Images of Woman in Hrosvith by Gandersheim and Terence

Abstract

A heroine devoted to virginity and to the only real love possible in the Christian perspective, which is the spiritual love of reunion in Christ, the female character in the dramatic dialogues of Rosvita of Gandersheim is the element that perhaps more than others reveals the conflicting and ambiguous relationship – mediated through hagiographic sources – with Terence’s model, between the declared rejection of the Latin poet’s alleged lascivae feminae and the unconscious attraction to the pagan humanity of his bonae meretrices.