SAJMARS 27

Permanent URI for this collection

https://wiredspace-extra.wits.ac.za/home/handle/20.500.12430/549399

EDITORIAL

This volume of the journal of the Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies is as diverse as ever. Readers of the journal will be familiar with the work of Catherine Addison, who has been a regular contributor to the journal. Her article on 'Chamberlayne's Pharonnida: The First English Verse Novel', published in volume 25, prefigured the appearance of a monograph in 2017. In this volume she argues that the sonnet form itself, following Petrarch, embodies the theme of death.

Two articles emanating from the Byzantine research unit at the University of Johannesburg were published in volume 25: Savvas Kyraikidis on Demetrios Kydones (1324–1398) and Effrosyni Zacharopoulou on the black St Maurice of Magdeburg and the Christian kingdoms in Nubia and Ethiopia in the thirteenth century. Now we have an article by the head of that unit, Benjamin Hendrickx, along with Thekla Sansaridou-Hendrickx, on the Duchy of Naxos in the Aegean. The authors discuss the transition from the Venetians and Franks to Ottoman rule in the sixteenth century, and especially the role of the enigmatic Duke Joseph Naci.

Amritesh Singh's article offers an intriguing analysis of gender issues in John Lyly's Gallathea (1592), referring to representations of the myth of the judgement of Paris in paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder and Hans Eworth. He argues that John Lyly's treatment of masculinity and female authority makes him the ideal male subject of Queen Elizabeth I.

This volume marks a departure from earlier volumes by including a short piece of historical fiction by Eugenie Freed, well known for her treatment of women authors in the English Renaissance. Here she tells the story of Marguerite de Porete, the medieval French mystic who was burnt for heresy but now ranks among the classics of Western spirituality, from the point of view of her defender Guiard de Cressonessart.

VICTOR HOULISTON

Editor

News


CONTENTS

RESEARCH ARTICLES

CATHERINE ADDISON • Death and the Sonnet

BENJAMIN HENDRICKX AND THEKLA SANSARIDOU-HENDRICKX • The State of the Duchy of the Archipelago (Naxos) during the reign of Joseph Naci and his locotenente Francesco Coronello, 1566–1579

AMRITESH SINGH • The Queen’s Two Bodies and the Elizabethan Male Subject in John Lyly’s Gallathea (1592)

HISTORICAL FICTION

EUGENIE FREED • Philadelphia

Browse

Browsing SAJMARS 27 by Keyword "Duchy of the archipelago"

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Joseph Naci, his locotenente Francesco Coronello, and the State of the Duchy of the Archipelago (Naxos), 1566-1579
    (Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2017) Hendrickx, Benjamin; Sansaridou-Hendrickx, Thekla
    This article examines the duchy of the Archipelago under Joseph Naci and Francesco Coronello, leading to the abolition of the duchy, which was created in 1204 after the occupation of Constantinople by the crusaders. The duchy, which survived the final fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, came itself to an end with the death of Joseph Naci in 1579 and its transformation into an Ottoman sancak. Nevertheless, some Byzantine and mainly medieval ‘Frankish’ institutions and titles did survive. This article studies the legal, institutional and practical implications of this process, thereby paying due attention to elements of continuity of feudal ‘Frankish’ institutions and traditions as well as to its gradual replacement with the Ottoman system. However, the new world order of the sixteenth century, which drastically changed the existing values and worldviews, had an inevitable influence on the Mediterranean lands, even on backwaters such as the Archipelago. This article shows how even Naxos could not escape these changes.

CONTRIBUTORS

CATHERINE ADDISON is a professor of English at the University of Zululand. After completing a PhD on Byron at the University of British Columbia, she started her career as a specialist on Romantic poetry, but has diversified. Her literary interests now include Early Modern, Victorian, Modernist and Postmodernist literature; colonial and postcolonial writing; the prose novel; African women’s fiction; and formal aspects of literature such as versification, narrative, simile and irony. Recently she has focused much of her attention on the verse-novel, culminating in the publication, in 2017, of her monograph A Genealogy of the Verse Novel.

catherine.addison@gmail.com

EUGENIE FREED is a Research Fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, where she taught for many years in the English Department. Her current interests and explorations include Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, and some lesser-known Early Modern figures, as well as William Blake. However, she has never lost her enthusiasm for her first love, medieval studies. In recent years she has enjoyed experimenting with creative writing, and has published a number of short stories and an historical novel. Her study, 'A Portion of His Life': William Blake's Miltonic Vision of Woman, was published in 1994.

eugenief@netactive.co.za

BENJAMIN HENDRICKX is professor emeritus at the University of Johannesburg. He studied in Louvain and obtained his PhD from Thessaloniki. His research covers two fields, (i) history and institutions of Frankish Greece and (ii) Afro-Byzantina, in which fields he has widely published. For his research, he received the Christoffel Plantin Prize (Belgium), the Gold Cross of St Mark (Alexandria), an Onassis Grant, and high ratings from the NRF. He became ‘Commander in the Order of Honour’ (Greece, 2008) and King Albert II (Belgium) ‘knighted’ him in 2011. He has worked in Belgium, Tahiti, Greece and South Africa.

bendrickx@gmail.com

THEKLA SANSARIDOU-HENDRICKX is professor emeritus at the University of Johannesburg. She obtained her MA from the University of the Free State and her PhD from the University of the Johannesburg (formerly Rand Afrikaans University). Her research covers the following fields: (i) Greek medieval chronicles, (ii) Greek identity and nationalism, and (iii) history of Frankish Greece (Frankokratia). She published several books and articles in all three fields, including Nationalism and national consciousness during the Middle Ages based on the Chronicle of Morea (2007). Together with B. Hendrickx she has edited the accredited journal Ekklesiastikos Pharos (African Series) and co-edited the international Prosopographic Lexicon of Byzantine History and Culture (Brepols, Belgium).

theklah@uj.ac.za

AMRITESH SINGH teaches English at the University of Southampton’s campus in Dalian, China. He graduated with a PhD from the University of York in 2011. Since then, he has held teaching fellowships at York and Teesside in the UK and at Auckland in New Zealand. He was a postdoctoral fellow at UNISA’s Institute for Gender Studies from 2014 to 2016. He publishes in the fields of constructions of gender and sexuality in early modern English literature and Bollywood adaptations of Shakespeare.

amritesh.singh@soton.ac.uk