The Coptic Magical Papyri: Vernacular Religion in Late Roman and Early Islamic Egypt was a five-year research project (2018-2023) which was based at the Chair of Egyptology of the Julius Maximilian University Würzburg and funded by the Excellent Ideas programme. The final team consisted of Korshi Dosoo (research group leader), Markéta Preininger, and Julia Schwarzer. Former members included
At the time of the project’s beginning, our goal was to advance the study of the corpus of Coptic “magical texts” – manuscripts written on papyrus, as well as parchment, paper, ostraca and other materials, and attesting to private religious practices designed to cope with the crises of daily life in Egypt. There are about six hundred of these texts which survive, dating to between the third and twelfth centuries of the common era. The largest published collection to-date, Ancient Christian Magic (Marvin Meyer & Richard Smith, 1994), contains only about one hundred of these texts – about a sixth of the total number – while the remainder of those published are scattered in over a hundred books and articles, accessible to and known by only a few specialists.
These documents serve as vital pieces of information for vernacular religion – the realities rather than the ideal of religious practices and beliefs as they were experienced and carried out in daily life. They provide rich information about the experiences of people from the periods they document – the transitions from traditional Egyptian religion to Christianity and Islam, the diffusion and interaction of different forms of Christianity (“gnostic” and orthodox, Miaphysiste and Dyophysite, cults of saints and angels), and conceptions of the human and divine worlds – how human experiences such as happiness and success, suffering and sickness, love and conflict were understood and negotiated.
The project ended in 2023, having met our goals by creating the Kyprianos database and published the first volume of the Papyri Copticae Magicae.
Our project had five key components:
- The creation of a continually-updated, publicly-available online corpus of Coptic magical texts, , stored within the Kyprianos database.
- The edition of new texts, and the re-edition and correction of older manuscripts, made possible by the comparative material within the corpus.
- The publication of these editions, both online and in print.
- Specific studies on different aspects of the magical texts – their language, their cosmologies, their ritual practices, and so on. These will respond to questions generated in the compilation of the corpus and the edition of texts.
- The communication of these results through regular blog posts and our podcast.
The Team
Korshi Dosoo was the junior research group leader of the project The Coptic Magical Papyri: Vernacular Religion in Late Antique and Early Islamic Egypt at the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg. Formerly ATER (lecturer) at the University of Strasbourg and post-doctoral researcher on the Labex RESMED project Les mots de la paix. His PhD thesis, Rituals of Apparition on the Theban Magical Library was completed in 2015 at Macquarie University, Australia. His research focuses on magic and lived religion in Egypt from the Ptolemaic to Mamluk periods as revealed by papyrological and epigraphic sources.
Markéta Preininger was a research fellow on the project The Coptic Magical Papyri. Markéta has defended her PhD thesis in 2022 at the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg on the topic of the body in the Coptic magical corpus. She formerly studied at the Charles University in Prague, where she obtained her Bachelor and Master degrees at the Institute of Philosophy and Religious Studies. She has also been an exchange student at the Eberhard Karls Universität in Tübingen, as well as at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE) in Paris. Markéta is interested in vernacular religion and magic, as well as the understanding of the body and emotions in Ancient Egypt, Greece and in Late Antiquity in general.
Markéta’s page on academia.edu
Julia Schwarzer was the doctoral assistant on the project The Coptic Magical Papyri from 2021-2023, as well as on the DFG project Local Self-Governance in the Context of Weak Statehood in Antiquity and the Modern Era (LoSAM). She is currently a PhD student at the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg. She studied History, Political Science, Law and American Studies before specialising in Ancient History for her M.A. degree at Goethe University Frankfurt. For her dissertation project, Julia is exploring the roles of lay people and their relationships to the holy and the sacred in the Coptic Church. Julia is interested in religious history and the plurality of perspectives gained by taking into consideration the Christianities of the east, especially regarding the role of the laity.
Selina Schuster was a research assistant on the project The Coptic Magical Papyri from 2022-2023 responsible for preparing the first volume for publication, as well as a master’s student at the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg. During their bachelor in Classical Archaeology and Philology and Egyptology at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Bonn, they were eager to combine their interests and wrote their Bachelor thesis on the Isis aretalogies. For their master’s thesis, they are getting their teeth into Coptic Magical texts featuring Isis.
Edward O. D. Love was the post-doctoral assistant on the project The Coptic Magical Papyri at the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg from 2018-2021. Following the completion of a BA and MSt in Oriental Studies (Egyptology) at the University of Oxford, he undertook two research years at the Ägyptologisches Institut of the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. In 2016 he returned to the University of Oxford as a DPhil in Oriental Studies (Egyptology) candidate under the supervision of Mark Smith, and was awarded a DPhil in 2019, following the examination of a thesis – “Innovative Scripts and Spellings in Roman Egypt” – by Joachim Quack and Sebastian Richter. Edward’s principal research interests include the conceptualisation, mechanics, and contexts of interaction with the divine in Egypt. A parallel research interest, stemming from the work of his doctoral thesis, is the obsolescence of the scripts of the Egyptian writing system during the Roman Period.