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381 Pages
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF
HUMAN-ANIMAL RELATIONS IN THE BYZANTINE WORLD
Animals have recently become recognized as significant agents of history as part of the
‘animal turn’ in historical studies. Animals in Byzantium were human companions, a source
of entertainment and food – it is small wonder that they made their way into literature and
the visual arts. Moreover, humans defined themselves and their activities by referring to
non-human animals, either by anthropomorphizing animals (as in the case of the Cat-Mice
War) or by animalizing humans and their (un)wanted behaviours.
The Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Relations in the Byzantine World offers
an in-depth survey of the relationships between humans and non-human animals in
the Byzantine Empire.
The contributions included in the volume address both material (zooarchaeology, animals as food, visual representations of animals) and immaterial (semiotics, philosophy) aspects of human-animal coexistence in chapters written by leading experts in their field. This book will appeal to students and scholars alike researching Byzantine social and cultural history, as well as those interested in the history of animals. This book marks an important step in the development of animal studies in Byzantium, filling a gap in the wider research on the history of human-animal relations in the Middle Ages.
Przemysław Marciniak is a Research Professor and the Director of the Center for Byzantine Studies at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. His research focuses on Byzantine performative culture, the reception of Byzantium, and recently on animals and nature in the Byzantine world. His publications include articles on Byzantine entomology and a co-edited volume on the reception of Byzantium in the popular imagination.
Tristan Schmidt is Assistant Professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. His research is focused on human-nature relations in the Byzantine world as well as on the aristocracy and military leadership between the 11th and 13th centuries in Byzantium. His animal-related publications include a monograph on animal imagery in Byzantine political discourse, and studies on concepts of animal agency in Byzantine texts and on ecological awareness in Byzantine society.
CONTRIBUTORS
Henriette Baron is a zooarchaeologist. She is the head of the exhibitions department at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Archäologie Mainz (LEIZA) since 2020. She has also conducted archaeozoological research on human-animal relationships, with a focus on the early Middle Ages and the Byzantine Empire.
Nicolas Drocourt is an Associate Professor of Medieval History at the University of Nantes, France, and member of the lab Centre de recherches en histoire internationales et atlantiques (CRHIA) (UR 1163). His research investigates the history of the Byzantine Empire and its diplomacy between the seventh and the beginning of the thirteenth century. He has recently co-edited A Companion to Byzantium and the West, 900–1204 (LeidenBoston: Brill, 2022), and has published L’autre Empire du milieu. La diplomatie byzantine (VIIe-XIIe s.) (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2023).
Stephanos Efthymiadis is Professor at the Open University of Cyprus, Programme in Hellenic Culture. He holds a PhD from the University of Oxford (UK) and BA degrees in Law (University of Athens) and in Greek Literature (University of Crete). He has published numerous studies on Byzantine hagiography, historiography and prosopography. He coedited the volume Niketas Choniates: a Historian and a Writer (with Alicia Simpson, La Pomme d’or, Geneva 2009).
A volume of collected articles on Byzantine hagiography appeared in the Variorum Collected Studies series in 2011. He is the editor of the twovolume Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography (2011 and 2014). His most recent monograph is The Hagiography of Byzantine Cyprus (4th–13th c.) published in Greek by the Cyprus Research Centre, Nicosia; its English translation, to be published with Cambridge University Press, is in press. He is currently preparing a monograph on the political and social history of Hagia Sophia of Constantinople (532–1453).
Johannes Koder is a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Institute for Medieval Studies/Division Byzantine Studies). His current research interests include the Hagiographical Kontakia of Ps.-Romanos Melodos and the pronunciation of the Greek language in Late Antiquiy and the Byzantine period. Maciej Kokoszko, University of Łódź, Poland is interested in the history of food and medicine (especially in dietetics) in Antiquity and early Byzantium.
Stavros Lazaris is a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and Professor of Byzantine History at the Catholic University of Paris. His research and teaching concern the history of Byzantine science, including the study of original textual and visual documents related to the field. Since his doctoral thesis, he has worked on medieval illustrations and their place in the transmission of medical and scientific knowledge to Byzantium. Horses and their role in the army and the economy of Late Antiquity and Byzantium is another major theme of his research, including equine science technology and the history of veterinary medicine.
