Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: Contexts, Identities, Affinities, and Performances. Edited by Phyllis R. Brown, Linda A. McMillin, and Katharina M. Wilson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Pp. vii + 313. $60.

This collection of essays displays a wide range of interests and methods in the reading of Hrotsvit. The fifteen contributors are associated mainly with North American departments of English (nine), as well as with history, art, humanities, theater, and foreign languages. Collectively, they study almost all Hrotsvit's works, with emphasis on the dramas—absent are sustained discussions of the stories Maria and Ascensio Domini, the Primordia coenobii Gandeshemensis, and the thirty-five hexameters on the Apocalypse transmitted with Hrotsvit's work but of uncertain authorship. The approaches include historical contextualizations and comparisons, thematics, and reception and performance studies. Citations are to the edition by Walter Berschin (2001), which is correct but somewhat inconvenient: many readers will prefer to study the text established by Paul von Winterfeld in Helene Homeyer's edition because her fine notes and commentaries accompany it. English translations accompany quotations in Latin. The stories and plays are usually cited by traditional titles that stem from the editio princeps of Conrad Celtis, which is regrettable in many cases because their male chauvinism can skew a reader's sense of Hrotsvit's focus.

Stephen L. Wailes
Indiana University, Bloomington