ROSWITHA THE NUN 



Celtes printing in 1501 Roswitha's MS. But, 

 on the other hand, the similarities we notice 

 may be a mere coincidence, or, as is much more 

 likely, the details in each case may have been 

 common property handed down from one genera- 

 tion to another. 



In her play of Paphnutius, Roswitha made 

 use of a story taken from the His form Monachorum 

 of Rufinus, a contemporary of St. Jerome, who 

 had journeyed through Palestine and Egypt to 

 visit the Hermits of the Desert. The mention, 

 too, at the beginning of Rufmus's account, of a 

 musician who tells of his retirement to a hermit- 

 age in order to change the harmony of music 

 into that of the spirit, evidently suggested to her 

 a discussion on music and harmony, probably 

 adapted from Boethius's De Musica. In this 

 discussion lies the chief interest of the play as 

 giving us some idea of the sort of intellectual 

 exercises probably practised by women in con- 

 vents in the tenth century. The play opens 

 with a truly mediaeval scene, a disputation 

 between a hermit and his disciples on the ques- 

 tion of harmony between soul and body, suggested 

 by the want of it in the life of the courtesan 

 Thais. Such harmony should exist, says the holy 

 man, for though the soul is not mortal like the 

 body, nor the body spiritual like the soul, we 

 shall, if we follow the method of the dialecticians, 

 find that such differences do not necessarily 

 render the two inharmonious. Harmony cannot 

 be produced from like elements or like sounds, 



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