Stephen B. Wailes. Spirituality and Politics in the Works of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2006. 290 pp. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-57591-100-7.

Reviewed by Kevin Teo Kia-Choong (Department of English, University of Calgary)
Published on H-German (September, 2007)

Spiritualitas, Auctoritas et Potentas: The Arms of the Spiritual Writer Hrotsvit of Gandersheim

In his Medieval Theory of Authorship (1984), Alastair J. Minnis defined the role of the auctor as "someone who was at once a writer and an authority, someone not merely to be read but also to be respected and believed."[1] In this context, the works of the auctor possessed authority insofar as he or she conveyed veracity and sagacity in his or her works. Situating the sixteen works of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim--a tenth-century canoness of the religious house of Gandersheim in Saxony in the period between the reigns of Otto I and Otto II--in such an ongoing debate is a productive critical endeavor that allows for fruitfulness in further highlighting the contemporary discourses of authorship and authority surrounding medieval female writers. Stephen B. Wailes's book, while indebted to former monograph-length studies of Hrotsvit in both German and English, such as Marianne Schütze-Pflugk's Herrscher und Märtyrerauffassung bei Hrotsvit von Gandersheim (1972) and Katharina Wilson's Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: The Ethics of Authorial Stance (1988), serves in its holistic consideration of all sixteen works of the author to reinforce the importance of Hrotsvit as an auctor within the medieval literary canon.

Two competing strands of thematic interest govern the argument of the book, mainly Hrotsvit's interest in both spirituality and politics. Wailes's understanding of this element of spirituality extends to two different arenas: the interior life of Christians and pagans who are imperfect (and often misled), and the interior life of Christian zealots and saints. Wailes defines the arena of politics for Hrotsvit distinctively within the manifest public lives of persons in positions of authority and power, especially princes and Christian nobility. Considering the commissions Hrotsvit received from Gerberga to write a poem in praise of the Ottonian dynasty and the political accomplishments of Otto I, it follows that Hrotsvit's works often reflect the intertwining of literature with concerns about how Christian rule is related to sacral history (a history of the Church Triumphant and Militant) as well as how a Christian monarch or figure of public trust should behave vis-à-vis the common people, including Christians and pagans. The merging of these two strands--traditionally seen as antithetical to each other from a twentieth-century perspective that stresses the separation of church and state--reminds us of the uniquely medieval worldview of Hrotsvit, in which she saw spirituality, found not only in public religion but also in interior faith, as manifestly occupying a stake in the affairs of the Holy Roman Empire during the tenth century C.E.

In this study, Wailes bucks the trend in Hrotsvit criticism established by predecessors like Wilson and Schütze-Pflugk, shying away from gender perspectives and focusing instead on a close study of the texts alongside possible sources. This return to a form of Hrotsvitphilologie, based on close reading techniques such as semantics, compositional principles, and stylistic features, has vital merits in its location of possible thematic sources for Hrotsvit's texts in the Latin Vulgate versions of Saint Paul, Augustine of Hippo, and Hrabanus Maurus. Here, themes pertinent to these authors, such as the conflict between spiritual and fleshly desires, and the conflict between godly communities based on charity and worldly communities based on cupidity, are noticeably mediated by Hrotsvit as a reflection of her enthusiastic engagement with Otto I as a latter-day successor to Constantine the Great and Charlemagne.

The division of the studies of Hrotsvit's works into topical chapters, based on a split between the narrative poems (Mary, The Ascension of the Lord, Gongolf, Pelagius, Theophilus, Basilus, Dionysius, Agnes), the plays (The Conversion of Gallicanus, General of the Army, Agape, Chionia, and Hirena, Drusiana and Calimachus, Mary, Thais, and Sapientia), and her histories (The Deeds of Otto, The Beginnings of the Convent of Gandersheim, and Primordia_), allows for ease of reading, as each chapter can be read as a singular unit on its own.

