While the scattered and persecuted strollers thus kept alive something of the popularity, if not of the loftier traditions, of their art, neither, on the other hand, was there an utter absence of written compositions to bridge the gap between ancient and modern dramatic literature. In the midst of the condemnation with which the Christian Church visited the stage, its professors and votaries, we find individual ecclesiastics resorting in their writings to both the tragic and the comic form of the ancient drama. These isolated productions, which include the [Greek: Christos paschôn] (_Passion of Christ_) formerly attributed to St Gregory Nazianzen, and the _Querolus_, long fathered upon Plautus himself, were doubtless mostly written for educational purposes--whether Euripides and Lycophron, or Menander, Plautus and Terence, served as the outward models. The same was probably the design of the famous "comedies" of Hrosvitha, the Benedictine nun of Gandersheim, in Eastphalian Saxony, which associate themselves in the history of Christian literature with the spiritual revival of the 10th century in the days of Otto the Great. While avowedly imitated in form from the comedies of Terence, these religious exercises derive their themes--martyrdoms,[1] and miraculous or otherwise startling conversions[2]--from the legends of Christian saints. Thus, from perhaps the 9th to the 12th centuries, Germany and France, and through the latter, by means of the Norman Conquest, England, became acquainted with what may be called the literary monastic drama. It was no doubt occasionally performed by the children under the care of monks or nuns, or by the religious themselves; an exhibition of the former kind was that of the _Play of St Katharine_, acted at Dunstable about the year 1110 in "copes" by the scholars of the Norman Geoffrey, afterwards abbot of St Albans. Nothing is known concerning it except the fact of its performance, which was certainly not regarded as a novelty. The joculatores, jongleurs, minstrels.