Stranger Things

Travis Zadeh, Yale University

The concept of a “coefficient of weirdness,” coined by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, has long served scholars of magic as a working heuristic. The invoking of nomina barbara and voces magicae, the drawing of demons, the use of unintelligible scripts and transgressive emblems, all of this, we are frequently reminded, is just weird. Weirdness, in such a framework, marks the boundary between magic on one side and religion and science on the other. Yet there are other ways of evoking the strange. The premodern Islamicate world had its own rich vocabulary for the uncanny, the paranormal, and the marvelous, and chief among these is the concept of gharīb, a word that can be glossed variously as strange, rare, extraordinary, or weird.

This lecture argues that the classical Arabic and Persian concept of gharīb — the strange, rare, extraordinary, weird — offers a historically richer alternative. Unlike Malinowski's coefficient, gharīb does not place magic outside normative religious and philosophical discourse; it describes a quality of the marvelous distributed across all three domains. Drawing on unedited handbooks of incantations (ʿilm al-ʿazāʾim) preserved in manuscript collections from Madrid to Hyderabad, the lecture traces how foreign sacred speech — Hebrew, Aramaic, and Sanskrit formulae alongside Qurʾānic recitation — was absorbed into Islamic incantatory practice without being translated or explained. Its strangeness was the point. The movement of Sanskrit mantras into Persian transmission, preserved phonetically across a fragile and scattered manuscript tradition, makes this logic most visible: here is efficacious speech that crossed every linguistic and religious boundary the premodern world could place before it, and arrived, still untranslated, still strange, still powerful.

Anne Lawrence-Mathers, University of Reading

The subject of divination has received increased attention and discussion in recent years, including the publication of impressively wide-ranging studies of its presence, practice and significance in pre-modern societies.  A recurring theme has been the tension between Christian condemnations of divination on the one hand and the popularity of divinatory texts on the other.  This paper will focus on a collection of sortes texts first assembled and illuminated by Matthew Paris, monk of St Albans, in the thirteenth century.  Matthew’s version of this collection (now MS Ashmole 304 in the Bodleian Library, Oxford) is relatively well known and has been the subject of several studies.  However, the slightly later copy which came into the hands of the seventeenth-century diarist, Samuel Pepys, has received considerably less attention. This volume, (now MS 911 in the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge) bears the early-modern title Bernardus Silvester de Virtute ac Essentia Planetarum et Constellationum, cum figuris. Intriguingly, it was missing when M.R. James prepared his catalogue of the medieval manuscripts in Pepys’ library (1922) and nothing is known of its origins. The attribution to Bernardus Silvester was shown to be spurious by both Thorndike and Burnett. To modern readers, its title appears to be in surprising contrast to its actual contents, which are beautifully illuminated, openly divinatory tables. This paper will attempt to suggest an answer to the question of how the texts were perceived and used, and how they escaped condemnation in the period of the witch craze.

Michael Zellmann-Rohrer, Macquarie University

This paper starts from a close reading of the texts and codicological features of a late medieval Greek illustrated manuscript in Penn’s Schoenberg Collection. Beyond an anchoring focus on botany, indicated by its catalogue title “herbal,” the manuscript proves to be a thick tissue of engagement with healing practice. It blends learned, Galenic medicine with popular pharmacology, and incantations and other procedures commonly classed as magical. Astral science is also applied in relation to the same concerns, mediated through the zodiac, an ancient technology with a rich reception history in the Middle Ages. Medical ingredients and procedures show intellectual and material exchange among the Greek-speaking lands, western Europe, and the Islamicate world, and layers of annotation allow us to glimpse the manuscript’s life as a healer’s tool.