He has also written on Visual Studies and, since his habilitation, he is interested in the Christianization of pagan scientific literature. Henry Maguire is Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University. Throughout his career he has been interested in the relationships between art and literature in Byzantium, although he has also written on other topics, including ivories, mosaics, Byzantine secular art, and attitudes toward nature in Byzantium.
Przemysław Marciniak is Research Professor of Byzantine Literature and the Director of the Centre for Byzantine Studies at the University of Silesia in Katowice. His research focuses on performance, satire, the reception of Byzantium, and animal studies. Charis Messis holds a PhD in Byzantine Studies from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and a habilitation from the Sorbonne University. He is now teaching Byzantine literature at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. His research interests concern Byzantine history and literature, especially the history of gender, along with other social and anthropological aspects of the Byzantine world.
Ingela Nilsson is Professor of Greek and Byzantine Studies at Uppsala University. Her research interests concern processes of rewriting, storytelling, and narratology. Christodoulos Papavarnavas is a postdoctoral researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Department of Byzantine Research. He was awarded a doctorate with honours of the Federal President of Austria (Promotio sub auspiciis praesidentis) from the University of Vienna in 2019. His research focuses on late antique and Byzantine narratives, especially hagiography, audience response, performance, space, gender, emotions, and the senses. He has taught and published on Byzantine literature. His monograph Gefängnis als Schwellenraum in der byzantinischen Hagiographie was published by De Gruyter (2021). Katarzyna Piotrowska is Assistant Professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice. She specializes in twelfth-century Byzantine literature. Her recent publications include books and papers on Theodoros Prodromos’ Katomyomachia and the translation of satirical dialogues.
Zofia Rzeźnicka, University of Łódź, Poland is interested in ancient and early Byzantine medicine (especially dietetics), food history, and cosmetology. Tristan Schmidt is Assistant Professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice. His research is focused on the Byzantine military aristocracy and military leadership in 11th to 13th century Byzantium and on human-faunal relations in the Byzantine world. His animal-related research includes a monograph on political animal imagery in the Byzantine political discourse, 11th–13th c. (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2020), studies on concepts of animal agency in Byzantine texts, on animal speech and on ecological awareness in Byzantine society. Nancy Patterson Ševčenko is an independent scholar. Her interests have focused on painted narratives of the lives of saints, on issues of art and liturgy, and on manuscript illumination. Bligh Somma is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University in New York. His research interest lies in psychology, ethics, and animals in philosophy of the Islamic world. Kirsty Stewart is an independent researcher based in Edinburgh. Her research focuses on nature and beauty in the later Byzantine period, addressing humour, religion, and physical appearance. Melpomeni Vogiatzi is a researcher at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Her research interest lies in classical to Byzantine philosophy, especially ethics, logic, and psychology. Arnaud Zucker is Professor of Greek Literature at University Côte d’Azur (Nice). His key research topics are ancient zoology, ancient astronomy, mythography, and folk etymology. He is heading an international research network on ancient zoological knowledge (Zoomathia) and is director of the journal Rursuspicae.
BYZANTINE ANIMAL STUDIES
History Beyond Humans Przemysław Marciniak and Tristan Schmidt Ἡροδότου Ἁλικαρνησσέος ἱστορίης ἀπόδειξιος ἥδε, ὡς μήτε τὰ γενόμενα ἐξ ἀνθρώπων τῷ χρόνῳ ἐξίτηλα γένηται, μήτε ἔργα μεγάλα τε καὶ θωμαστά, τὰ μὲν Ἕλλησι τὰ δὲ βαρβάροισι ἀποδεχθέντα, ἀκλεᾶ γένηται, […]. This is the publication of Herodotus of Halicarnassus’ systematic observations [historia], so that the events do not fade from human [memory] in the course of time, nor that the great and marvelous deeds, both of the Hellenes and of the barbarians, lose their fame […].1 When Herodotus introduced his monumental Histories that would become the reference for the tradition of historiography that followed in the Western world, the pater historiae described very anthropocentric aims: to preserve, first and foremost, the memory of the deeds of humans. This focus on human and, to a certain degree, divine agency does not imply that his work does not include references to nonhuman animals as well.2 On the contrary, they feature in considerable numbers in zoological and ethnographical excursuses; they are described as parts of everyday human life and interpreted as portents for human fate.3 History as such, however, is largely shaped by gods and humans.
