Christianity went west and east during the latter years of the Roman Empire. Of course, its language going west was Latin, while its language traveling east was Greek. Priests and monks needed to read Latin sounds at the minimum, so that they could speak the liturgy. Education for priests varied until the middle of the medieval period; they learned through apprenticeship in many places, and how much they could actually understand Latin depended on the teacher. Monks, however, were taught to read, write and speak good Latin. As women’s convents grew next to some monasteries, they too kept the same standards of learning.
How best to teach monks and nuns in England or Germany to read and write in fluent Latin? After learning the basics, they needed to copy and study things that demonstrated everyday language. They read Pliny’s letters, a book of 2nd century anecdotes (Attic Nights), the geography of Caesar and Tacitus, and the plays of Terence. These plays came to have an outsize role in Latin study because they used simple, direct, conversational speech. Even St. Jerome, who made the definitive translation of the Bible into Latin, studied Terence.
Terence lived in the late 2nd century, when Latin was spreading into Europe with Roman Legions. His nickname was “the African,” and he appears to have been the educated slave of a Roman Senator, so the best guess is that he was at least part Berber from Libya, which was an integrated part of the Roman world. He must have been a prodigy, because he probably died when he was 25, traveling to Greece, but before that he wrote plays and was part of a literary salon with other famous writers.
I looked up and read a play by Terence, “The Mothers-in-Law.” It’s hard to imagine monks and nuns copying and studying this play, but they surely did. It opens with a situation: a newly-married couple has split up, the bride going back to live with her mother. The fathers blame the mothers for antagonizing or coddling the bride, but as gossip flies among the families, a friend who runs messages, and some other women, we learn that the bride has secretly given birth to a son at home. This fact is kept from the fathers, who keep guessing: perhaps the young husband is just returning to the “escort” he used to “keep”? They drag her on stage and she professes complete ignorance, but when they send her to talk to the bride and her mother, the truth comes out: the escort is wearing a ring that used to belong to the bride! How did she get it? Well, the bride was raped in a dark alley and the rapist took her ring. And guess who gave the same ring to the escort, prior to his wedding? The young husband! Why, good news then: the baby is his! We all rejoice!
We can only guess how much ambivalence Terence’s Rome had about this story; did they recognize the deep hypocrisy of the husband, did they wonder how the young wife could happily share life with her rapist? But there’s no question the material was shocking for a young nun to be copying out.
One nun did something about it. Hroswitha was a high-born, well-educated Saxon lady who entered the cloister in childhood and was mentored in literature by her Abbess, the niece of Emperor Otto I. Among her many poems and stories, she wrote several plays in imitation of Terence, but hers were about martyrs. They were also about love, even the same sensual love Terence wrote about, but they ended with pious deaths. In her most comic work, a prefect during the persecution of Diocletian tries to get three Christian girls into bed, imprisoning them in a kitchen. But God strikes him with blindness and he has a slapstick scene of embracing sooty pans instead of the girls. The comedy doesn’t prevent the three girls from being killed for their faith, but for Hroswitha, it was a happy ending.
Hroswitha’s plays were not intended to be staged. They were just reading material so that convents could leave sinful Terence on the shelf, teaching Latin while not bringing guilt into a nun’s mind. They aren’t a real starting point for medieval drama as such, but they show us that when Latin plays were not staged in public, they were still mainstream literary fare for the educated.