Der Workshop wird ausgerichtet von Matthew L. Keegan und Beatrice Gründler im Rahmen des Dahlem Junior Host Program.

Medieval Arabic literature (adab) is full of animals. The most famous example is Kalila wa-Dimna, a collection of stories about talking animals and humans. This text is usually described as "fables" or as a Mirror for Princes (Fürstenspiegel). However, the rich diversity of animal stories beyond Kalila wa-Dimna and the role these animal stories play in the broader adab tradition are not well understood. Participants in this workshop explore the various ways in which medieval authors and readers put animals to work in adab and related discourses, as the site of theological debate, as a vehicle for allegory, and as a way of thinking about poetics and fictionality. These diverse traditions of animal writing influenced, in turn, how readers interpreted Kalila wa-Dimna over the centuries. Some readers interpreted it as a work on politics, while other readers viewed it as a repository of proverbial wisdom, as a mystical treatise, or as a picaresque narrative. This workshop shows how animals were not sequestered into one genre or mode of writing but roamed across disciplinary boundaries as part of a dynamic culture of imagination, inquiry, and writing.