27th Biennial International Conference
Southern African Society of Medieval and Renaissance Studies

Mont Fleur, Stellenbosch, South Africa

3-6 September 2026

Journeys — Borders — Encounters

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

THURSDAY, 3 SEPTEMBER

Thursday afternoon: Arrival and registration

FRIDAY, 4 SEPTEMBER

KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Jordi Sánchez-Martí, “The journeys of chivalric romance in medieval and early modern England” (University of Alicante)

Session 1

Lynton Boshoff, “The rhetoric of travel in the ‘epistolary’ poetry of Alcuin” (North-West University, Potchefstroom)

Session 2

Victor Houliston, “For those in peril on the sea” (University of the Free State)

Anna Anisimova, “English monastic towns as pilgrimage centres” (Institute of World History, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow)

Hannah Zdansky, “From hagiography to romance: the journey of St. Alexis” (Belmont Abbey College, North Carolina)

Natasha Ferreira, “The streams of Babylon and the streets of Jerusalem: ancient cities in Renaissance receptions of the Susanna story” (North-West University, Potchefstroom)

Session 3:

Christopher Thurman, “Island encounters: The Tempest, translation and environmental crisis” (University of the Witwatersrand)

Judith Simon, “Oceans of connection: Early Modern storytelling and the climate crisis in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island” (University of Pretoria)

Paul Beehler, “Journeys don’t always end well: the migration of Emilia as truthbearer in Othello” (University of California, Riverside)

Session 4:

Victoria Legkikh, “Intertextual encounters: Byzantine models and East Slavic princely services” (Independent Scholar)

Frances Ringwood, “Journeys within and without: dream visions, healing, and the Levantine encounter in Medieval England” (University of Zululand)

Josena Nascimento Lima Ribeiro, “Gendered labor and the politics of crafts in Late Medieval Lisbon (1385–1438)” (Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro)

SATURDAY, 5 SEPTEMBER

KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Keith Busby, “Flying Under the Radar: Elsabe Carmen Einhorn (1921-2011)” (Douglas Kelly Professor of Medieval French Emeritus, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Session 5:

Andrew Breeze, Exeter Book Riddles 19 and 22: Journeys of Horus and of Sixty Riders (University of Navarre)

Session 6:

Catherine Addison, “Ariosto’s horses: persons or things?” (University of Zululand)

Sonia Fanucchi, “Orphic encounters: Ulysses and Virgil in Dante’s Inferno” (University of the Witwatersrand)

Joshua Wilensky, “‘If there be breadth enough in the world, I will hold a long distance’: setting and crossing masculine boundaries in All’s Well That End’s Well” (University of Pretoria)

Antony Goedhals, “Chaucer and Italy: ‘derked looking’ in Chaucer’s translation of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiæ (University of Pretoria)

Session 7:

Carin Marais, “‘The fabric is woven and the battlefield reddened’: The parallel portrayal of violence and textile craft, and its interaction with mythic elements in Medieval Icelandic Sagas” (Independent Scholar)

Anna Mayzlish, “Flemish magistrates on ‘business trips’ in the first quarter of the 15th century” (Institute of World History, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow)

Ekaterina Domnina, “An early Tudor diplomat on the road: Tommaso Spinelli and his itineraries” (Faculty of Foreign Languages and Area Studies of Moscow State Lomonosov University)

SUNDAY, 6 SEPTEMBER

Session 8:

David Scott-Macnab, “The borderlands of the page: an unknown Tudor poem found in a single bas-de-page inscription” (Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Bristol)

Michèle du Plessis-Hay, “Cosmographic conceits: how “nature and art are ransacked” by Donne and Marvell” (North-West University, Potchefstroom)

Tal Laufer, “The struggle for hegemony between locals and immigrants in the Jewish community of 13th-century Palestine” (Middle East Studies, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)

Session 9:

Idette Noomé & Janine Engelbrecht, “Transgressions: the Anglo-Saxon ‘Fall of the Angels’ and Milton” (University of Pretoria)

Johan Steenkamp, “Encountering Greek myth in English: translation decisions in Golding’s Ovid” (North-West University, Potchefstroom)

Jac Conradie, “Journeys horizontal and vertical: from Beatrijs to Suster Bertken” (Emeritus professor, University of Johannesburg; Senior Research Associate in LanCSAL)

Closure