ABSTRACT
Actual or potential violent behavior towards women is a part of all of Hrotsvit's plays, but four of her six plays are primarily concerned with torture of women. As might be expected, torture is endorsed when it is employed in a religious setting and ineffective when it is used in a pagan environment. In each of these four plays, female suffering is glorified because it leads to salvation and martyrdom. As male sexuality threatens to pervert the young women in the plays, violent redemption is presented as a defense against perversion because it enables a reconfiguration and desexualization of the female body. While torture erases a sense of self for two prostitutes, however, it becomes a means of female empowerment for young virgin martyrs, who humiliate their Roman persecutors. And even though perversion is imagined as uncontrolled sexual desire, the accusations of Roman emperors show that chastity can also be perceived as sexual deviance. There is a double standard with respect to the pagan and religious conceptions of the perverse, but it is nevertheless important that, in the case of the Roman authorities at least, the interpretation of sexually deviant behavior is shown to be contingent upon political power structures.
