Hrotsvit was the first dramatist of Christianity, the first female Saxon poet, the first Germanic author to employ the Faust theme, and one of the first Western writers to compose a Christian epic. The essays in Hrotsvit of Gandersheim examine the historical, cultural, legal, and political contexts of Hrotsvit's works, locating her opus within the tenth-century aristocratic and clerical intellectual milieu.

This collection contextualizes Hrotsvit's works with respect to heroic, sexual, domestic, behavioural, linguistic, theological, and hierarchical aspects of early medieval...

This is one of the first anthologies devoted to the writings of women in the Middle Ages. The fifteen women whose works are represented span seven centuries, eight languages, and ten regions or nationalities. Many are recognized, taught, and anthologized in their own countries but have been inaccessible to students in English. Others are little read today because their literary fortunes have paralleled fluctuations in literary taste and literary patronage.

Katharina M. Wilson's introduction to the volume places these writers in historical context and explores the question of the female...

The dawn of humanism in the Renaissance presented privileged women with great opportunities for personal and intellectual growth. Sexual and social roles still determined the extent to which a woman could pursue education and intellectual accomplishment, but it was possible through the composition of poetry or prose to temporarily offset hierarchies of gender, to become equal to men in the act of creation.

Edited by Katharina M. Wilson, this anthology introduces the works of twenty-five women writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, among them Marie Dentiere, a Swiss evangelical...