Updated program: Studying Ancient Magic: Categorisation - Comparison - Materiality

The updated program of the workshop Studying Ancient Magic: Categorisation - Comparison - Materiality is out. I am very proud to share it with you!


Wednesday 10th June (Auditorium 4)


08.30-09.00 Welcome and introduction, Nils H. Korsvoll and Liv Ingeborg Lied

09.00-10.30 Paper session
09.00-09.40 Anastasia Maravela (University of Oslo)
Women on the verge of a nervous breakdown in the Greek magical papyri?

09.50-10.30 Ewa Balicka-Witakowska (Uppsala University)
Magic Power of Gaze According to Ethiopians

10.30-10.45 Coffee break

10.45-11.45 Short paper session
10.45-11.15 Laura Willer and Sarah Kiyanrad (University of Heidelberg)
Amulets in Roman Egypt and Islamic Iran – Cross-cultural Comparisons

11.15-11.45 Olivier Dufault (University of Munich)
The Professionalization of Greek Curse Writing in Late Antiquity

12.00 Lunch

Keynotes (Auditorium 2)
13.00-14.00 David Frankfurter (Boston University)        
From Magic to Materiality: Refining an Exotic Discipline

14.00-15.00 Marco Moriggi (Università di Catania)
Jewish Divorce Formulae in Syriac Incantation Bowls

15.00-15.30 Coffee, cake and fruit

15.30-17.00 Short paper session (Auditorium 4)
15.30-16.00 Paolo Vitellozzi (IULM Milano / SFB 933 Heidelberg)
An Aphrodisiac formula on a Greek Magical Gem. Some reflections.

16.00-16.30 Malavika Binny (New Dehli University/Leiden University)
The Magic of Politics and the Politics of Magic: Delineating Miracle and Magic in the ‘Mother Mary Miracles’ in Kerala.

16.30-17.00 Juliane Schlag (University of Halle-Wittenberg)
The Necessity to Fall in Love – Ancient Greco-Roman Magical Thought in Love-Practices

19.00 Dinner  

Thursday 11th June (Auditorium 4)

09.00-10.30 Workshop
09.00-09.45 Marco Moriggi
The Relationship between Magic and ‘Official Religion’ in Sasanian Mesopotamia

9.45-10.30 David Frankfurter
Magical Charms from Late Antique Egypt

10.30-10.45 Coffee break

10.45-11.45 Short paper session
10.45-11.15 Emilio Suárez de la Torre (University of Pompeu Fabra)
Some Lexical Remarks and a Textual Conjecture on P. Oslo n. 1 (*PGM* XXXVI), ll. 211-230

11.15-11.45 Agnes Mihálykó Tothne (University of Oslo)
Liturgical manuscripts as amulets

11.45-12.45 Lunch

13.00-15.00 Excursion: Oslo University Papyri Collection (Oslo University Library)
Anastasia Maravela and Agnes Mihálykó Tothne (University of Oslo)

15.00 End of conference

Helsinki-bound

I am on my way to Helsinki to attend a conference on text, ritual and magic organized by the Centre of Excellence in Changes in Sacred Texts and Traditions at the University of Helsinki. Here's my paper abstract:

Reading texts in ritual and manuscript contexts: Re-contextualizing 2 Bar 72:1-73:2

In this paper I will use the transmission/transformation history of 2 Baruch as a laboratory for exploring and discussing the various interrelationships between text, manuscript, and ritual – with a dash of magic.

2 Baruch is commonly known and contextualized as a 1st or 2nd century, Jewish, apocalyptic writing. However, as often is the case for ancient writings, the manuscripts that serve as our sources to 2 Baruch are considerably younger. Scholars have applied these Syriac manuscripts, which date from the 6th/7th to the 15th century, exclusively as “witnesses” to the assumed early text of 2 Baruch. 

