27th BIENNIAL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

SOUTHERN AFRICAN SOCIETY OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES

MONT FLEUR, STELLENBOSCH, SOUTH AFRICA

3-6 SEPTEMBER 2026

Journeys — Borders — Encounters

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:

(Chair: David Scott-Macnab, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Bristol)

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

Session 2:

Victor Houliston. “Godspeed and guesswork on the road in Spain” (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)

Rebecca Schleuss, “‘Ipse iacuerunt in nostro infirmitorio cum nostris sororibus’: transcending boundaries through impairment and healthcare” (Oxford University)

SATURDAY, 5 SEPTEMBER

KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Keith Busby, “‘Yes, we have no bananas’: Jofroi de Waterford, Servais Copale, and the import trade in early fourteenth-century Waterford” (Douglas Kelly Professor of Medieval French Emeritus, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Session 5:

(Chair: David Scott-Macnab, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Bristol)

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:

Idette Noomé, “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).

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)

SUNDAY, 6 SEPTEMBER

Session 8:

David Scott-Macnab, “Beneath the text: 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)

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)

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:

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

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)

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