Although Terence's plays often dealt with pagan material, the quality of his language promoted the copying and preserving of his text by the church. Terence's popularity throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is attested to by the numerous manuscripts containing part or all of his plays; the scholar Claudia Villa has estimated that no fewer than 650 manuscripts containing Terence's work exist, dating from after AD 800. Priests and nuns often learned to speak Latin through reenactment of Terence's plays. The 10th-century German playwright Hroswitha of Gandersheim claims to have written her plays so that learned men had a Christian alternative to reading the pagan plays of Terence. Pietro Alighieri states that his father Dante took the title of his famous "Divine Comedy" from Terence's plays and in the 14th century Giovanni Boccaccio copied out in his own hand all of Terence's Comedies in manuscripts that are now in the Laurentian Library. The 16th-century reformer Martin Luther not only quoted Terence frequently to tap into his insights into all things human but also recommended his comedies for the instruction of children in school. The preservation of Terence through the church enabled his work to influence much of later Western drama. Two of the earliest English comedies, the 16th-century Ralph Roister Doister and Gammer Gurton's Needle, are thought to parody Terence's plays. Montaigne, Shakespeare and Molière cite and imitate him. Terence's plays were a standard part of the Latin curriculum of the neoclassical period. President of the United States John Adams once wrote to his son, "Terence is remarkable, for good morals, good taste, and good Latin...His language has simplicity and an elegance that make him proper to be accurately studied as a model." American playwright Thornton Wilder based his novel The Woman of Andros on Terence's Andria. Due to his cognomen Afer, Terence has long been identified with Africa and heralded as the first poet of the African diaspora by generations of writers, including Juan Latino, Phyllis Wheatley, Alexandre Dumas, Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou. Two of his plays were produced in Denver with black actors. Questions as to whether Terence received assistance in writing or was not the actual author have been debated over the ages, as described in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica: [In a prologue to one of his plays, Terence] meets the charge of receiving assistance in the composition of his plays by