The implication of this practice is that the literary and material aspects of the manuscripts themselves and the scripted use of these textual artefacts in medieval, Syriac, ritual contexts have never been engaged as relevant contexts for 2 Baruch, even if these historical contexts are explicitly given by the form and layout, notes, colophons, and other traces of use in the manuscripts themselves.

This paper offers a “thick description” of one select situation of use of 2 Baruch in a Syriac, thirteenth century context. I will look closer at the monastic use of an excerpted passage from 2 Baruch in a lectionary manuscript dated 1256, scripted to be read as a lesson from Scripture on Easter Sunday, and probably read as such, for instance, in the Monastery of the Syrians in the Wadi al-Natrun (Egypt).

Hence, this paper offers both a fresh exploration of the text in its 13th century material, spatial and performative context, and a possible methodological correction of the default scholarly models of interpretation and categorization of ancient writings that tend to decide our engagement with manuscripts and their texts.

On Thursday I am also giving a lecture on New Philology, "What's New about New Philology?" at the Faculty of Theology.  I might publish the power point presentation on Academia.edu later.


Update:
I have posted my lecture notes on Academia.edu. Please, look for "New Philology - in a Nutshell".

There is also a blog post on the Text, Ritual, and Magic-conference over at the Changes in Sacred Texts and Traditions-blog (Here: http://blogs.helsinki.fi/sacredtexts/2015/04/21/scripture-andor-scripture-reflections-from-the-joint-rrrctss-workshop-on-text-ritual-and-magic-april-14th-15th/ )


Update II:
New Philology - in Finnish, here: http://blogs.helsinki.fi/sacredtexts/2015/04/24/uusi-filologia-nostaa-kasikirjoituksen-keskioon/

Book History - and Digital Humanities

I will be giving two papers at the 2015 SBL Annual Meeting in Atlanta. Here are the abstracts.


For the Book History and Biblical Literatures Consultation:

Do paratexts matter? Transmission, re-identification, and New Philology

The last decade has seen a rapidly growing interest in the reception of (biblical) writings and the transformative impact transmission processes might have on the textual contents of these writings. Thus, micro and macro level changes of narrative contents, as well as the scribal and reader practices that produced them are finally receiving the attention they deserve.

This paper will address another, related, aspect of the transformation that might take place when writings circulate which has still not attracted the same level of interest: circulation of writings not only leads to changes in textual contents, transmission processes may also lead to a re-identification of the writings themselves. In other words, narrative contents are not the only thing that changes – cultural perceptions of what a given text unit is may change too. Traces of these transformations are still available to us in the form of paratextual features in extant manuscripts.

Inspired by the perspective of New Philology, and in order to discuss the relevance of studying paratextual features, I will explore the Syriac transmission of the so-called Epistle of Baruch. This epistle is known to most scholars as the final 10 chapters of 2 Baruch. 47 Syriac manuscripts contain a copy (complete or excerpted parts) of this epistle, and with one exception (a single Arabic codex), the Syriac tradition is to my knowledge the only manuscript tradition that preserves it. In contemporary scholarship these manuscript copies of the epistle are commonly applied as 'text witnesses' to the epistle attached to the apocalypse in 2 Baruch. However, a closer study of titles and postscript titles, as well as the location and contextualization of the epistle in Syriac codices show that while the textual contents of the epistle remains relatively stable, 46 of these 47 manuscripts identify the epistle with a different title, associate it with a different biblical figure, locate it in a different context of text units than the context of 2 Baruch, and suggest other contexts of cultural usages than the apocalypse. Is the epistle in these copies, then, the same or a different composition than the epistle attached to 2 Baruch, and how does this paratextual information challenge the default use of these copies as text witnesses to the epistle integral to 2 Baruch?

And for the Digital Humanities in Biblical, Early Jewish, and Christian Studies Consultation:

Digitization and manuscripts as visual objects: reflections from a media studies perspective

During the last decade, libraries and collections worldwide have digitized their manuscript collections, making photos of manuscripts available for scholars online. Due to this ongoing digitization of manuscripts, and assisted by a constant sharing of images of manuscripts in various online (social) media, scholars in the relevant academic fields are now regularly exposed to, and are becoming familiar with, manuscripts as visual objects. Hence, manuscripts, which were formerly seldom seen, being engaged with only by the few, are now increasingly visually available - they are only “a click away”. Due to the ongoing digitization, thus, manuscripts are now accessible for new and broader groups of scholars. 

