Looking Back at the Five Years of the Coptic Magical Papyri Project – Coptic Magical Papyri Podcast
- Looking Back at the Five Years of the Coptic Magical Papyri Project
- Magic in the Byzantine World with Michael Zellmann-Rohrer
- Talking Ancient Magic with David Frankfurter
- Intersection between Christian and Jewish Magic with Joseph Sanzo
- Greek and Egyptian Deities in Coptic Magical Texts with Roxanne Bélanger Sarrazin
In this episode, Michael Zellmann-Rohrer introduces 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 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.