Studies on animals in the Byzantine world are gaining considerable momentum. An increasing number of scholars are exploring and reconstructing zoobiographies through the lens of Byzantine literature. Yet a significant corpus of texts—often unjustly relegated to the category of minora—remains underexplored, despite teeming with animal life. In fables, popular tales, proverb collections, school manuals, rhetorical treatises, and dreambooks, animals play important roles : they drive narrative plots, embody moral and social agency, and serve as crucial vehicles for cultural meaning.

Argument

Studies on animals in the Byzantine world are gaining considerable momentum. An increasing number of scholars are exploring and reconstructing zoobiographies through the lens of Byzantine literature. Yet a significant corpus of texts—often unjustly relegated to the category of minora—remains underexplored, despite teeming with animal life. In fables, popular tales, proverb collections, school manuals, rhetorical treatises, and dreambooks, animals play important roles : they drive narrative plots, embody moral and social agency, and serve as crucial vehicles for cultural meaning.

In these genres, the representation of animals combines zoological observation with the fantastic, the mythological, and the folkloristic. Studying them makes it possible to reconstruct the distinctive relationship between humans and non-human animals across the Byzantine centuries and to trace how the heritage of antiquity—cultural as well as zoological—was adapted, reinterpreted, and woven into the fabric of medieval thought, folkbiology and popular storytelling.

To mark the launch of the project on Stephanites and Ichnelates and animal fables in Byzantium—hosted at the University of Silesia in Katowice—and to foster broader engagement with animal studies, we are organizing an introductory international online conference. We invite papers that address, among others, the following questions :

• How is animality mobilized to convey ethical, social, or philosophical meanings ?
• How are animals portrayed and employed in these so-called minor genres ?
• How does practical or folk zoological knowledge intersect with the literary imagination and popular belief ?
• How are non-human actors understood and constructed in texts that are not explicitly zoological yet remain deeply entangled with both the symbolic and the real worlds of beasts ?

Contributions are welcome on animals in Byzantine fables, proverb collections, dreambooks, and related paraliterary or didactic texts. We also encourage submissions examining the presence and rhetorical function of animals in scholia, commentaries, and rhetorical treatises.

Submission guidelines

Please send an abstract of up to 150 words along with a brief academic CV to bizancjum@us.edu.pl no later than 28 February 2026.

Scientific committee

• Lorenzo M. Ciolfi (Univesidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain)
• Przemysław Marciniak (University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland)
• Katarzyna Piotrowska (University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland)