[384] Post, Chapters XXXIV.-XLII.
[385] Born 1078; king from 1108-1137.
[386] Ante, Chapter X.
[387] Ante, Chapter IX.
[388] On Notker see Piper, Die älteste Litteratur (Deutsche Nat. Lit.), pp. 337-340.
[389] Ante, Chapter XI., where something was said of Liutprand also. Ratherius was a restless intriguer and pamphleteer, a sort of stormy petrel, who was born in 890 near Liège. In the course of his career he was once bishop of that northern city, and three times bishop of Verona, where he died, an old man of angry soul and bitter tongue. Two years and more had he passed in a dungeon at Pavia—a sharpening experience for one already given overmuch to hate. There he compiled his rather dreary six books of Praeloquia (Migne 136, col. 145-344), preparatory discourses, perhaps precursive of another work, but at all events containing moral instruction for all orders of society. It was in the nature of a compilation, and yet touched with a strain of personal plaint, which sometimes makes itself clearly audible in words that show this work to have been its author’s prison consolatio: “Think what anguish impelled me to it, what calamity, what necessity showed me these paths of authorship. Dread of forgetting was my first reason for writing. Buried under all sorts of the rubbish of wickedness, surrounded by the darkness of evil, and distracted with the clamours of affairs, I feared that I should forget, and was delighted to find how much I could remember. Books were lacking, and friends to talk with, while sorrow gnawed the soul; so I used this book of mine as a friend to chat with, and was comforted by it as by a companion. Nor did I worry, asking who will read it; since I knew me for its reader, and as its lover, if it had none other” (Praeloq. vi. 26; Migne 136, col. 342). On Ratherius see Ebert, Ges. der Lit., iii. 375 sqq.
[390] Vita Brunonis, caps. 4, 6.
[391] Vita Brunonis, cap. 8.
[392] Cf. post, Chapter XXXII., III.
[393] Enough will be found regarding Hrotsvitha and her works in Ebert, Allgem. Ges. der Lit., iii. 285-329.