Biography
Hrotsvit was born around 935, probably into Saxon nobility, and entered the imperial convent of Gandersheim as a young woman, where Abbess Gerberga II, a niece of Emperor Otto I, taught her the liberal arts and Latin literature. Between roughly 960 and 973 she wrote saints' legends in hexameter, six plays in rhymed prose modelled on Terence, and historical poetry, including the "Gesta Ottonis" on the reign of Otto I. Her plays, among them "Dulcitius," set Christian martyr stories against the love comedies of antiquity, which she considered immoral. She is regarded as the first known female poet of German origin and the first playwright since antiquity; her year of death is not recorded, but she died after 973.
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