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The Hroswitha Club was a membership-based club of women bibliophiles and collectors based in New York City, active from 1944 to 2004.Ozment Kate. 2023. The Hroswitha Club and the Impact of Women Book Collectors. Cambridge United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.
Members of the Hroswitha Club included authors, bibliographers, librarians, curators, and private collectors. Individual members had a wide range of collecting interests - they collected books not just about Hroswitha, but also boxing, "Military uniform," and Walt Whitman; at least one member was a collector of Incunable. By the 1950s, membership had been reportedly capped at 40 members. Some notable members were Sarah Gildersleeve Fife, Anne Lyon Haight, Belle da Costa Greene, Frances Hooper, Ruth S. Granniss (librarian to the Grolier Club), Rachel McMasters Miller Hunt, Rosamond B. Loring, Eleanor Cross Marquand, and Shakespeare scholar Henrietta C. Bartlett.
Additionally, the Club published several works throughout the 20th century, most notably a 1965 bibliography of Hroswitha almost a decade in the making; entitled Hroswitha of Gandersheim: Her Life, Times and Works, it was edited by Anne Lyon Haight with contributions from other Club members. Members carried out original research, establishing the dates that Hroswitha's dramas were performed. The Club also commissioned a life of Hroswitha, by Robert Herndon Fife (1947).
The Club maintained its own private library, established in 1948 and later named the Sarah Gildersleeve Fife Memorial Library in honor of the club's founder; it specialized in books about Hroswitha, books published by members of the club, and other books of interest to collectors. The club's official bookplate was inspired by a copy of Albrecht Dürer's woodcut of Hroswitha that Rachel McMasters Miller Hunt acquired and donated to the club; she later had her friend Sarah B. Hill design the club's bookplate based on the woodcut.
Records of the Club's correspondence and activities are found principally at the Grolier Club. Additionally, the Princeton University Library holds an address to the Club on the occasion of their visit by scholar and collector Miriam Y. Holden.
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