Coptic Magical Papyri Podcast Coptic Magical Papyri Podcast

In this episode, I discuss the results of the Coptic Magical Papyri project with Korshi Dosoo, the project leader. We also discuss our new book, Papyri Copticae Magicae, which is available for sale in printed and electronic format on the De Gruyter website.

In this episode, Michael Zellmann-Rohrer introduced us to Byzantine magic. Michael Zellmann-Rohrer has an undergraduate degree in classical philology from Harvard University. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on late ancient and medieval Greek and Latin magical texts at the University of California. Between 2016 and 2021, he was a research associate on the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names at the University of Oxford. Currently, Michael Zellmann-Rohrer is part of the ERC project "Zodiac - Ancient Astral Science in Transformation", in which he is dealing with a corpus of texts and practices related to his earlier interest in magic. Astrology is another form of easily transmissible folk knowledge with a foundation in religious thought, which has survived on papyri thanks to the favorable climate in Egypt, allowing us to trace the details of its application by practitioners from different social classes. During his research, he has worked with various artifacts of manuscript cultures: Inscriptions on stone, jewelry, amulets made of precious stones and metal leaves, books and formulas on papri, and in parchment and paper codices.

In this episode, the well-known scholar of ancient Mediterranean religion David Frankfurter not only introduces the into the basic questions concerning magic in the ancient world, but also shares his memories of magic studies during their revival in the 1990's. David Frankfurter specializes in Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature, magical texts, popular religion, and Egypt in the Roman and late antique periods. Frankfurter’s particular interests revolve around theoretical issues like the place of magic in religion, the relationship of religion and violence, the nature of Christianization, and the representation of evil in culture

In this podcast episode, our guest Joseph E. Sanzo discusses the intersection between Christian and Jewish magic. Joseph Sanzo is Associate Professor of the History of Religions at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. Joseph Sanzo obtained his PhD degree at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2012 and his thesis was published in 2014 in a volume called Scriptural Incipits on Amulets from Late Antique Egypt: Text, Typology, and Theory. Since then, he has held various positions; after his PhD, he was a lecturer at UCLA and a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Jerusalem, between 2015 and 2018 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Munich and between 2018 and 2020 he was the WIRL Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellow at the University of Warwick. His research focuses on ancient Mediterranean religion, with a particular focus on ritual practices during late antiquity, and he is the author of numerous publications on the topic. His current European Research Council Starting Grant project running from 2020 investigates late-antique Jewish and Christian magical objects, such as amulets and incantation bowls, as sites for thinking about early Jewish-Christian relations. For more information on Joseph's current project, see https://pric.unive.it/projects/ejcm/home

Sarrazin has obtained a PhD title in Religious Studies and in Languages, Literatures and Translation Studies from the University of Ottawa (Canada) and the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB, Belgium) in 2020. In general, her research focuses on the appropriation of ancient magical practices by Christians in Greek and Coptic magical texts from Late Antique Egypt and on the processes of religious transformation in Late Antiquity. Currently, Roxanne is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Theology for the ERC-funded project Storyworlds in Transition: Coptic Apocrypha in Changing Contexts in the Byzantine and Early Islamic Periods, led by Hugo Lundhaug at the University of Oslo, where she works on the relationship between Coptic apocrypha and Coptic magical texts. Within the Coptic magic community, Roxanne is of course known for compiling a list of magical texts which served as a starting point for the creation of the Kyprianos database, and she is also a contributor for the Coptic Magical Papyri project.

In this episode of the podcast, we are discussing Coptic pharmacological texts with Anne Grons, who is currently finishing her thesis on the topic. Pharmacological texts offer a window into ancient medical practices. The pharmacological prescriptions are aimed at healing various issues, often by applying remedies made of plants, animals, minerals or other substances, to the body. Coptic pharmacological texts are crucial for understanding Coptic magical prescriptions - often, the boundaries between the two genres are blurred, as they tend to use the same formulations or ingredients. Anne Grons has studied Egyptology and was the assistant/lexicographer at the project Dictionary and Database of Greek Loanwords in Coptic (DDGLC) (Freie Universität Berlin). Currently, she is a researcher at the Institute of the History of Pharmacy and Medicine (in formation) at Philipps-Universität Marburg led by Prof. Dr. Tanja Pommerening.