New Approaches to the Great Paris Magical Codex: From PGM IV to GEMF 57

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 fr...