The Greco-Egyptian Magical Formularies: Libraries, Books, and Individual Recipes

Description

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. 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