SOURCE: "Hroswitha of Gandersheim: Her Life, Her Times, Her Works" in Hroswitha of Gandersheim: Her Life, Times, and Works, and Comprehensive Bibliography, The Hroswitha Club, 1965, pp. 3-34.

In the following essay, Haight surveys the life an(d writings of Hroswitha, terming her "the most remarkable woman of her time."

The most remarkable woman of her time was Hroswitha, the tenth-century canoness of the Benedictine monastery of Gandersheim, Saxony. She was the earliest poet known in Germany and the first dramatist after the fall of the ancient stage of classical times.

In 1494 Conrad Celtes, the Renaissance humanist and first poet laureate of Germany, found an early and incomplete manuscript (Munich Codex) of the work of this "German Sappho," as he called her, in the monastery of Saint Emmeram at Regensburg. He published it in 1501, but unfortunately changed the order of her works and made "corrections." It had been lying...