This minor role that animals play, not just in Herodotus but in Euro-Mediterranean (and global) historiography in general, correlates with the fact that “history” itself is considered a deeply anthropocentric concept, alien to every other living being except humans. Authors interested in zoology in and beyond the Greek tradition admired animals’ abilities to plan ahead for their own good and pointed to the memory of certain animals.4 But even though zoological research has hitherto expanded a great deal, we still do not possess any cues indicating that nonhuman species have developed a concept comparable to what we call “history.”5 Despite being limited to the human perspective, however, it is evident that even an anthropocentric concept of history is by no means an exclusively human affair; in many regards, the social, economic, political, and cultural events and developments recorded in our sources have to be acknowledged as the results of aggregated action, conscious and unconscious interventions, and mutual dependencies within human-nonhuman networks.
Assessing the roles of nonhuman animals within these networks and interrelations is the aim of historically oriented human‒animal studies. There are many ways to approach and understand the significance of animals in history: from an archaeological exploration of the material remains of animals, to the investigation of human concepts of nonhuman beings, to the search for a concrete intervention of animal action in historically relevant processes such as human‒animal coevolution, or warfare and transport.
In Byzantine studies, the animal world and human‒animal interaction has rarely been the focus of scholarly attention, even though the interactions between the Byzantines and the animals surrounding them could hardly be ignored when it comes to the agrarian economy;7 rural and urban everyday life; or specific practices such as hunting, animal parades, or the horse races and animal fights in the empire’s hippodromes.8 An explicit focus on the Byzantine fauna (and flora), however, has been a topic in only few, albeit influential studies; the extensive works by Henry Maguire and Eunice Dauterman Maguire on Byzantine secular and religious art should be mentioned here, as well as the important, although by now partly outdated work of Phaidon Koukoules.9
A first in-depth and interdisciplinary approach toward the animal world in Byzantium was undertaken in 2008, resulting in a conference on “Animals and Environment in Byzantium” (Ζώα και περιβάλλον στο Βυζάντιο [7ος-12ος αι.]) at the Institute for Byzantine Research at the National Hellenic Research Foundation in Athens. The proceedings (2011) are still the main reference for anyone interested in the animal world.10 The topics addressed in the volume provide an overview of core questions of animal-related research in Byzantine studies. A clear focus lies on everyday practices in agriculture and animal husbandry, pastoralism, hunting and fishing, as well as the use of animal products. Other chapters explore the semiotic dimension of animals in the political debates of Byzantium, as metaphors in rhetorical culture, as well as in religious doctrine and interpretation of the kosmos. 11
Since the publication of this groundbreaking volume, the methodological and theoretical development of historical animal studies has progressed, primarily in neighboring disciplines of cultural history and in literary studies. This can be attested in numerous handbooks and compendia that appeared during the last decade.12 In Byzantine studies, animal-related research has profited first and foremost from ongoing studies of source material (texts, figurative representations, and archaeological material).
The emergence of perspectives on the role of nonhuman animals in historical processes, even though this largely happened outside the discipline, affected the small community of animal-focused researchers of Byzantium as well, opening new windows for scientific exploration. Taking into account these developments in- and outside Byzantine studies, the present collective volume is meant as a continuation of the work done so far in Byzantine animal studies. Contributing to The Routledge History Handbook Series, our aim is to present current approaches and research interests in the field and give an overview of the available source material, including its potential for research in the upcoming years. When in 2011 Taxiarchis Kolias opened “Ζώα και περιβάλλον” with an assessment of the state of animal-related studies, he pointed to the limited amount of research literature in comparison with studies in the Central and Western European Middle Ages.13 This statement has not lost its validity. One likely reason is the limited size of our discipline in terms of funding and personnel compared with the overall number of potential research topics.
