New Approaches to the Great Paris Magical Codex

The Bibliothèque Nationale de France preserves an extraordinary document: a fourth-century CE papyrus codex from Upper Egypt. This handbook is over seventy inscribed pages long and is equivalent in length to four or five normal-sized papyrus rolls. But despite its great size, it contains only fifty-three recipes, many of unusual length and complexity. Our research team on the Transmission of Magical Knowledge project has been studying, re-editing and translating all the magical handbooks from Roman Egypt, and in the process, we have realized that the Paris Codex from Upper Egypt, long understood as the "typical" or "model" handbook of the age, is, in fact, a marvelous outlier in the group. The manuscript was probably never used for the preparation of quotidian magical spells, but rather as a book to be read and to fire the imagination of its readers. We propose in this volume a complete re-assessment of GEMF 57, not only of its materiality, scribal production, and its language, but also of its composition in different blocks coming from divergent exemplars.

The book is distributed into five sections: 1. Materiality of GEMF 57, including codicology, paleography and scribal practice; 2. Language and Rhetoric; 3. Poetry, on the metrical sections; 4. Special sections, including chapters on the Mithras Liturgy, the collapse of Solomon and the Epistolary section; 5. Special topics, on astrology and Egyptian influence.