In this proposed paper, I will engage theoretical perspectives from Media Studies in a discussion of the hypothetical effects of the digitization of manuscripts. I will see the resulting transformation of the representation of the manuscripts as an important media shift and ask how this shift in media technology and format will affect the ways scholars engage with their source material. As has been pointed out at several occasions in the fields of Sociology of Knowledge and Media Studies, change in technical media will typically change the perception, communication, and social practices surrounding the mediated object.

Thus, seeing scholarly practices basically as social and cultural practices where technology and media culture play decisive parts, this paper will pose three questions. First, (how) is it likely that the increased visual presence of manuscripts online will change editing practices? Second, how will the increased availability and the visual presence of manuscripts online change scholarship on ancient texts? And third, what new and different studies may result from this innovation in digital humanities?

 

 

Trolls at my door: reflections on the occasion of the International Women’s Day 2015 (8 March)

When I started blogging one and a half year ago I was well aware that there were trolls in the digital woods. I knew very well that women who blog or otherwise take part in online public debate experience various kinds of unwanted attention. I also knew that a large part of this unwanted response is gendered in nature, in the sense that its content is responding to the fact that the blogger is a woman. However, since I was planning a research blog, with purely academic contents, I assumed that this would protect me from at least parts of the most aggressive trolling that we all know is taking place in online sharing culture.

Now, looking back, I guess that in part I was in fact right. I have never been threatened, nor have I received explicit hate mails. But still, as I was soon to discover, I was wrong as well. Less than 24 hours after publishing my first post a troll was at my door. Ever since, each and every time I have posted something I receive “responses” (let’s call them that) via Gmail, Google+, and Messenger/Facebook messenger service.


The responses fall into two categories:


1.Responses that in various ways call for my attention, but not as a scholar. Some respondents ask, quite discretely, if they can be in touch with me privately or have my phone number. Others share pictures of themselves dressed in army uniforms. Curiously, I receive these army uniform messages again and again, each time from a different respondent.


2.At times I receive messages of a far more aggressive kind. These are the messages I would categorize as trolling, defined elsewhere as “recreational abuse”. Out of concern for the fainthearted I will not summarize them here, but simply share one short quote to illustrate their general contents and style. That first troll knocking at my door back in 2013 claimed, among other things, that I “obviously needed to be ****** by a real man.” No need to go into detail – you get the picture.


These two categories of responses are in many ways two different types of responses. The first category may be described as ill-informed and uninvited, but probably rather innocent per se, while the second is obviously offensive. Upon receiving them, I have tended to react differently to them. The first type has left me somewhat puzzled, but otherwise has not affected me much. The second type is disturbing and my initial reaction has been accordingly.


However, the two categories also have something important in common: they are both completely off the point in the sense that they are not responding to the contents of my posts. They are responses, but they are utterly irrelevant to the contents of my blog - they respond to my online representation, my digital avatar, and that avatar is female. My name and the picture on the blog give away that I am a woman and that is what these messages are all responding to.


And upon further reflection, I have come to think a bit differently about the respective graveness of the two types of responses. Although the messages I categorize as trolling are clearly the most disturbing, the other category displays a tendency that might be seen as equally grave, just in a different way. The fact that so many individual respondents approach me in ways that are completely irrelevant to what I have posted suggests that it is considered alright and comme-il-faut to approach women online in this way: responding to the fact that she is a woman, not her utterances. 


Sure, you might say that I asked for it. I knew about the trolls, but I still decided to put my blond head out there. You might say that there is nothing special about my experiences. Rather, this is common, and many women have worse stories to tell. You might say that I knew what I was entering into. What I have experienced is simply an integral part of contemporary cultural practices online. No reason for whining!