Another aspect is the fact that pioneering theoretical and methodological works from animal-related studies of medieval history and literature such as Jeffrey Cohen’s “Medieval Identity Machines” (2003) and Udo Friedrich’s “Menschentier und Tiermensch” (2009), were received in Byzantine studies only after some delay and only sporadically. On the other hand, scholars from neighboring disciplines have not shown much interest in Byzantium. A certain separation of Byzantine animal studies from neighboring disciplines becomes manifest also in the fact that the comprehensive “Cultural History of Animals in Antiquity” and the following volume on the Middle Ages (2007) hardly contains any reference to the Eastern Mediterranean world.14
This, however, does not mean that Byzantine animal studies did not progress during the last decade. Significant developments can be identified with regard to the study of relevant source material. As for the texts, new studies on zoological knowledge traditions, the Greek Physiologus and the Hexaemera literature, as well as the rich corpus of animal-related satirical texts have deepened our understanding of perceptions, conceptualizations, and representations of animals in Byzantium.15 Important new editions, e.g., of the Zoological Collection commissioned by Emperor Constantine VII (forthcoming), the Nomos Georgikos (2020), and the Eugenian recension of Stephanites and Ichnelates (2022), have further broadened the source base available for study.16 A special place in Byzantine studies has always been held by horses and horse-related veterinary studies, and the extensive research on the hippiatrica has considerably broadened our understanding of human-horse relations.17 Significant progress has also been made with regard to non-textual sources, above all, in the field of zooarchaeology. When H. Baron published her overview on the sites within the Byzantine Empire in 2010, she described the situation as “heterogenous, both chronologically and geographically.”18
In fact, access to well-documented and studied zooarchaeological material has been limited ever since; as the preservation of animal bones (especially small species that require sieving) and plant remains became a concern only in recent decades, standardized practices of collecting and documenting such finds are still a desideratum.19 Baron nevertheless detected a positive development both in methods of collection and in the quantity of the material.20 Her own study greatly facilitated the systematic inclusion of zooarchaeological data in animal-related research. Subsequent findings, in particular the important excavations at Yenikapı (Harbor of Theodosius), Istanbul (2004–2013), where great care was taken with the archaeozoological remains, further increased the amount of data on the use and living conditions of different species in Byzantium and, in this specific case, in its capital.21
The developments in Byzantine animal studies between the “first wave” (culminating in the 2011 collective volume) and the “second wave” (on which the present handbook is based) manifest themselves not only in the expansion and further study of available source material but also in a widening of the research perspectives and topics in which animals have become considered relevant. While previous research was characterized by a strong (albeit not exclusive!) focus on animals in everyday life and agriculture as well as in animal semiotics,22 these traditional topics are now complemented by new, previously neglected areas of research. The thematic expansion concerns new areas of the natural environment (such as the hitherto sparsely researched aquatic/maritime space), previously neglected species (such as insects), an ongoing interest in different aspects of equids in the Byzantine world, and a strengthened importance of animals in the study of court rhetoric and techniques of prognostication in medieval societies.23
The current handbook takes into account both the new research foci that have developed during the last decade and the evolution in sectors of study where animals are traditionally considered relevant. The semiotics of animals clearly belongs to the latter category. Already a long time ago, André Grabar and Otto Treitinger have acknowledged the important messages of political and social power embedded in the imagery of animals in representations of imperial victory or in aristocratic hunting practices.24 Fittingly characterized as an “Age du Symbole” (M. Chenu), the Euro-Mediterranean Middle Ages were in many ways focused on the meanings inherent in animal signs, including in political speech, public performance, moral discourse, and religious doctrine.25
Taking into account the constant interaction of semiotic concepts and material human‒animal contact, Tristan Schmidt provides a systematic view over the manifold ways in which animals were considered significant in the Byzantine world and provided meaning even beyond their own actions and appearances. One of the bases of any symbolic interpretation of animals in the Byzantine world was zoological knowledge, the sources of which can be found in everyday human‒animal interaction, in the ancient traditions of zoological, and in the Christian concepts of the kosmos that dominated the discourse from Late Antiquity onwards.
