Daughters out of line: the marriage plot in three paradigmatic texts of the Cretan Renaissance, Erotokritos, Panoria and Vasileus o Rodolinos

A neglected and marginalized area of Renaissance studies, the role of daughters in the representation of marriage in Cretan literature of the seventeenth century offers a unique perspective on the crisis of Byzantine aristocratic values and feudal structures of authority. Colonized by Venice, the powerful Cretan Byzantine aristocracy was confronted with alien rulers, a new commercial economy and a disruptive Latin/Italian Renaissance culture. In the context of this confrontation between Byzantium and Venice, between feudal kin structures and a modern politics of expediency, traditional marriage roles and alliances were strained. My dissertation focuses on three paradigmatic texts which, in different genres and with different outcomes, dramatize the resistance of aristocratic daughters who, acting out of line, challenge their roles as political objects of exchange among powerful men. Erotokritos (1713) by Vitsentzos Kornaros is an epic romance in which a royal daughter refuses to marry an appropriate suitor chosen by her father because of her love for a man who is not her social equal, thus threatening the consolidation of national identity. The conflict is finally resolved after the princess and her suitor disguised as an alien warrior prove their worth to the king through extraordinary feats of loyalty and heroism and are allowed to marry. The pastoral Panoria (1585-1590) by Georgios Chortatzis represents the crisis of traditional paternal authority and social equilibrium when a daughter refuses a convenient marriage and chooses a pastoral retreat in the name of her autonomy and independence. Paradoxically, this crisis is resolved by Eros, recruited, against the odds, in the service of the arranged marriage. However, in Vasileus O Rodolinos (1647) by Andreas Ioannis Troilos a bizarre arrangement to reconcile the values of feudal kingship, romantic love and male friendship through a marriage based on lies and betrayal, tragically fails and, as in Hamlet, social chaos results. Epic romance, pastoral and tragedy, these texts, which provide insights into a world of cultural, economic and ideological transformations, present their different resolutions and dissolutions of problematic marriage plots.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical references (p. 205-215)by Kalliope Valadaki