But I am not whining. I am analyzing.


And here is the analytical point of this post: The very fact that trolling and other off-the-point responses are highly common practices in digital communication culture is exactly why this issue should be addressed in an academic blog on the occasion of the International Women’s Day. During the last decades, and particularly during the last couple of years, online platforms and fora of various sorts have become an increasingly important arena for academic discussion, communication, and knowledge sharing. These digital sites are in this sense academic arenas. They may well appear as new and different than traditional academic arenas, and they are clearly hybrid in nature. They are sites where academic discussion takes place and simultaneously they are a part of the overwhelming interrelatedness of the web, open for anyone who wants to pay them a visit. And yet, they are still arenas where academic practices unfold and where scholars – men and women – do their job. They should be taken seriously as such.


The implication is that trolling cannot be seen as foreign to this academic arena. My trolls have found me due to the interrelatedness of the web. I certainly do not believe that any of these trolls are colleagues in the academy, and still that fact does not make the trolls less real when I do my job. From this point of view, then, fighting trolls is one of the things I, as a woman, will have to do if I want to be present at this academic arena. If I want to share my research digitally and do my job as a scholar in a world where online presence is increasingly part of the game, this is what I am facing out there. If these kinds of responses should keep me and other women from posting or otherwise taking part in online discussion, and if they make women practice self-censorship that is bad news for gender equality in the academy.

I know that this post means trouble. I am bolting my door.

More Magic: Call for papers, workshop in Oslo

STUDYING ANCIENT MAGIC

Categorisation – Comparison - Materiality

10th-11th June 2015

MF Norwegian School of Theology

Oslo

PROGRAMME

Wednesday 10th June

Workshop
08.30 Coffee and welcome, Liv Ingeborg Lied and Nils H. Korsvoll

09.00-09.40 Nils H. Korsvoll (MF)                              

Cruciform Motifs in Syriac Incantation Bowls

09.40-10.20 Victor Ghica (MF)                                    

Voces Magicae and Nomina Barbara in Egyptian Gnostic and Magical Texts: Dynamics of Development

10.30-11.30 Short papers

12.00 Lunch

Lectures
13.00-14.00 David Frankfurter (Boston University)        

From Magic to Materiality: Refining an Exotic Discipline

14.00-15.00 Marco Moriggi (Università di Catania)

Jewish Divorce Formulae in Syriac Incantation Bowls

Thursday 11th June

Workshop
08.30 Coffee

09.00-09.45 Marco Moriggi                             

The Relationship between Magic and ‘Official Religion’ in Sasanian Mesopotamia

09.45-10.30 David Frankfurter                                                     

Magical Charms from Late Antique Egypt

10.45-11.45 Short papers

12.00 Lunch

13.00-15.00 Excursion: Oslo University Papyri Collection

CALL FOR SHORT PAPERS

We invite proposals for short papers (15 mins + 15 mins Q&A) on the workshop theme from PhD-students and Post-docs.

Please send proposals to nils.h.korsvoll@mf.no by May 1st.

PARTICIPANTS

David Frankfurter (Boston University)

Frankfurter’s particular interests revolve around theoretical issues addressing the place of magic in religion, the relationship of religion and violence, the nature of Christianisation, and the representation of evil in culture. He teaches on Christian apocalyptic literature, and the documents of early Christianity, including extra-canonical sources, magical texts, and saints’ lives.

Marco Moriggi (Università di Catania)

Moriggi has published extensively on Syriac amulets, as well as Aramaic philology and epigraphy more generally. He also works with Semitics and linguistic theory, and has recently produced a corpus of Syriac incantation bowls.

Victor Ghica (MF Norwegian School of Theology)

Ghica is a trained archaeologist and philologist and works on Christian archaeology,coptology, papyrology and epigraphy. He is a member of the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology and has published on gnostic texts and Coptic and Manichean epigraphy.