The question of what counts as “zoological literature” and how to separate the corpus of extant texts from Byzantium is still open for debate and has been answered differently in scholarship.26 A striking characteristic is the Byzantines’ openness to combine and harmonize seemingly different approaches – see, for instance, Michael Glykas’ employment of the Aristotelian concept of physis to support the idea of a God-created kosmos. 27 As Arnaud Zucker demonstrates, however, the collection and compilation of ancient zoological texts continued in Byzantium even without the intervention of the Christian discourse. Discussing the works of Timotheus of Gaza (6th century) and the zoological collection commissioned by Emperor Constantine VII (10th century), he delineates the status of the ancient zoological tradition in Byzantium and contextualizes two important source texts pertaining to the small group of “nonphysiological and non-catechetical” zoological literature.28
The Christian zoological perspective, by contrast, can justifiably be called the leading paradigm of conceptualizing the fauna during the Byzantine era. Research in this regard has always revolved around the famous Physiologus and its morality-based interpretations of the zoological knowledge at the time. Stavros Lazaris has pushed forward the research on this central text tradition in recent years. In the present handbook, he delivers the latest insights on this influential text tradition, delineating the core characteristics of Christian “natural science.”29
Far less prominent than the Physiologus is the rich literature in Byzantine Hexaemera, i.e., extended comments on the Book of Genesis that often go far beyond the biblical text and include ample zoological knowledge and interpretations. As one of the first researchers of Byzantium, Henry Maguire understood the crucial role of these texts within the Christian discourse on nature.30 Lazaris provides a long-required overview of the most important texts, not just from the hitherto better researched formative phase in Late Antiquity but deep into the Middle Byzantine era. With the chapter by Bligh Somma and Melpomeni Vogiatzi on animal rationality in Byzantine and Islamic philosophy, we include a topic that has received ample attention in recent years in Ancient and Western medieval studies, but less so in our field.31
The ratio or logos-based agency has been a core element of human‒animal separation since Antiquity, even though the inferior status of animals resulting therefrom was never unanimously accepted. Recent studies on 13th-century Western Europe emphasize the great diversity of opinion and lively scholarly debate on the topic.32 Somma and Vogiatzi take a look at no less vibrant discussions on the intellectual faculties of animals in Byzantium and the Islamic world. Comparing strategies of adopting, developing, and emancipating from the ancient Aristotelian and Neoplatonic foundations, they connect two key areas of intellectual development in the Middle Ages to the wider discourse on human‒animal categorizations within global animal studies. The focus on semiotics and zoological knowledge in the first section of the handbook provides up-to-date overviews of the most basic themes of animal-related studies in a specifically Byzantine context. The following section zooms further in, focusing on the discursive diversity of approaches to the animal world visible in the extant sources.
This perspective points to the fact that in all societies, human perceptions and representations of animals are characterized by a multitude of collective and individual concepts. In each concrete testimony, representations of animals therefore encompass only a fraction of all conceptual elements attributed to an animal or a species in a given milieu or society. For the present handbook we consider it crucial to lay out the different discourse- and media-dependent ways of perceiving, “thinking with,” and presenting animals in the socioecological context of Byzantium. A necessary prerequisite for such a multi-perspectival approach is the scientific progress made in many areas of Byzantine cultural studies in recent years.
Thanks to this, it is now possible to diversify animal-related research and dig deeper into specific discourses on animals and investigate their respective audiences. One such specific, and at the same time very influential, discourse is treated in Christodoulos Papavarnavas’ chapter on the functionalization of animal characters in hagiographic martyr narratives. Working on a subgenre of hagiographical narratives, he discusses the central role given to animals in these texts, namely that of “main and secondary heroes or as antagonists” that significantly contribute to the martyrs’ spiritual progression. In this way, Papavarnavas shows how the extension of holy status even to nonhuman animals became thinkable in the context of Eastern Roman hagiography. Stephanos Efthymiadis’ assessment of the presence of animals in Byzantine historiography deals with another literary approach toward animals that influenced both the mindsets of the Byzantine elites and the modern researcher’s picture of Byzantium. Whereas previous research was mostly limited to general stocktaking of animal descriptions in specific works, Efthymiadis presents a much broader comparative view on historiographic texts.33
He emphasizes that the metaphorical use of animals widely overshadowed their real-life descriptions. In this, Byzantine historiographers followed the standards set by the “GrecoRoman tradition of the anthropocentric collection of facts.” Discussing the adoption of a more personal, biographical model of history writing in the 11th and 12th centuries, Efthymiadis shows that developments within the anthropocentric mode of writing history had noticeable consequences for the literary manifestations of animals.34 Another, no less anthropocentric, way of looking at animals and letting them “speak” is through satirical texts. Kirsty Stewart responds to increased interest in late Byzantine sociocritical animal poetry.
