St. Agnes and the Emperor’s Daughter in Saxon Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: Feminizing the Founding of the Early Roman Church

Abstract

One of the most popular saints in England in the eighth to the tenth centuries, the Roman martyr St. Agnes (291–304) was lauded in Latin works about virginity written by Aldhelm (640?–709) and the Venerable Bede (673–735).1 Aldhelm’s influential Prosa de virginitate, of which fourteen English manuscripts exist, was “popular in England and the continent until Viking invasions put an end to native learning in the last half of the ninth century,” according to Scott Gwara; interest in Aldhelm’s work revived in the 920s, along with “a new movement in ‘hermeneutic’ Latin that lasted, in some centers, beyond the turn of the twelfth century.”2 St. Agnes’s virginity may have been responsible for the inclusion of material from her vita, as well as that of St. Agatha, in English liturgical ceremonies after the tenth century in which nuns professed their vows.3 Widely circulated, St. Agnes’s vita is narrated in Latin and Anglo-Saxon in Bede’s Martyrology, the anonymous ninth-century Old English Martyrology, and Ælfric’s later Old English Lives of the Saints (ca. 996–97).4KeywordsTwelfth CenturyChristian FaithRoman ImperialismRoman EmperorEnglish LifeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.