Hrotsvitha

Hrotsvitha (c. 935 – c. 1002), also known as Hroswitha, Hrotsvit, Hrosvit, and Roswitha, was a 10th-century German secular canoness, as well as a dramatist and poet who lived and worked in Abbey of Gandersheim, in modern-day Lower Saxony, a community of secular canonesses. Her name, as she herself attests, is Saxon for "strong voice."She wrote in Latin, and is considered by some to be the first person since antiquity to compose drama in the Latin West.Hrotsvit was born into the German nobility and became a canoness at the Abbey of Gandersheim, located at Bad Gandersheim.Hrotsvit studied under Rikkardis and Gerberg, daughter of King Henry the Fowler. Gerberg's brother, the Emperor Otto I, penned a history that became one of Hrotsvit's poetical subjects, in her Carmen de Gestis Oddonis Imperatoris, which encompasses the period up to the coronation of Emperor Otto I in 962.She was noted for her great learning and was introduced to Roman Writers by Gerberg. Hrotsvit's work shows familiarity, not only with the Church fathers, but also with Classical poetry, including Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Plautus and Terence (on whom her own verse was modelled). Several of her plays draw on the so-called apocryphal gospels. Her works form part of the Ottonian Renaissance.