Important studies have attempted to categorize texts such as the Entertaining tale of the Quadrupeds, the Poulologos or the Tale of the Honorable Donkey as reflections of late Byzantine politics and society, as literary reflections of quarrels about social rank and status at court, and as representations of a nascent genre that blended animal stories with rhetorical exercises, satire, and sociopolitical comment.35 Recent studies on Theodore Prodromos’ mock epic Katomyomachia and on Byzantine continuation of the Lucianic tradition of paradoxographical encomia show that in the literary circles of the 11th and 12th centuries, it was already fashionable to connect humorous narrative agendas with catchy animal stories.36 Based on these developments in research, Stewart discusses the general role of animals within Byzantine humorous literature with its manifold functions, from social criticism to didactic purposes and entertainment. Ingela Nilsson and Charis Messis delve into the Byzantine world of hunting. This topic has enjoyed limited popularity in previous scholarship.37
Nilsson and Messis, using various sources, differentiate between two types of hunting: the ordinary hunt, whose primary motivation was economic (hunting for food), and the heroic/imperial hunt, which served more representational purposes. Hunting was also a topic of several ekphraseis and played its part in late Byzantine literature. Hunting is a multilayered event that includes performative aspects and that arises from the most basic human need: food. Texts clearly dominate the corpus of sources relevant for animal studies in the Byzantine world, and yet, Eastern Roman society was also an intrinsically visual culture. Two chapters by Henry Maguire and by Nancy Ševčenko address these issues. However, although they both engage with the visual material, they are fundamentally different. Maguire’s chapter discusses animals depicted in mosaics in different roles as metonymy, metaphors, and talismans.
And while (a correct) interpretation might require some additional knowledge, these representations are displayed in places available to the wider public (e.g., in churches). Conversely, Ševčenko’s chapter deals with the depictions of animals accessible to a relatively small group of people – those who were in possession of costly illustrated manuscripts. Ševčenko not only discusses the various types of animals represented in the manuscripts but shows possible links between these representations and historical events, as was the case of a zebra in a 14th-century manuscript, which could echo an earlier story of a shipload of exotic animals that was detained by the Byzantine emperor. The third section of the handbook engages with the materiality of animals in the Byzantine world. While literary and artistic sources often idealize nature or focus on its symbolic meaning, most Ancient and Medieval humans were in close contact with countless animals on an everyday basis, which influenced their lives to a high degree. The material presence of animals has been the object of studies on everyday life in Byzantium, beginning with the seminal work of Ph. Koukoules in the 1950s.38 For historic research in general, we can detect an increasing awareness of the impact of animals on human life and their significance for economic, cultural, and political developments all over the globe.
This is visible, for instance, in the emergence of new concepts such as “deep history,” where coevolutionary processes between humans and animals are investigated that greatly influenced the development of both human and nonhuman species,39 or in the emphasis of historians of equids that without their functions in terms of baggage carrying and draft, “many societies in history could never have prospered.”40 In the present volume, Maciej Kokoszko and Zofia Rzeźnicka approach the materiality of animals by investigating their role as part of the Byzantine diet. This thorough chapter written by the eminent specialists in the field details many instances of consuming meat, dairy products, and eggs. Even more importantly, it strives to reconstruct the meateating patterns of the Byzantines. Quite unsurprisingly for premodern societies, meat was consumed mostly by the better-offs and only sporadically by the lower strata of society. This chapter is also noteworthy because animals here are what Carol Adams calls “absent referents.” As she explained in The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist Vegeterian Critical Theory, “Behind every meal of meat is an absence: the death of the animal whose place the meat takes.
Kokoszko’s and Rzeźnicka’s contribution discusses an undeniably material aspect of the animal presence in Byzantium. However, a significant portion of the source material comes – understandably – from texts. This is partly, though not entirely, due to the fact that Byzantine zooarchaeology is still an underdeveloped field. Henriette Baron, the first scholar to provide a systematic overview of animal remains in Byzantium, titled her chapter, in a sort of dialogue with Kokoszko’s and Rzeźnicka’s work, “More Than Food.” Baron surveys the remains of various species, not only those consumed by the Byzantines but also beasts of burden as well as cats and dogs.
Her chapter gives a physical dimension to many other chapters in this volume by adding the “material animal” to their literary/semiotic versions. Nicolas Drocourt approaches the materiality of animals from the perspective of gift giving and exchange across and beyond the Byzantine world. In his chapter devoted to “animals on the move,” Drocourt examines the diplomatic exchange of animals in the Mediterranean area, illustrating how animals served diplomatic purposes. Certain animals were more common, such as horses, while others were given quite rarely, such as elephants. The choice of a particular animal carried political significance, as Drocourt points out. Intriguingly, some of the skeletal remains found in Theodosius harbor might have belonged to animals received by the Byzantine emperors as gifts.