The workshop is organised by Liv Ingeborg Lied and Nils H. Korsvoll

Texts, ritual, magic

Workshop on texts, ritual and magic in Helsinki in April. More information here: http://blogs.helsinki.fi/sacredtexts/2015/02/17/workshop-on-text-ritual-and-magic-helsinki-april-14-15/

Digitization and manuscripts as visual objects: effects of a media change

As many of you have surely noticed, libraries and collections worldwide are slowly, but steadily, digitizing their manuscript collections, making them available online. Just during the last couple of months I have seen announcements from the Vatican Library, from the HMML, from St Petersburg, from the National Library of Greece in Athens, and from the Yale University Library saying that they will digitize their collections or provide online reading rooms for scholars. In effect, these and other recent digitization projects are making manuscripts available as visual objects online.

 

And it does not stop there. Manuscripts are not only there for scholars who consciously seek them up in their online locations. In their capacity as visual objects, manuscripts may in fact be seen as among the winners of the new, digital world, being the perfect aesthetical objects in an increasingly visual culture online. Images of manuscripts are favored objects of tweeting and retweeting (e.g., @DamienKempf), Facebook groups are dedicated to them (“Sexy Codicology”: 6458 followers, Alin Suciu’s “Coptic Literature and Manuscripts”: 3533 followers [accessed 21 January 2015]), and specialized blogs update their followers regularly (the blogs of Roberta Mazza, Adam McCollum, and The British Library Medieval Manuscripts blog, just to mention some).

 

First, due to the ongoing digitization of manuscript collections as well as the steady flow of images in social media communication, scholars in the relevant fields are more regularly exposed to pictures and will become more familiar with the visual aspects of manuscripts.  Second, as time goes by and libraries feel the raising pressure to digitize their collections, scholars will probably expect to find manuscripts available online. And let me add, just briefly, that all of us, and scholars too, to a large degree are living digitized lives, surrounded by an increasingly visual culture.

 

I see the digitization of manuscripts and the resulting transformation of the representation of the manuscripts as visually available objects as an interesting and important media shift, and I wonder how this shift in media technology and media format will affect the ways scholars engage with their source material. As has been pointed out at several occasions in the fields of sociology of knowledge and media studies, change in technical media will typically change media practices, as well as the perception, communication, and social practices surrounding the mediated object (cf., e.g., Kittler 1985; Altheide and Snow 1988; Reckwitz 2002; Meyer 2006).

 

So, how will the transformation of manuscripts into visual objects online change scholarship on texts and manuscripts? As has also been pointed out in the above mentioned research on media shifts, there is no one-to-one relationship between technological change on the one hand and change in social practices (what people do with media [Kratz 1959]) on the other. Until someone decides to answer the question based on actual empirical research we don’t yet know how this shift influences scholarly practices. For now, all answers will necessarily be hypothetical and suggestive, and I’ll phrase them in the form of follow-up questions.  


Will the increased visual presence of manuscripts online change editing practices, as well as the academic reader’s expectations to the content and format of text editions?

Until recently manuscripts have primarily been available (and perceived of) as being material artefacts kept on, e.g., library shelves or in private collections. Some of these manuscripts have even been hard to get access to. In addition, due to a traditional division of labor in many fields (although not all) between editors of texts on the one hand and interpreters of text on the other the manuscripts have typically been seen and engaged with only by the few. However, when manuscripts are digitized they become visually accessible objects which are only “a click away”, and when more and more libraries digitize their collections they will be expected to be no more than a click away. Hence, during the next decade(s) manuscripts will be visually available to new groups of scholars who may already have the necessary language competence and who know the contents of the texts from editions very well but who traditionally have not engaged much with manuscripts.  

