The Coptic Magical Papyri: Vernacular Religion in Late Roman and Early Islamic Egypt is a five-year research project (2018-2023) based at the Chair of Egyptology of the Julius Maximilian University Würzburg and funded by the Excellent Ideas programme. The team consists of Korshi Dosoo (research group leader), Edward O. D. Love, and Markéta Preininger Svobodová.
Our goal is to advance the study of
the corpus of Coptic “magical texts” – manuscripts written on papyrus,
as well as parchment, paper, ostraca and other materials, and attesting
to private religious practices designed to cope with the crises of daily
life in Egypt. There are about five hundred of these texts which
survive, dating to between the third and twelfth centuries of the common
era. The largest published collection to-date, Ancient Christian Magic (Marvin
Meyer & Richard Smith, 1994), contains only about one hundred of
these texts – about a fifth of the total number – while the remainder of
those published are scattered in over a hundred books and articles,
accessible to and known by only a few specialists.
These documents serve as vital pieces of information for vernacular religion –
the realities rather than the ideal of religious practices and beliefs
as they were experienced and carried out in daily life. They provide
rich information about the experiences of people from the periods they
document – the transitions from traditional Egyptian religion to
Christianity and Islam, the diffusion and interaction of different forms
of Christianity (“gnostic” and orthodox, Miaphysiste and Dyophysite,
cults of saints and angels), and conceptions of the human and divine
worlds – how human experiences such as happiness and success, suffering
and sickness, love and conflict were understood and negotiated. Our project has five key components:
The creation of a continually-updated, publicly-available online corpus of Coptic magical texts, stored within the Kyprianos database.
The
edition of new texts, and the re-edition and correction of older
manuscripts, made possible by the comparative material within the
corpus.
The publication of these editions, both online and in print.
Specific
studies on different aspects of the magical texts – their language,
their cosmologies, their ritual practices, and so on. These will respond
to questions generated in the compilation of the corpus and the edition
of texts.
The communication of these results through regular blog posts and our forthcoming podcast, You’re a Wizard!
Please contact us if you would like to collaborate, receive regular updates, or correct information online or in the Kyprianos database.
The AWOL Index: The bibliographic data presented herein has been programmatically extracted from the content of AWOL - The Ancient World Online (ISSN 2156-2253) and formatted in accordance with a structured data model.
AWOL is a project of Charles E. Jones, Tombros Librarian for Classics and Humanities at the Pattee Library, Penn State University
AWOL began with a series of entries under the heading AWOL on the Ancient World Bloggers Group Blog. I moved it to its own space here beginning in 2009.
The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of networked information as it comes available.
The ancient world is conceived here as it is at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, my academic home at the time AWOL was launched. That is, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific, from the beginnings of human habitation to the late antique / early Islamic period.
AWOL is the successor to Abzu, a guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world, founded at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago in 1994. Together they represent the longest sustained effort to map the development of open digital scholarship in any discipline.
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