The Southern African Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies
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For content queries on this community please email Professor Victor Houliston : victor.houliston@wits.ac.za Alternatively use the following telephone number to contact Prof, Tel: 011 717 4357
The Southern African Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies is the official publication of the Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (SASMARS) and is published annually.
Instructions to Contributors The journal welcomes submissions in any of the disciplines of the humanities relating to the Middle Ages or the Renaissance up to 1700. All submissions will be refereed. Typescripts should be prepared in accordance with the MLA Style Manual and submitted by email in a file format compatible with Microsoft Word.Browse
Browsing The Southern African Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies by Type "Journal Article"
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- ItemA Bishop and the Less Privileged in an African Diocese in the Late Roman Empire: Augustine at Hippo Regius(The Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (SASMARS), 2008) Saddington, D. B.; Houliston,VictorAugustine1 reached the highest levels of a classical education in Africa, first at Madauros (Mdaourouch) near his home town and then in the provincial capital of Carthage (nr. Tunis), before completing his studies in Rome itself, where he probably hoped to find a patron able to secure him a lucrative post in the civil service. But philosophy, and Christianity, intervened. A man of genius, he chose to spend his life in monastic retreat devoted to study and writing. However, he was ordained a priest against his will and, soon afterwards, bishop in a humdrum harbour town. The question to be addressed is how the highly educated and brilliantphilosopher and theologian that he became could respond to the less privileged in his diocese.
- ItemA Jesuit 'Memento Mori': the Passage of Death in the 'Resolution' of Robert Persons(The Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (SASMARS), 1995) Houliston, Victor; Houliston,Victor
- ItemA Reappraisal of Late-Thirteenth-Century Responses to the Shroud of Lirey-Chambery-Turin: 'Encolpia' of the Eucharist, 'vera eikon' or Supreme Relic?(The Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (SASMARS), 1994) Allen, Nicholas Peter Leagh; Houliston,Victor
- ItemA Tale of 'synne and harlotries'? The Miller's Tale as Social Ideology(The Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (SASMARS), 2015) Knoetze, Retha; Houliston,VictorThis article provides a detailed discussion of how romance tropes are parodied in the Miller’s Tale in order to pose a social challenge to the Knight’s Tale and in order to reject the vertical view of social relations which romance tales traditionally uphold. Through a comprehensive investigation of this issue, the article illustrates Paul Strohm’s argument that the clash between the romance genre of the Knight’s Tale and the fabliau genre of the Miller’s Tale symbolically reflects the tension between two different ideologies simultaneously present within Chaucer’s society. The Miller’s fabliau tale is shown to express a mercantile outlook of calculation in one’s own interest that was becoming more prominent in the increasingly commercial world of late fourteenth-century England, as opposed to the feudal view of social relations which is found in the Knight’s Tale.
- ItemAlexander Barclay's Pastoral and 'good old Mantuan'(The Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (SASMARS), 1990) Claassen, Jo-Marie; Houliston,Victor
- ItemAnarchy and Ordure in Ben Jonson's 'On the Famous Voyage'(The Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (SASMARS), 1999) Parr, Anthony N.; Houliston,Victor
- ItemAspects of Dramatic Development in the Roles of Devil Characters in the Religious Drama of the Netherlands, with particular reference to 'Mariken van Nieumeghen'(The Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (SASMARS), 1996) Raftery, Margaret Mary; Houliston,Victor
- ItemAssisi: An Urban Centre transformed by two Saintly Lives(The Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (SASMARS), 1993) Mare, Estelle A.; Houliston,Victor
- ItemBetween Scholasticism and Folk Wisdom: The Weather Lore of William Merle(The Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (SASMARS), 1997) Snedegar, K. V.; Houliston,VictorAs Jeff Opland’s interdisciplinary research into the Anglo-Saxon and Xhosa poetic traditions has shown, the cross-fertilization of medieval and African studies can stimulate new flowerings of insight within both disciplines (Opland 1980; 1983). Thus it is fitting that my recent occupation with indigenous South African calendar systems should have caused this lapsed medievalist to revisit the career of an obscure fourteenth-century meteorological scholar, William Merle, whom I had first met in dissertation work on medieval astrology (Snedegar 1988; 1995). The examination of African calendars has increased my appreciation of just how keenly attuned to seasonal variation traditional agro-pastoral peoples are. Their food production largely depends on environmental contingencies, most important of which is the presence of water in adequate quantities at appropriate times. And although southern Africa and northern Europe experience vastly different weather patterns, the essential relationship between climate and agricultural success pertains to traditional Africa and medieval Europe alike.
- ItemCales and Guiana: John Donne and Elizabethan Foreign Policy(The Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (SASMARS), 2009) Parr, Anthony N.; Houliston,VictorAs a young man John Donne joined at least two maritime campaigns in England’s long-running war with Spain, and he wrote a good deal of poetry in direct response to those experiences. His verse also reflects more generally the contemporary fascination with overseas enterprise and discovery, and has been extensively scrutinised for evidence of Donne’s attitude to foreign adventure, colonisation and the new geography. This essay argues that, partly by misinterpreting the historical facts, critics have offered a somewhat muddled picture of the way he and others in his circle addressed themselves to English maritime ventures in the closing years of the sixteenth century. Moreover, Donne’s use of voyage metaphor in his poetry, though subjected to elaborate analysis in recent years, has been misread in some influential discussions, so that the discursive role of his verse in Elizabethan controversies over maritime warfare and the colonial project is not always clearly understood.
