The Corpus of Coptic Magical Formularies project (CoMaF) is a three-year research project (2024-2027) based at the Chair of Egyptology of the Julius Maximilian University Würzburg, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), and a partner of the DFG Centre for Advanced Studies MagEIA. The two principal investigators are Korshi Dosoo and Markéta Preininger.
This project focuses on the study of Coptic-language magical manuscripts, texts attesting to non-institutional rituals which provide deep insights into the hopes, fears, and beliefs of individuals living in late antique and early Islamic Egypt (ca. 4th to 12th century CE). The practices to which they attest were used to negotiate the crises of daily life – disease, social conflicts, and uncertainty about the future – offering glimpses into the intimate lives of ancient people. They also document the complex cultural, linguistic, and religious exchanges of the time – interactions between the ancient Egyptian and Greek religious traditions, different forms of Christianity, Judaism, and later Islam – and provide a perspective into worldviews beyond those represented by elite literary or ecclesiastical texts.
The project has three main goals:
- The publication of a second volume of Coptic magical texts in the series Papyri Copticae Magicae.
- The production of focused studies on the language of and ritual processes described in the Coptic magical papyri.
- The diffusion of our research, which includes making our work of describing and editing texts available through the Kyprianos database, and through regular blog posts and podcasts.
This project is the successor of the older project Coptic Magical Papyri: Vernacular Religion in Late Roman and Early Islamic Egypt, which ran from 2018 to 2023, and was funded by the Excellent Ideas programme.
Please contact us if you would like to collaborate, receive regular updates, or correct information online or in the Kyprianos database.