The Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies

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For content queries on this community please email Professor Victor Houliston victor.houliston@wits.ac.za 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. For technical question regarding research utilization and dissemination contact Nina Lewin: nina.lewin@wits.ac.za who is the responsible librarian in this collection. 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.

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Browsing The Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies by Author "Addison, Catherine"

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    Chamberlayne's Pharonnida: The First English Verse Novel
    (The Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (SASMARS), 2015) Addison, Catherine; Houliston,Victor
    This 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.
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    Death and the Sonnet
    (The Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (SASMARS), 2017) Addison, Catherine; Houliston,Victor
    This article argues that the fundamental theme of the sonnet is not love but death. Though some sonnets have from the beginning focused explicitly on death, the majority from the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance are love poems. Petrarch may be regarded as the prototypical sonneteer and idolizer of love; but on close analysis his focus is found to be more on the ephemerality of love than on love itself. The structure of the sonnet supports – even creates – a predisposition toward death. Both the Italian and the English varieties display a fixed and intricate structure of extreme terseness, offering space for an utterance of concentrated force and complexity, but one whose principal feature is brevity. While complexity of structure allows for the conflicted or self-reflecting consciousness that Paul Oppenheimer claims of this form, brevity brings its discourse to a point, in Michael Spiller’s sense, all too quickly. The bringing to a point of a short-lived dilation reflects in miniature the confrontation of the individual consciousness with its own point or full-stop. The article demonstrates that death sonnets are not exceptions to a more erotic rule but explicit statements of what is present in all sonnets, implicit in the form itself.
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    The Female Knight in Renaissance Romance Epic: The Grace of the Tigress
    (Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2019) Addison, Catherine
    The female knights in the romance epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso and Spenser do not realistically reflect the lives and pursuits of women of their period, and yet they have been and remain attractive, popular literary figures. The gender roles of these female knights are complex, for they do not simply mirror the behaviour of the male knights of their texts. Instead, they project a type of womanhood that is possible rather than either realistic or fantastic. These Renaissance women warriors trace their literary genealogy to Greek and Latin forebears such as Virgil’s Camilla and Quintus’ Penthesilea and yet only a minority of the later figures suffer the tragic fate of Amazons in classical epic. This paper anatomizes the characters and narrative trajectories of Bradamante and Marfisa as they appear in both Orlando innamorato and Orlando furioso, Clorinda and Gildippe in Gerusalemme liberata and Britomart and Radigund in The Faerie Queene. It also pays attention to other warlike women characters in these texts, such as Armida, Belphoebe, and the communities of Amazon-like women that feature in both Spenser and Ariosto. The two main questions guiding the exploration of these figures ask why the female knights are so attractive and what precise gender roles they perform in their texts and contexts.
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    Formalism and the Spenserian Stanza
    (The Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (SASMARS), 2002) Addison, Catherine; Houliston,Victor
    Formalism and aestheticism, so long anathema to the avant garde in literary—or, rather, cultural—studies, have recently started making a comeback. Susan J. Wolfson, leading the charge in her appropriately named Formal Charges (1997) and in numerous essays, argues that the current prejudice against formalism is misplaced because formalism is not the tool of reaction for which many late-twentieth-century theorists have taken it (227-232). In fact she demonstrates, as Shklovsky suggested before her, that formalist criticism can make radical, disquieting discoveries (20). Substantial essay collections such as Aesthetics and Ideology (1994), edited by George Levine, and Revenge of the Aesthetic (2000), edited by Michael P. Clark, as well as a special issue of Modern Language Quarterly (March, 2000) entitled Reading for Form, show that Wolfson’s voice is not a lone cry from the wilderness. Even a group of contemporary poets have joined the fray, dubbing themselves “New Formalists” and, as a deliberately self-defining act, writing in regular verse forms. Some of these poets have also theorized about their poetic practices in collections such as Annie Finch’s After New Formalism (1999). Thus, when such a pivotal figure in cultural studies as Edward Said turns his attention in a recent book (Musical Elaborations) to the meanings of music, that form of forms, we should perhaps not be too surprised. We should similarly take in our stride Said’s enthusiasm (‘Scholarship and Commitment’, 7-8) for the work of Elaine Scarry, who claims that the duty of literary scholars is to pay attention to the form of the ‘beautiful object’, for in this act of attention lies one of the sources of human morality (‘Beauty and the Scholar’s Duty to Justice’ 25; On Beauty and Being Just 90-93).
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    Margaret of Anjou: The Literary History of an Aberrant Woman Warrior
    (The Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (SASMARS), 2006) Addison, Catherine; Houliston,Victor
    Margaret of Anjou has always had a bad reputation among the warrior women of fact and fiction. Joan of Arc, her peasant contemporary, who was also denounced in her own lifetime, was consecrated by the popular imagination soon after her death and has remained a universal hero and martyr ever since, achieving official sainthood nearly five centuries later. Margaret remained the epitome of unwomanly evil as late as the Romantic period. This paper is an attempt to illustrate and account for her persistent unpopularity, especially in an age of apparent libertarianism.