In Greco-Roman Egypt, recipes for magical undertaking, called magical formularies, commonly existed for love potions, curses, attempts to best business rivals—many of the same challenges that modern people might face. In The Greco-Egyptian Magical Formularies: Libraries, Books, and Individual Recipes, volume editors Christopher Faraone and Sofia Torallas Tovar present a series of essays by scholars involved in a multiyear project to reedit and translate the various magical handbooks that were inscribed in the Roman period in the Greek or Egyptian languages. For the first time, the material remains of these papyrus rolls and codices are closely examined, revealing important information about the production of books in Egypt, the scribal culture in which they were produced, and the traffic in single recipes copied from them. Especially important for historians of the book and the Christian Bible are new insights in the historical shift from roll to codex, complicated methods of inscribing the bilingual papyri (in which the Greek script is written left to right and the demotic script right to left), and the new realization that several of the longest extant handbooks are clearly compilations of two or more shorter handbooks, which may have come from different places. The essays also reexamine and rethink the idea that these handbooks came from the personal libraries of practicing magicians or temple scriptoria, in one case going so far as to suggest that two of the handbooks had literary pretensions of a sort and were designed to be read for pleasure rather than for quotidian use in making magical recipes.
Author(s): Christopher Faraone, Sofia Torallas Tovar
Series: New Texts From Ancient Cultures
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 568
City: Ann Arbor
Contents
Concordances
List of Contributors
List of Figures
List of Tables
Introduction (Christopher A. Faraone and Sofía Torallas Tovar)
I. Libraries, Codices, and Rolls
Chapter 1. Anatomy of the Magical Archive | Korshi Dosoo and Sofía Torallas Tovar
Chapter 2. Roll vs. Codex: The Format of the Magical Handbook | Korshi Dosoo and Sofía Torallas Tovar
Chapter 3. The Paleography and Dating of the Magical Formularies from Roman Egypt | Alberto Nodar
II. Compositional and Redactional Patterns
Chapter 4. Compositional Patterns in the Paris Magical Codex (GEMF 57 = PGM IV) | Lynn R. LiDonnici
Chapter 5. The Composition of the Demotic Magical Papyrus of London and Leiden (GEMF 16 = PDM/PGM XIV) | Korshi Dosoo
Chapter 6. GEMF 60 (= PGM XIII): A Study of Material, Scribal, and Compositional Issues | Richard Gordon and Rachel Yuen-Collingridge
III. Distribution of Texts and Their History
Chapter 7. GEMF 74 (= PGM VII): Reconstructing the Textual Tradition | Richard Gordon and Raquel Martín Hernández
Chapter 8. GEMF 15 (= PDM/PGM XII): Production and Use of a Bilingual Magical Formulary | Panagiota Sarischouli
IV. Individual Recipes
Chapter 9. The Composite Recipes in GEMF 57 (= PGM IV) and How They Grew: From Practical Instructions to Literary Narratives | Christopher A. Faraone
Chapter 10. The Rationale of Multi-Purpose Praxeis in the Formulary Tradition | Richard Gordon
Chapter 11. The Traffic in Magical Recipes: Single-Sheet Formularies as Prompts for Oral Performance | Christopher A. Faraone
Abbreviations
Bibliography
Subject Index
Index Locorum
Papyri and Manuscripts Index
