Dr. Igor Medić, a member of the project team, participated in the international conference Women in World Literature: Climate, Crisis, and Contagion, which took place on 19 and 20 June 2025 at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom. There he delivered a presentation titled The bee, the witch, and the church – A crisis caused by a woman in a medieval tale, in which he presented part of his research on exempla from Croatian Glagolitic non-liturgical miscellanies.

In his presentation, he analysed a previously unexplored text from the Petris Miscellany (1468) titled Kapitul ot bahoric’ nečis’ (33v–34r). The story tells of a woman who owns a beehive. The devil persuades her to deceitfully obtain a consecrated host from a priest and place it in the hive in order to increase the number of her hives. The angels gather around the hive to protect the consecrated host and instruct a monk to inform the bishop. The bishop, accompanied by a community of believers, brings the host back to the church. The woman is attacked by bees and condemned to eternal torment.

In the presentation, the text was linked to the exemplum genre and compared with several Western European sources. In addition, the similarities and differences to a version of the tale from Étienne de Bourbon’s collection were analysed. The text was also placed in a broader cultural and historical context, showing the role of such stories in witch trials in early modern Poland. Finally, an attempt was made to explain why a variant of the same story was included in the Fatević Miscellany (1617) as a sermon against witches, followed by a sermon against female arrogance.