Speculum Spotlight | Snakes and Ecology in Byzantine Aesthetics (Kee, Quigley)
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Anthropologists, evolutionary theorists, and others have asserted profound connections between snakes and human cognition and culture, yet these animals have not played a major role in ecological approaches to the Middle Ages. In his essay “Snakes and Ecology in Byzantine Aesthetics,” Dr. John Kee engages such views in order to integrate the possibility of deep, even evolutionary links to these creatures with the humanities’ traditional orientation toward cultural contingency and creativity. Via case studies ranging from Philo of Alexandria (first century CE) to Basil of Caesarea and John Chrysostom (fourth century) to the Paris Nicander manuscript (c. 1000), this essay argues that in Byzantium broadly construed, snakes acted as a figures of latent danger across a wide variety of contexts, providing a means for representing the environmental entanglement of perception in general. These animals’ special salience for humans presents not a constraint on but an opportunity for cultural creativity, helping to make possible, without determining, new acts of literary or artistic production. Snakes can thus stand as exemplary figures of what might be called “ecological aesthetics”: evaluative sensory engagement with the environment from a perspective not of detached contemplation but active involvement.
John Kee is an Austrian Science Fund (FWF) postdoctoral fellow with Central European University. His research interests range across Byzantine literary, cultural, and intellectual history from late antiquity to the later Middle Ages. He holds a PhD from the Special Program in Byzantine Studies at Harvard University; an MA in Medieval Studies from Central European University; and a BA in Classics and Philosophy from Dartmouth College.
Logan Quigley is a producer for The Multicultural Middle Ages Podcast. He holds a PhD in medieval literature from the University of Notre Dame.
Further information:
In modern Greek, poikilia is most commonly used to mean something like a mixed grill platter. (Google it and you’ll see!)
The Routledge Handbook of Human–Animal Relations in the Byzantine World (ed. Przemysław Marciniak, Tristan Schmidt) makes a good starting point for anyone interested in the recent work on animals in Byzantium.
Access the digitized Paris Nicander here.
Peter Godfrey-Smith. Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind.
Live transcripts are available for the podcast episode through most free podcasting platforms (e.g., Apple Podcasts, Spotify).
Listen here or on your preferred podcast platform!
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