Mapping the dimensions of the Sisyphean archetype in Cretan and Cypriot Renaissance Literature
Lewis-Gibson Visiting Fellowship Research
Professor Marina Rodosthenous-Balafa
Lewis-Gibson Visiting Fellow, University of Nicosia
Dr Marina Rodosthenous-Balafa is Associate Professor of Modern Greek Literature at the University of Nicosia. Her research centres on Cretan and Cypriot Renaissance literature, with particular interests in Petrarchism, Neoplatonism, literary thematics and the relationships between Greek and wider European Renaissance traditions. A Cambridge-trained scholar, she has published extensively on writers including Vitsentzos Kornaros and Georgios Chortatsis and on the sixteenth-century Cypriot Canzoniere. She is editor of Studies on the Cypriot Collection of Renaissance Poems (National Hellenic Research Foundation, 2022). Her work combines close literary analysis with comparative approaches to intellectual history, reception and the movement of ideas across the Greek-speaking Mediterranean.
About the project
Dr Rodosthenous-Balafa’s project, Mapping the Dimensions of the Sisyphean Archetype in Cretan and Cypriot Renaissance Literature, brings together two longstanding strands of her research: Cretan Renaissance literature and the sixteenth-century Cypriot poetic tradition. It asks how the ancient myth of Sisyphus, understood as an archetype of repeated and enduring struggle, can illuminate the philosophical and literary worlds of Greek Renaissance texts.
The project develops from her earlier work on themes including youth and old age, fortune, virtue and divine agency in the works of Georgios Chortatsis and Vitsentzos Kornaros, and from subsequent research on the Cypriot Canzoniere and its engagement with Petrarchism and Neoplatonic thought. By bringing these traditions into dialogue with the Sisyphean archetype, the study explores patterns of struggle, aspiration and recurrence and considers how classical ideas were received, reshaped and given new significance in the Renaissance Greek-speaking world.
During her Lewis-Gibson Visiting Fellowship, Dr Rodosthenous-Balafa will undertake a cross-disciplinary investigation of ancient sources for the Sisyphus tradition alongside Renaissance philosophical texts and modern scholarship. Research in the Cambridge University Library and the Faculty of Classics Library and Archives will allow her to examine both the classical foundations of the archetype and the intellectual traditions through which it was transmitted and transformed.
The project addresses what Dr Rodosthenous-Balafa identifies as a gap in existing scholarship: the Sisyphean archetype has not previously been systematically explored as an interpretative framework for Greek Renaissance literature. In doing so, the study seeks to deepen understanding of the relationship between classical inheritance, Renaissance philosophy and literary expression in Crete and Cyprus, while situating Greek-language writing within broader European intellectual currents.