Drocourt mentions in his paper the public display of some of the animals that came to Constantinople. However, most animals mentioned in his chapter were inaccessible to the wider population of Constantinople. And yet, Constantinople (and other Byzantine cities and settlements), like other premodern spaces, must have teemed with animals – both invited and uninvited.42 The chapters by Katarzyna Piotrowska and Przemysław Marciniak address two particular groups of animals: rodents (mice) and pets, respectively.43 Piotrowska offers a comprehensive overview of the presence of mice in Byzantine culture and literature. Interestingly, mice are featured as protagonists in many literary works, particularly from the Middle Byzantine period. However, as her chapter reveals, much of the knowledge of mice can be inferred from paroemiographical material.
The main focus of Marciniak’s chapter is on the emotional bonds between animals and humans in Byzantium. This is of particular importance, as research on pet keeping has hitherto been conducted mostly outside Byzantine studies. In his chapter, Marciniak discusses the appropriateness of using the terms “pets” or “domestic animals” within Byzantine society. Perhaps more importantly, he illustrates the peculiar approach of the Byzantines to pet keeping.44 The chapters collected in this handbook present a field of animal-related Byzantine studies that has expanded during recent decades, partly by continuing and deepening existing research aims, partly by taking new directions that widen and diversify the area of interest. This development must be regarded in the context of an increased interest in humanenvironmental relations and the wider discourse on current environmental change.
Another factor to be considered is the wish for a more balanced perspective on the relations and interdependencies between human and nonhuman actors that came with posthumanism. Both aspects have contributed to a general reorientation of “history,” away from seemingly autonomous actions of humans and toward processes and developments that took place within heterogenous networks including the hitherto neglected animal world. The increase in research topics can be attributed less to a coordinated research program and more to the initiative of individual researchers and research teams. In comparison with thematic expansion, however, one has to admit that the adaptation of methods and perspectives developed in critical literary and cultural human‒animal studies outside our field is still in its initial phase.
Even though ecocriticism, a pluriform initiative emerging from literary studies that focuses on human-environmental relationships in texts, has gradually made its way into research on premodern literatures, Byzantine texts have only sparsely been analyzed in this way.45 The pioneering work by Adam Goldwyn on Medieval Greek Romance opened the path for the exploration of human‒animal relations in Byzantine literary texts. His discussions on the animalization of Digenis Akritas as a hunter/predator and the “sympoietic” entanglement of humans, plants, and animals in literary descriptions of garden spaces present new, ecocritically informed readings of the boundaries and entanglements between humans, animals, plants, and objects in Byzantine texts.46 Thomas Arentzen, Virginia Burrus, and Glenn Peers recently applied a similarly environmentally oriented perspective to “Byzantine Tree Life,” discussing, among other things, the important concept of human-plant hybridization in the example of Byzantine dendrites.47 These approaches are not exclusively animal-related, but they further shift the perspective away from the concept of “history” as the result of the activity of autonomous humans toward an acknowledgment of nonhuman, animal agency.
A recent colloquium at the Metochi Study Centre on the island of Lesbos (“‘The sound of your leaves implores the Creator’: Relating to the Non-Human in Byzantium” 2023) progressed in the topic of environmental-oriented readings of Byzantine “wilderness writing,” ecocritical perspectives on the Physiologus, and methodological questioning of emic and etic views on animal agency in Byzantium.48 These endeavors are flanked by other initiatives, e.g., by Maroula Perisanidi who combines animal studies with disability studies, again taking a direction toward a post-humanist view that differentiates between a clear human‒animal divide and alternative readings that counteract these boundaries.49 Even though this is a still nascent research trend, these initiatives show that Byzantine animal studies is a developing field. The coming years will show whether this development will turn into a “third wave” of Byzantine animal studies, in the course of which the research becomes (even) more methodologically aware, theory based, and more strongly embedded in tendencies of environmental studies and cultural human‒animal studies outside the subject of Byzantine studies. The research of the last decade, which has led to the results presented in this handbook, has created a solid basis for this endeavor.
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