that focus on drama, Hrotsvit is strangely absent, which, on the face of it, seems odd since she is one of the earliest medieval dramatists and one of the few from the period whose name we know. I have looked at numerous anthologies put out by major publishers for use in introduction to drama courses, and I have yet to find one that includes a play by Hrotsvit, or even one that mentions her in the critical apparatus. Hrotsvit is also absent from David Bevington's Medieval Drama (1975), the standard text in most university courses on medieval drama. If, as Glen Johnson has argued, anthologies "ratify] whatever consensus exists about the canon" and "perpetuat[e] that consensus in the act of presenting it and preserv[e] the consensus through assuring that the works are accessible" (1991, 113), then Hrotsvit's absence from drama anthologies, both medieval and general, must indicate something about her status in the drama canon as a whole. For some reason, Hrotsvit is not seen as an integral part of discussions of drama, even medieval drama. The question is, why not?

One easy way of explaining Hrotsvit's absence from the drama canon is to blame it on her sex. Sue-Ellen Case, for example, argues that "the seemingly dramatic standards which select the playwrights in the canon are actually the same patriarchal biases which organize the economy and social organization of the culture at large. In the case of Hrotsvit, this patriarchal bias suppresses the importance of the role of the first woman playwright" (1983, 534). Case goes on to argue that the problem with Hrotsvit, from the point of view of patriarchal bias, is that "[h]er project was to change the roles of women on the stage from negative ones to positive ones" (535) by overturning the problematic depiction of women in the works of Terence, on whom Hrotsvit claims to draw as a dramatic source.

While I believe that Case has a point in her gender-based explanation for Hrotsvit's exclusion from the canon of drama, I think there is more involved than simply the sex of the writer or the strength of her female characters. In Lost Saints, her study of the process by which Victorian women writers gained and were denied literary canonization,Tricia Lootens observes that as much as she would have liked to blame the lack of attention to women writers squarely on gender, what she actually discovered was that "the process of decanonization was much more complex and ambiguous" (1996, 1-2). Lootens links the canonization and decanonization of Victorian women writers to what she calls "the power of legend" (3). In Lootens' study, the "legends" in question are Victorian ideas about womanhood and paradigms for saintly canonization, among others. In the case of Hrotsvit, the primary "legend" which I believe excludes her from the canon of medieval drama is the largely discredited, but still powerful, notion of the evolutionary development of drama.

In his landmark 1965 book Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages, O.B. Hardison examines the influence of two early twentieth century scholars, E.K. Chambers and Karl Young, on the study of medieval drama. Hardison acknowledges that Chambers' The Medieval Stage, published in 1903, and Young's The Drama of the Medieval Church, published in 1933, have formed the basis of much of the critical work on medieval drama that has come since, but he also notes several serious problems with the two texts. For example, Hardison notes Chambers' aversion to the clergy and the dramatic productions of clerics which causes him to see the church as an impediment to the "mimetic instinct" which he believes drives the development of drama (1965, 15).This aversion leads, at best, to a serious misreading of much medieval drama. Hardison also notes that both Chambers and Young are somewhat fuzzy in how they define what exactly drama is and is not, a problem that complicates the determination of which texts bear discussion (17).

The most serious problem that Hardison points out, however, is that both books are deeply flawed in their conception of the development of drama, primarily because they rely on a Darwinian view of drama, a conception Hardison finds unsurprising considering when the works were written. The basic idea of both texts is that "Drama had 'arisen' from simple medieval beginnings, had 'flowered' in the work of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson, and had then passed into a phase of 'decadence' until its expiration in 1642" (1965, 4). The upshot of this approach was that "early forms of drama are interesting only as they lead to Shakespeare" (11). It is worth noting that Chambers and Young were not the only ones who saw medieval drama in this way; the anthology which Bevington's largely replaced was Joseph Quincy Adams's Chief Pre-Shakespearean Dramas (1924). Young took the evolutionary idea even further, seeing within medieval drama itself a mini-evolution where liturgical drama evolves into Passion and Nativity plays, which in turn evolve into legendary plays and morality plays (1965, 19).