"Magical Signs: The Text that Wasn't Text"

Abstract

Magical texts from the ancient and medieval Mediterranean region attract increasing scholarly attention, giving rise to new interpretative issues as well as questions. In this paper (part of a larger joint project, titled “Structuring Magic”) we present some of the key issues, and the ways in which interdisciplinary DH projects can answer these questions. This paper discusses a type of “text that wasn't”, that is, magical symbols (‘charakteres’), an important phenomenon found in magical texts which is not textual in itself. We present a project in progress, aimed at automatically detecting formats of magical signs in two corpora of magic manuscripts, pertaining to the Cairo Genizah and to Coptic Egypt.