Parergon

Venturing into the Unknown, 1983–89

So Parergon is celebrating its fortieth issue—a red-letter day indeed! To be accurate, however, what is being celebrated is the fortieth issue of the New Series, for the handsome biannual journal of today started off in 1983 as the revamped version of the annual bulletin (named Parergon) issued between December 1971 and April 1982 by the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Under the editorship of Chris Eade of The Australian National University this bulletin (itself the transformation of an earlier newsletter) was initially intended to combine reports of academic activity in Australia and New Zealand in medieval and Renaissance studies with two or three articles ‘of modest length’. Quite rapidly the reports fell away and the bulletin Parergon came to consist entirely of some six or seven shortish papers usually originally presented at an ANZAMRS conference. The title page of the journal Parergon continued to refer to itself as the ‘Bulletin’ of ANZAMRS until issue 14.1 in July 1996, while the formulation New Series was not dropped until issue 20.1 in January 2003.

I was much involved with the discussions that led up to the transformations introduced into Parergon’s New Series. These were intended to turn the deliberately modest bulletin into a fully fledged academic journal, to widen the publication’s scope from predominantly literary topics to cover ‘the whole field of medieval and renaissance studies’ and to give a more international platform for the contributors and readers. To achieve this, all contributions were to be peer-reviewed (later blind peer-reviewing was stressed) and there was to be a board of international advisers (not listed in the journal until issue 4 in 1986). The peer-reviewing worked quite well, but the international advisers, though vital initially, could have been used more frequently.

So how did I get involved and why did I end up as editor? My background is as a classicist who has turned into a Byzantinist. After an undergraduate degree in Classics from Cambridge and a postgraduate degree from Oxford focusing on Franco-Greek literary interactions in twelfth-century Constantinople, and a period spent schoolteaching, I was lucky enough to enjoy a sequence of research fellowships in the Warburg Institute in London, Harvard’s Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, and the University of Ioannina in Greece. The main topic of my research was an edition of a huge, largely unknown and unedited medieval Greek translation of Benoit de Ste Maure’s Roman de Troie (eventually published in 1996). I also married, and Michael, my husband and likewise an erstwhile classicist, had developed his own interest in medieval Greek literature. These internationally peripatetic years gave Michael and me an amazing opportunity to explore the byways of medieval culture, attend a wide range of seminars on [End Page 7] medieval and Renaissance life, both eastern and western, and amass a host of international friends and colleagues; we also produced a daughter. In 1976, as we were wondering what our next step could be, there came an unexpected suggestion that we should both apply to Sydney University to be considered for a newly announced lectureship in Modern Greek. The recent surge in immigration from Greece had led to a demand that universities in Australia should set up courses in Modern Greek to assist the new migrants and their families; some eighteen months previously Alfred Vincent from Birmingham and Cambridge had been the pioneer in Sydney. To be brief, Michael was offered the position, while I had asked not to be considered as we had a young child to care for (!). The culture shock when we arrived in Sydney was monumental. Teaching Modern Greek in Sydney was nothing like teaching Modern Greek in England: students of Greek origin enrolled in daunting numbers, and their English-speaking instructors had to discover how to teach Greek to near-native speakers of Greek. For several years my role was to support Michael in his demanding teaching load, and to discover a purpose for myself.

The discovery came...