In part 1, Wailes takes care to unify his examination of the various narrative texts through a focus on the theme of conflict between spirit and flesh. The examples stretched throughout the study include Hrotsvit's rendition of biblical events, such as the contrast of the divine incarnation in Mary's body with the Jews' carnality (which prevents them from understanding Christ as the embodiment of God's grace) and Christ's ascension (which reveals an impending beatification of the body and its dignity). But it also includes Hrotsvit's narrative renditions of saints' legends: the emergence of the cult of Gongolf, vassal to the Christian Emperor Pippin, despite Gongolf's wife's impiety; Saint Pelagius's resistance to the carnal desires of Abd ar-Rahm n I; Theophilus's redemption by divine intervention after being seduced into carnal pride by the devil; Basilius's triumph over the devil; Dionysius's brave effrontery before Domitian in preaching the Gospel to the Gauls; and the passion of Saint Agnes, which involved resistance both to would-be suitors and the demonstration of her faith before pagans. While Wailes's study navigates the critical terrain of these narratives with relative ease, relating adequately how they affirm this central conflict of the carnal versus the spiritual, a lack of evenhandedness is present in the less-than-satisfactory look some chapters take at this conflict's connection to the political dimensions of Hrotsvit's role as auctor. While the study of the narratives of Theophilus and Basilius neglect this tethering, other chapters give it undue emphasis, such as those dealing with Pelagius, Gongolf, and Dionysius, which see these narratives as allegorical models of ideal Christian kingship.

In part 2, which focuses chiefly on Hrotsvit's plays and historical poems, Wailes devotes an equal amount of effort to studying the various aspects of the plays, which are concerned with the opposition between a godless Roman Empire and a Christian community as represented by its various Christian characters. To contrast the arguments of the latter half against the earlier half, Wailes's study of the drama here in part 2 is more tightly reined in towards affirming the crucial roles Hrotsvit's drama plays in voicing the state's functionality in formulating policies that affirm Christian values. Tristitia, otherwise known as sadness of a worldly bent, emerges as an emotion experienced by figures of authority whose carnal desires conflict incipiently with the sexual restraint advocated by Christian religion.

Part 3 of Wailes's study is arguably the most relevant to the study of the link between Christian spirituality and politics, especially in its focus on the Ottonian dynasty's contribution to the formations of a Christian polity, as well as the establishment of the ecclesiastical house for female religious at Gandersheim and its political links to the Ottonians. The situating of these historical poems within the historical context of Otto I's deposition of Pope John XII and his enthronement of Pope Leo VIII reveals Hrotsvit's role as an author intensely aware of the controversies over the claims of either church or state to rightful hegemony, but caught in a dilemma owing to Otto I's sponsorship of her writing. In lieu of the philological-literary emphasis of the former parts, this section tilts more towards a historical methodology in studying the specific events that shaped the writing of these historical poems, such as Liudolf and Oda's journey to Rome in 845 to seek papal approval to bring holy relics to Saxony, and the subsequent origins of the holy cloister at Gandersheim.

As a return to Hrotsvitphilologie, Wailes's book is an interesting, comprehensive study of the entirety of Hrotsvit's literary texts that reinstates her importance within the medieval literary canon as a female author. The link between the two domains of Christian spirituality and politics, however, is not always spelled out explicitly in certain parts of the book. When one reads of this vital theme of Wailes's study, one wonders if Wailes is referring to "politics" in a general sense of a political ideal as advocated by Hrotsvit, or whether he is referring to specific contemporary, political events of Hrotsvit's days. It is hard to manage a study of the ensemble of Hrotsvit's works and their thematic concerns and then to tether them to a singular theme in the shape of the correlation between Christian spirituality and politics; some readers might find that some of these chapters should have been omitted from this thematic study. Nonetheless, the book is an invaluable resource for the study of Hrotsvit's authorial self-fashioning and will be of interest to medievalists and scholars of medieval German literature and culture.

Note

[1]. Alastair J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship (London: Scolar Press, 1984).

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Citation: Kevin Teo Kia-Choong. Review of Wailes, Stephen B., Spirituality and Politics in the Works of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim. H-German, H-Net Reviews. September, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13612

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