Meagan Allen, Johns Hopkins University

Historians of science and technology have long been fascinated with the English Franciscan Roger Bacon’s Epistola de secretis operibus artis et naturae et de nullitate magiae, a short work which promises to explore the wonderful powers of art and nature working in tandem. From flying machines to perpetual lamps and medicines that can prolong life, the Epistola contains a trove of examples of what nature can do when completed by human art. The last three chapters are dedicated to alchemy, specifically the creation of the philosophers’ egg, which is the starting material from which the work begins. Each chapter contains a different way of preparing the “egg”. While the instructions are fairly straightforward, the last chapter contains a strange line, typically transcribed as LURU VOPO VIR CAN UTRIET SULPHURIS. What does this portion of text mean? Is it a coded portion of the recipe for the coveted philosophers’ egg that Bacon wanted to keep secret? Is it a charm? Is it a mistranscription by a later scribe not familiar with the practices of alchemical abbreviations? In this talk, I will explore the possible interpretations of this passage by asking what the earliest manuscripts can tell us about its transmission and relative importance to the rest of the work.

J. H. Chajes, University of Haifa

Ilanot (Hebrew, “trees”) are kabbalistic cosmographs that map the structure and unfolding of the divine world on large parchment sheets or rotuli. The ilan at the center of this paper, drafted in Kraków around 1650 by Meir Poppers, is among the most sophisticated examples of the genre: a monumental rotulus that fuses diagram, image, and text. Produced alongside Poppers’s editorial recension of Lurianic Kabbalah in ‘Eẓ Ḥayyim (“Tree of Life”), it constitutes the visual counterpart to that editorial enterprise, distilling an immense manuscript tradition into a single cosmographic field. The ilan first reached print in Christian Knorr von Rosenroth’s 1677 Kabbala denudata, where it was engraved in seven fold-out plates and accompanied by an extensive Latin commentary. Those engravings not only provide a crucial terminus ante quem but also preserve readings superior to any surviving Hebrew manuscript. Three and a half centuries later, the Poppers ilan is being re-edited as a digital scholarly edition on the Ilanot Project’s Maps of God platform. My lecture reads the object through the edition, and the edition through the object.

I argue that the ilan is best understood not simply as an image but as a performative technology. Its visual and textual components operate in distinct registers, making different demands upon the practitioner. The upper reaches present ideal, fully rectified configurations of the Divine, inviting contemplative presence, perhaps even with talismanic aspirations. By contrast, the lower sections depict dynamic sequences within the emanating Godhead that are meant to be imaginatively enacted, rendering the ilan a script for theurgic practice rather than a static representation. Even the physical act of unrolling the rotulus mirrors the emanative descent it depicts, transforming reading into embodied ritual performance.

Yet the script is deliberately incomplete. Poppers replaces the connecting lines of earlier ilanot with dense textual labels that often name without classifying, leaving relations implicit and requiring readers to supply the conceptual architecture themselves. The digital edition therefore becomes an act of interpretation as much as preservation: its ontology must identify entities, define relationships, and articulate the connective logic the manuscript leaves tacit. The later history of the Poppers ilan confirms this original design. Only in the modern period was it repurposed as an apotropaic amulet, marking a fundamental shift from an artifact intended to be enacted through contemplative and theurgic engagement to one whose efficacy resided simply in its presence—a revealing instance of the romanticization of kabbalistic iconography in modern Jewish popular culture.

Matthew Melvin-Koushki, University of South Carolina

Epitome of Enlightenment, Mīr Dāmād (d. 1631) is not just the most important philosopher of Safavid Iran, in terms of both intellectual and imperial impact; his explicitly Pythagorean-lettrist philosophy of metatime was the most revolutionary in the Greater Western (Helleno-Judeo-Christo-Islamic) tradition to date. In this, he stands equal to Francis Bacon, his exact contemporary, who as a fellow Pythagorean was likewise focused on marrying science to empire by mathematizing the cosmos. But where Bacon is now venerated as the father of the Holy Scientific Method, Mīr Dāmād’s focus on time more than body, and intensely ornate Arabo-Persian literary style, has earned him total erasure from the historiography of science and technology and the Western canon, thanks to colonialist-Orientalist processes still ongoing.

