15 I 2026: Sofía Torallas-Tovar (IAS Princeton), Writing Magic: Scribes and Magical Formularies on Papyrus

In the study of magic in the Ancient World, scholars have had a tendency to focus on the practitioners and clients of magical practices. This paper focuses instead on the individuals who engaged in the act of copying, reading, and sharing the recipes for the aforementioned activities. The corpus of Greco-Egyptian magical papyri serves as an ideal laboratory for the study of scribal practices and the backgrounds of the writers, rather than the users of magic. What lies behind the papyri is a network of interrelated scribal skills and practices that have an influence on both magic and various other textual genres.