International Conference organized at Ghent University by Flavia Ruani and Koen De Temmerman Het Pand,
Thursday 22nd-Saturday 24th November 2018
Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Prof. Kate Cooper, Royal Holloway, University of London; Prof. Stratis Papaioannou, Brown University
The conference aims to examine the persistence of ancient novelistic material in hagiography and instances of continuity of novelistic and/or hagiographical strands in medieval romances in the West, Byzantium and Persia. We invite papers exploring intersections between two or three of the following narrative traditions:
1) ancient novelistic fiction (broadly defined), including Greek novels (both extant and fragmentarily preserved; e.g. Ninus, Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon, Heliodorus’ Aethiopica, etc.), Latin novels (Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, Petronius’ Satyrica and the Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri), Jewish novels (e.g. the Book of Tobit, Joseph and Aseneth) and so-called ‘fringe novels’ or ‘novelistic biographies’ (i.e. the Alexander Romance, the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, the Pseudo-Clementines, Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana, the Life of Aesop, etc.); and/or
2) hagiography from the fourth to the twelfth century, including Lives, Martyr Acts, hagiographical romances, and edifying tales written in Greek, Latin, Syriac, Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, Ethiopian and Coptic; and/or
3) medieval romance in the West, Byzantium or Persia.