To the contrary: our Safavid worthy’s pursuit of out-of-body philosophy for exploring metatime went beyond mere literary ornateness to actively harness the textual-visual lettrist diagram as theurgic Wormhole to the One—by literally drawing down the Moon. Small wonder, then, that his circle produced the largest Islamic hanging diagram known to survive; apotheosis of several centuries of lettrist diagram design, it is exceptionally psychedelic, and bears the signs of ritual use. Specifically, this gorgeous algorithmic-poetic meditation on the letters ʿayn and nūn dizzyingly visually captures Mīr Dāmād’s devotedly ʿAlid mantra for ascending to the Moon as both cosmic Inkwell and imperial Panopticon, the ultimate vantage point from which to read and rewrite the world. All pivots on the Pythagorean progression from primordial Dot to Line to Circle; think Kepler’s orbit as ellipse, but here applied to time rather than the planets (which come to the same thing). The same vision led in his lifetime to the revolutionary reconstruction of Isfahan as the world’s first Pythagorean-Solomonic talismanic city, also explicitly designed to pop its denizens out of their bodies—in the cause of Science, Technology and Empire as expressions of the One.

In honor of the symposium theme, I restore this wondrous instance of cosmic calligraphy—whereby the early modern manuscript (or city) is already digital and therefore weirdly Lunar—to the comparative historiographical and codicological conversation.

Oscar Qiu Jun Zheng

This paper examines the visual features of excavated hemerological manuals (rishu 日書; lit. "daybooks"), including scribal hands and images, so as to investigate how these manuals were produced and read. Just as Martin Kern has characterized these manuals as "authorless texts that represent not individual inspiration but institutional knowledge," many surviving examples exhibit evidence of multiple scribal hands, suggesting collaborative processes of manuscript production. The frequent occurrence of errors in some of these manuals, such as *Daybook B (*Rishu yizhong 日書乙種) from the Qin 秦 (221–207 BCE) tomb Shuihudi 睡虎地 M11, indicates either inexperience in hemerological knowledge among the scribes, or the absence of careful editorial oversight during the copying of these manuscripts. Images in early Chinese hemerological manuals offer two important insights into their production and use. First, some scholars, drawing on the depictions of scribes in Han 漢 (202 BCE–220 CE) pictorial bricks and murals, have argued that early Chinese scribes never used desks while writing, yet images in hemerological manuals provide clear evidence attesting to the usage of desks during manuscript production in early China. Second, although hemerological manuals were mostly used for quick consultation, many comprise more than 200 strips, making them some of the longest early Chinese manuscripts ever discovered. Whereas some of the long medical manuscripts come with a table of contents to facilitate navigation, not one hemerological manual that has been excavated so far includes a table of contents. This paper argues that tables of contents might not have been necessary for navigating hemerological manuals, because their users, possibly already familiar with their overall layout, could have conveniently located specific hemerological entries by using images as visual markers within the manuscripts.

Caz Batten, University of Pennsylvania

Scattered across the manuscript and archaeological records of early medieval England and Scandinavia are what we call charms: ritual texts designated for performance that include a verbal (spoken or written) incantation, conjuration, or adjuration of some kind, intended to alter material substances and observable forces. Charms are a technology of transformation, breaking fevers, shrinking tumors, restoring stolen property, ensuring safe travel. They are a rich and diverse archive of possibilities for practical devotion, and they reveal some of what their users and audiences thought about their bodies, the demonic and the divine, and the parameters of the universe they believed they inhabited.

The ways these charms were written down (copied in the margins and flyleaves of manuscripts, integrated into remedy collections, carved on lead plate and cattle bones), and the writing they instruct practitioners to perform (letters, symbols, esoteric diagrams, names), clarify their role in medicine, science, and religious practice, and offer insight into the cosmic order these charms both create and claim to uphold. I will offer three case studies from the pivotal eleventh century, in three languages: an Old English medical remedy that instructs the user to write the names of saints on eucharistic wafers, an Anglo-Latin charm for childbirth in which the physician writes an exorcism on wax and binds it to the pregnant person, and a group of closely related Old Norse charms for an infected abscess, carved in runes on metal and bone amulets. The writing performed by their early medieval users, and the likely circumstances of that writing, reveal an obsession with bodily invulnerability in a world fundamentally hostile to humanity and a conviction that the only true cure for porous, partible human flesh is the wholeness of resurrection, promised to the faithful at Judgment Day.