 

Those who have worked on texts based both on study of the manuscripts and the use of text editions know how different the visual impression of a manuscript page and a page of edited text may be, and also how poorly the critical apparatus may sometimes represent the various features on the manuscript pages (cf., e.g., Nongbri 2006). The hand may for instance be difficult to read, words and letters open to interpretation, texts may be lacunose, the script may be continuous, or there may be no chapter division or other markers of sense units. Manuscript folios may be messy too. They may contain notes, glosses, corrections and erasures. Folio layouts may also contain paratextual features, study and memory aids, designed to communicate between text and reader. So far, some of these features may have been represented in a critical apparatus, while others have been overlooked, regarded unimportant or even as clutter, or it has simply been difficult or too expensive to reproduce paratextual features such as these in a text edition. Now, when the manuscripts are available online, the unruly elements of a manuscript page are there for everyone to see. Maybe these elements may even come as a surprise to those who did not know of their existence.

 

When users of text editions know that the manuscripts (i.e., the basis of the text edition and the artifactual realities behind sigla) is there for them to consult online, will the representation of the messy variability present on manuscript pages in the form of a critical apparatus be satisfactory to them? And when editors know that their readers will probably consult pictures of the manuscripts, will they change the way they represent the manuscripts and the various elements found on manuscript pages because they know that the elements of the manuscript page is visually available? The practice of publishing text editions is already starting to change due to new, online formats of publishing and advances in digital humanities, as can be seen for instance here, here and here  (note: collaborative effort, online work process, inclusion of wiki- and social media logic). The increased presence of manuscripts online will probably speed up this development.

Will we see more and different studies of manuscripts and manuscript practices?

Here’s a guess: when manuscripts become relatively easily available, visible objects online they will appeal to other categories of scholars and lend themselves to other kinds of studies than the ones we have commonly seen so far. These scholars may bring in new interpretative tools to the study of manuscripts and their various texts. During the last decades we have seen a general rise of interest in the materiality of artefacts, in the role of the medium and in aesthetics, scribalism and scribal cultures, paratexts, reader practices and interventions, etc. Now manuscripts are an increasingly available source material for scholars who are influenced by these recent research debates.

 
I expect that we will see more studies of the various relationships between text and manuscript, between text, manuscript and their readers, the role and importance of manuscript layouts and aesthetic elements, as well as the clutter, notes and other text units sharing the manuscript pages (This has of course already started, cf. e.g. and importantly, Caruthers 1992). We may for instance see more studies of manuscript pages as discursive and dialogical spaces, as spaces where the text of the column is sometimes contested and negotiated by later readers (cf. e.g. Penn 2010). And we may see more studies of manuscripts that were transformed and provided new and different functions by later readers than the ones envisioned by the producers of the artefact (cf., e.g. Childers forthcoming). Studies such as these will probably both add to and challenge studies that primarily take interest in the text in the column and the manuscript’s function as a mere text witness or text carrier.
 
Will libraries and collections restrict access to the manuscripts?


Here’s another guess: they will. I have heard that this is already happening. One may well imagine that some libraries and collections will argue that since the manuscripts are digitized and generally available online, there is no longer a need to consult the actual material artifact.

 
If so, this is very unfortunate for at least two reasons. Just as a traditional text edition and its critical apparatus is but a representation of the text and the manuscripts that contain it, so are digitized pictures of manuscripts only visual representations of the material object. Pictures are not identical with the object, and the visual aspects do not account for all the qualities of a manuscript.

 
First, pictures may hide and misrepresent features of the manuscript. The only way to find out if what looks like a fold in the picture is in fact a fold (and if so: which letters might be hidden behind that fold), or whether that stain in the margin is ink or dirt is to consult the actual artifact. And second, some studies will still be dependent on an exploration of the actual, physical thing. There is more to the manuscript than its visual appearance. Texture, weight, and smell, which may matter to a study of, e.g., manuscripts as ritual objects, do not reach us through the computer screen. Hence, I hope digitization of manuscripts will be regarded by libraries and collections as added value which will not replace the possibility to consult the actual manuscripts.

 
This post may be read as a reflection on one of the many transformations brought about by digital humanities.  I have written about this before and I will write more about it on later occasions.


Thanks are due to John W. Kaufman, Eystein Gullbekk and Alin Suciu.