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In spite of the conviction of many children's literature scholars that there was no childhood and thus no children's literature before the seventeenth century, specialists in the earlier periods have known otherwise for some time.1 Child actors, dramas that included child characters, and audiences that were understood to contain children were common in the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Although children may have been used in anonymous dramatic liturgical performances even earlier, the tenth-century German canoness Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim is the first known playwright whose work for young actors and a young audience has survived.
Most scholars agree that Hrotsvitha was born about 935 and died somewhere between 975 and 1002. She belonged to a noble German family and probably began her education young. The convent where she became a teacher, Gandersheim, was founded by a member of the nobility around 802 as a safe place to put noble girls before they were settled in arranged marriages at about age twelve or entered religious orders. The members of the convent were not nuns, but canonesses. They took vows of chastity and obedience but not of poverty, had their own servants and property, and wore their own clothes. They could leave at any time, released of their vows. What we have at Gandersheim, then, is the medieval equivalent of a modern upper-class Catholic finishing school. Gandersheim was large, wealthy, and included an unusually well-stocked library; moreover, throughout Hrotsvitha's life, the convent had very close connections with the nearby royal court of the Ottonian emperors.
Hrotsvitha did not marry, and in her twenties she became a teacher for the younger girls in the convent, who would probably have begun their studies at about the age of seven.2 At that time in Germany, women of high position were expected to be well-educated, and Hrotsvitha's task was to teach Latin, the classics, religious literature, and good behavior (particularly chaste behavior) to a group of potentially spoiled and worldly young ladies. One of her solutions was to substitute for the classical Latin drama in the curriculum-the plays of...