Simcha Gross, University of Pennsylvania

Aramaic incantation bowls from late antique Mesopotamia have attracted increasing scholarly attention as complex ritual artifacts produced by practitioners conversant with diverse traditions, formulae, and modes of textual authority. Yet a substantial subset of these bowls has often been dismissed as the work of illiterate charlatans, judged against modern notions of literacy and its importance rather than within the ritual and material contexts in which they were produced and used. This paper reconsiders such assessments by examining the signs, symbols, scripts, and non-standard textual features of the bowls alongside their material form and ritual function, with a focus on several unpublished bowls in the Penn Museum. I argue that these elements should be read as meaningful and legitimate practices embedded in broader late antique conceptions of language, efficacy, and material power.

Sofía Torallas Tovar, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

In antiquity, books on magic circulated in various formats, including papyrus rolls, codices, rotuli (vertical rolls), and individual sheets. The comparison of these formats with those of other genres, such as medical literature, sheds light on the circulation and transmission of magical knowledge. In this lecture, I will address the dissemination of magic from a material perspective, focusing on the sale and circulation of books on magic. I will also discuss the epistolary genre within magic and the circulation of magical knowledge on a smaller scale. 

Margaret Gaida, Occidental College

Astronomical and astrological diagrams are among the most ubiquitous visual features of medieval scientific manuscripts, yet they have rarely been studied as diagrams with their own histories of transmission. This paper follows the astrological aspect diagram from its earliest surviving Arabic and Byzantine witnesses into the Latin West, tracing its circulation through manuscripts, printed books, and eventually scientific instruments and mechanical clocks. Although the diagram retained its recognizable structure over several centuries, it was continually adapted as it moved between languages, media, and communities of readers. Scribes and printers added labels and colors, omitted features, made it rotate, combined it with weather tables and other diagrams, and situated it alongside different kinds of texts. In the process, the diagram came to serve new conceptual, pedagogical, calculational, and symbolic purposes while preserving a shared visual tradition.

Rather than treating these variations as incidental, the paper examines what they reveal about the transmission of knowledge. The inclusion—or exclusion—of a diagram, the place it occupies within a manuscript or printed book, and the textual traditions with which it circulates all shape the range of conceptual associations available to readers. Looking across these successive adaptations reveals how diagrams acquired new meanings through the textual and visual traditions in which they circulated, participating in the reception, reconfiguration, and transmission of scientific knowledge across the medieval and early modern Mediterranean.

Claire Fanger, Rice University

The Liber florum celestis doctrina (Flowers of Heavenly Teaching), written in the first decade of the fourteenth century by the Benedictine John of Morigny, is composed of prayers, ritual instructions, and visionary autobiography. The text’s goal was knowledge acquisition. The prayers engendered visions, which in turn could often beget more text: new visionary accounts, as well as additions to existing prayers. The text was thus a dynamic project that kept growing and changing.

Clearly, John expected his followers and eventual successors to be engaged in a continuation of the same dynamic processes of reading, having visions, and writing. He instructed operators on where and how to add their own names to the figures; he told them how to work smaller subsets of the prayers for specific ends, and how the book should be consecrated.  John makes some prohibitions too: a book consecrated for one user could not be used by another without direct authorization from the Virgin.  Users were also warned not to change anything in the text without Mary’s permission.