- ItemCamoes and the Sanctuary of Venus: A Climax in all Senses of the WORD(The Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (SASMARS), 1999) Meihuizen, Nicholas; Houliston,Victor
- ItemChamberlayne's Pharonnida: The First English Verse Novel(The Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (SASMARS), 2015) Addison, Catherine; Houliston,VictorThis article seeks to explain George Saintsbury’s and W. MacNeile Dixon’s enigmatic categorization of William Chamberlayne’s Pharonnida (1659) as a verse novel, by elaborating the relation of Pharonnida with the ancient Greek prose novels, especially the Aethiopica of Heliodorus. Pharonnida imitates the Aethiopica quite closely: it is comparably long and its plot follows the ancient formula in which a pair of nobly-born young lovers manage to remain faithful to each other during a scarcely credible proliferation of adventures, including imprisonment, rescue, enslavement, disguise, and kidnapping by pirates and robbers. Whereas the Aethiopica is set in its own contemporary world, Pharonnida is set in a past resembling the present of the Aethiopica. Chamberlayne compensates for non-novelistic lack of contemporaneity by including some contemporary authorial comments and autobiographical episodes. The only significant generic difference is that Pharonnida is composed in verse. If the ancient popular written narratives are indeed prose novels, then Pharonnida can surely be claimed as a verse novel since it is so close a reading of Aethiopica.
- ItemChaucer's 'Franklin's Tale': 'Trouthe', 'Routhe' and the 'Rokkes Blakke'(The Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (SASMARS), 1994) Kearney, John; Houliston,Victor
- ItemChaucer's Theseus: Tyrant or Philosopher-King?(The Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (SASMARS), 1993) Northover, Alan; Houliston,Victor
- ItemCompass, Centre and Circumscription: Some Themes in Paradise Lost Books VII and VIII(The Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (SASMARS), 1997) Hall, Ronald; Houliston,VictorMy theme is human limitation. It’s perhaps appropriately in keeping with that theme that I want to begin very simply, even naively, with some homespun philosophy which I like to share with my students when beginning to teach Paradise Lost.
- ItemCreation, Re-creation, and Recreation in an Old Yiddish Romance(The Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (SASMARS), 2002) Delany, Sheila; Houliston,VictorThere’s a Yiddish joke: Before I speak, I want to say a few words. I’ll be talking today about an Old Yiddish romance, the Bovo-bukh, and about its creation in the early sixteenth century—a process that, as we’ll see, was really a re-creation. I’ll be talking too about the use of this romance not only as recreation in the sense of entertainment, but as a tool for further re-creation or renewal of an always-threatened culture. Because my topic is related to Jewish literature and culture, it’s appropriate to mention that on Friday—tomorrow—at sundown commence two of the most important Jewish holidays, which themselves evoke creation and re-creation.1 One is, of course, the Sabbath (or, as my grandparents, with their Ashkenazi accent, would say, ‘shabbas’). This weekly holiday, based in the biblical story of creation, is the earliest and most important of Jewish holidays. Shabbas is also the only holiday directly related to Yahweh himself, who took the seventh day off after his six days of creative labor, and enjoined us to do the same so that we might, through our recreations on that day, re-create the cycle of work and rest that the ur-artisan performed. Traditionally (though not biblically) these recreations include a bath, good clothes, a fine dinner, and—according to a thirteenth-century kabbalistic marriage manual—lovemaking (for scholars, at least) at midnight, when the dinner has been properly digested (The Holy Letter, c. 3).
- ItemCriminality, the Criminal Records and the Reconstruction of Social Realities: The Example of Late Medieval Tuscany(The Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (SASMARS), 1997) Bratchel, M. E.; Houliston,Victor
- ItemCrossing the Line: Transgression and Communion in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament(The Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (SASMARS), 2008) Geldenhuys, Katharine L.; Houliston,VictorThe East Anglian Croxton Play of the Sacrament is extant in only one manuscript: Trinity College, Dublin, MS F.4.20 (Catalogue No. 652), folios 338r–356r. The modern appellation of the “Croxton�? Play is due to the internal reference in the banns which states that the performance will take place ‘At Croxston on Monday’ (line 74). The Croxton referred to is most likely the one in Norfolk, two miles north of Thetford. Another internal reference to ‘the colkote . . . / A lytyll beside Babwell Myll’ (lines 620–21) indicates that this miracle play would have been performed in the vicinity of Bury St Edmunds (Suffolk), which is some fourteen miles from Croxton. Gail McMurray Gibson has, however, convincingly argued for the plausibility of the play being originally intended for performance in Bury St Edmunds. This non-cycle drama was likely written after 1461 for performance at the feast of Corpus Christi (introduced to England in the 1320s).
- ItemDa Augusta a Pisa. Le peripezie di un abate del XII secolo(The Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (SASMARS), 2012) Lemut,Maria Luisa Ceccarelli; Houliston,VictorA Pisa, nella chiesa di San Michele in Borgo, in fondo alla navata sinistra, a destra della porta della sagrestia si legge un’epigrafe novicia che così si esprime: SCHISMATICOS FUGIENS EGINO HIC CONDITUR ABBAS, QUEM MICHAEL SUPERAM TRASTULIT IN PATRIAM. L’epigrafe, tuttora inedita, si riferisce alla tomba di un abate di nome Eginone, che fuggendo gli scismatici, a causa dei quali – come vedremo – fu costretto a lasciare la sua patria terrena per venire a morire a Pisa, fu sepolto nella chiesa dedicata all’arcangelo Michele, che lo condusse nella patria celeste. Niente di più ci dice l’epigrafe, per altro trascrizione moderna dell’originale perduto; tuttavia dell’abate Eginone ci è pervenuta la narrazione della vita, riferita dal suo dicepolo e compagno Uodascalcus e pubblicata nel 1856
- ItemDe la tradition a l'individualisme dans le recueil de nouvelles encadrees(The Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (SASMARS), 1995) Godwin, Denise; Houliston,Victor