Santa Clara University Scholar Commons English College of Arts & Sciences 10-2012 Hrotsvit's Apostolic Mission: Prefaces, Dedications, and Other Addresses to Readers Phyllis Brown Santa Clara University,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarcommons.scu.edu/engl Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Brown, Phyllis "Hrotsvit's Apostolic Mission: Prefaces, Dedications, and Other Addresses to Readers." In Hrotsvit of Gandersheim (fl. 960): Contextual and Interpretive Approaches. Ed. Phyllis R. Brown and Stephen L. Wailes. Brill's Companions to the Christian Tradition 34. Brill, 2012. 235-64. Copyright 2012 Brill. All Rights Reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789004234390 This Book Chapter is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Arts & Sciences at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in English by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Hrotsvit’s APOSTOLIC MISSION: PREFACES, DEDICATIONS, AND OTHER ADDRESSES TO READERS Phyllis R. Brown Hrotsvit’s Apostolic Mission The most complete manuscript of Hrotsvit’s writings, Bavarian State Library Clm 14485 (the Munich codex), includes prefaces, dedications, and other addresses to readers in which Hrotsvit names herself and provides information about her education, writing practices, and purposes. If this manuscript had not survived, we might have some of her plays and poems extant in other manuscripts, but we would know little or nothing about Hrotsvit, and we would likely not be able to imagine that such a scholar and writer could have existed.1 By naming and identifying herself as an author and addressing readers in the first-person, not only in the prefatory texts but also within the poems, Hrotsvit presents herself as an important actor throughout the manuscript and creates significant parallels between her actions and those of the characters in her poems and plays.