Of course, this wasn’t a serious obstacle to making changes, since the Liber florum was itself a tool for acquiring just such authorization. Whether or not the Virgin was consulted for everything that happened later, signs of alterations and adaptations of John’s work are all over the manuscripts. Most copies are personalized, showing that they were intended for use or derived from user copies.  This talk will explore the relation between John’s stipulations about ritual performance and the copying and alteration of actual extant books.  I will show that users of this text had a profound interest in its practice; they were concerned as much with the text’s functionality and ease of use as with its sacred and scriptural qualities -- and they did pass on books to be used by others, as the Salzburg University Library copy attests.

Marco Heiles, University of Hamburg

Around 1424, Conrad Buitzruss, a young student from Heidelberg, compiled a manuscript that now forms the first codicological unit of the Codex latinus monacensis 671 of the Bavarian State Library in Munich. Described by Conrad himself as Liber diversitatis, this Latin-German collection contains a calendar and an extensive collection of medical, technological and culinary recipes, as well as texts on astronomy, astrology and divination, alongside proverbs, riddles and songs. This collection is particularly noteworthy due to the framing texts surrounding it. Conrad comments not only on the composition of the collection but also makes auto-bibliographical statements. From these, we know that Conrad was matriculated at the University of Heidelberg in 1422 at the age of fifteen and passed his bachelor’s examination in 1425 on the question whether magic should be studied, used and permitted. Although the academic answer of this question is clear – Magic should not be permitted or practiced – Conrad collected an exceptional number of magical recipes, which he himself also refers to as “nicromantic” (ex nigromanticorum libris). These include 30 recipes “on love” (de amore), which range from simple recipes using wonder drugs or short charms or writs, to instructions for complex rituals involving wax dolls and the invocations of demons. This paper argues that these texts should not be read primarily as practical instructions, but as narratives, written from an imperative 'you' perspective, stimulating the reader's (Conrad’s) imagination about their (his) own actions and agency. As such, they are part of a multiple-text manuscript which was used for student-identity construction and self-expression, and exchanged with other members of the university.

Sophie Page, University College London

In the prologue to Book 30 of his Natural History, Pliny the Elder set out a history of magic from its invention in the distant past to its practice in his own day, weighing its morality and rituals and asking whether the art held any shadow of truth. This paper follows that history of magic into the medieval manuscript, where Pliny's text acquired a rich but little-studied visual tradition: more than a dozen illustrated copies place a historiated initial or miniature at the head of Book 30, at the very threshold of the discussion of magic. Positioned where the reader entered the subject, these images of the magician direct attention and pose questions, such as where magic comes from, how it works, whether it is universally evil, and whether the magic of the fifteenth century is the same as that of ancient Rome. Artists and their patrons had to choose between depicting Roman or contemporary magic, and the magician they produced is by turns philosopher, pagan priest, and necromancer, shifting across the corpus from a masterful magister in command of his demons to a distracted, vulnerable, student experimenter. My paper reads the images against the divergent textual afterlives of Pliny's history; for example, it was enlisted by Isidore of Seville to condemn magic as alien and dangerous and by Pico della Mirandola to license a mystical ascent. Surviving manuscripts and incunabula reveal how Book 30 was continually reinterpreted at the shifting borders of science, religion, and magic, and offer a visual record for real ritual practice.

Michael D. Bailey, Iowa State University

The construction of what the pioneering German scholar Joseph Hansen called the Kollektivbegriff of witchcraft was one of the most fateful developments in the history of magic in Europe and the Western World. It redefined forms of harmful magic, most often designated maleficium in Latin sources, from acts of individual malefactors to evidence of large-scale conspiracies in which suspected magic-users were presented as members of diabolical cults bent on destroying Christian society. In assembling and editing a variety of manuscript sources relating to this development, Hansen established a gradual timeline that stretched across most of the fifteenth century, and this remained the received understanding for most of the twentieth century. Over roughly the last twenty-five years, however, a series of manuscript discoveries and redatings have substantially changed our view of both the chronology and geography of the emerging idea of diabolical, conspiratorial witchcraft in the late medieval period. In this talk, I will explore these discoveries and investigate how they have reshaped our knowledge of this pivotal intellectual development that helped to provoke the terrible European witch hunts that were to come.