ROTSVITA. - Benedictine nun and Saxon poetess, born c. 935, died probably after 973. According to Seidel, the name Hrotsvit is an abbreviation of her lay name Helena von Rossow; others, such as Gottsched, derive its etymology from “white rose”; in the preface to her collected plays, R. calls herself: “Clamor validus Gandeshemensis.”
Of noble family, she entered the convent of Gandersheim as a young girl, where a school of Latinity flourished. Under the guidance of Gerberga, niece of Otto the Great, she studied Latin authors and, after attempts made “clam cunctis et quasi furtim,” she practiced classical versification.
Of her production, entirely in Latin and ignored after her death, the humanist Conrad Celtes discovered the archetype toward the end of the 15th century in the Benedictine convent of St. Emmeram in Regensburg and issued the first edition (Nuremberg 1501, with eight woodcuts by Dürer). Arranged chronologically in three collections, it includes, besides a poem in hexameters on the deeds of Otto I up to 962 and a narrative, also in hexameters, of the origins of her monastery, eight sacred poems in leonine hexameters, six one-act plays in rhymed prose, and an appendix of 35 verses on episodes from the Apocalypse. Lost is the codex in which, according to the testimony of the monk Bodo, there were contained the lives, also in hexameters, of the holy popes Anastasius and Innocent.
The poems, of excellent craftsmanship, include: the Historia Nativitatis of the Blessed Virgin, drawn from the apocryphal Gospel of St. James; the Ascensio Domini, derived from a Greek text translated into Latin by Archbishop John; the Passions of Sts. Gongolphus and Pelagius (of the martyrdom of the latter, which occurred at Córdoba under the Saracens, she heard
ROTSVITA - ROUEN
1927; partial edition by G. Bosio with introduction by S. D’Amico, Milan 1927. Studies: E. Panzacchi, Storia R., in Saggi critici, Naples 1896, pp. 243-55; Ménitius, I, pp. 619-32; F. Ermini, Poeti epici latini del sec. X (with bibliography), Rome 1920, pp. 1-10; M. Rigobon, Il teatro e la latinità di Hrotsvitha, Padua 1932; E. Franceschini, Per una revisione del teatro latino di R., in Riv. ital. del dramma, 2 (1938), pp. 300-16; S. D’Amico, Storia del teatro drammatico, I, Milan 1939, pp. 282-91; C. Grünanger, Einführung in die Geschichte der allgemeinischen und der frühdeutschen Dichtung, ibid. 1942, pp. 127-28. Lanfranco Fiore