20-24 February @ Lorentz Center Snellius/Hybrid
Three of the participants of the Transmission of Magical Knowledge project – Korshi Dosoo, Raquel Martín Hernandez, and Panagiota Sarischouli – collaborated recently with Ortal-Paz Saar (Utrecht University) to organise a workshop, Structuring Magic, with the goal of laying the basis for an integrative study of magic from different cultures, periods, and locations. The key aims of the workshop were: (i) outline the needs of the field, (ii) plan concrete steps to solve these needs, e.g., through DH and computational linguistics methods, and (iii) establish an interdisciplinary network of scholars who would begin pursuing these steps. From February 20th to 24th, 2023, 15 scholars who have worked on various magical traditions (Mesopotamian, Demotic, Greek, Coptic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Armenian, Ge’ez) came together (either in person or on zoom) to discuss what tools researchers need to carry out a comparative and historicising project on these magical corpora, and how a meaningful interdisciplinary collaboration might be established. Joining them were scholars of digital humanities, computational linguistics, and artificial intelligence, to help explore methods that could be employed to take these new steps. Two afternoons of the week were devoted to visiting magical manuscripts in Leiden – the Greek, Arabic, and Ge’ez manuscripts in the collection of the University Library, which includes the recently-re-edited GEMF 34 (=PGM LXII) and manuscripts of the Arabic “Goal of the Wise”, translated into Latin as the Picatrix – and Demotic, Greek, and Coptic papyri of the the National Museum of Antiquities, including the famous magical papyri P. Leiden I 383 (=GEMF 16/PDM xiv) [in the image above with Korshi and Panagiota], 384 (=GEMF 15/PGM XII), 385 (KYP M171, containing the Letter of Jesus to Abgar), and 395 (= GEMF 60/PGM XIII).
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