Healing Traditions in Coptic Magical Texts

Korshi Dosoo

doi:10.1515/tc-2021-0003

Healing Traditions in Coptic Magical Texts

Trends in Classics ◽

10.1515/tc-2021-0003 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (1) ◽

pp. 44-94

Author(s):

Korshi Dosoo

Keyword(s):

Literary Texts ◽

Academic History ◽

Concepts Of Disease ◽

A Performance

Abstract Within the ‘market of healing’ of Christian Egypt (here broadly considered as the fourth through twelfth centuries CE), ‘magical’ practitioners represent an elusive yet recurrent category. This article explores the evidence for magical healing from three perspectives – first, literary texts which situate ‘magicians’ in competition with medical and ecclesiastical healing; second, the papyrological evidence of Coptic-language magical texts, which provide evidence for concepts of disease, wellness, and their mediation; and finally confronting the question of how these healing traditions might be understood within the methodologically materialistic framework of academic history, using the concepts of placebo and healing as a performance.

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Prologue

The Matter of Song in Early Modern England ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198843788.003.0007 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 1-31

Author(s):

Katherine R. Larson

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Early Modern England ◽

Literary Analysis ◽

Musical Performance ◽

Literary Texts ◽

Embodied Experience ◽

Methodological Challenges ◽

Recording Process ◽

And Performance ◽

A Performance

The Prologue confronts the volatility and airy capriciousness of song as a performance medium and considers the methodological challenges of locating song’s musical and performance-based traces. Nuancing Carolyn Abbate’s influential notion of the “drastic” nature of musical performance, it argues for the necessity of factoring the embodied experience of song into literary analysis. The Prologue devotes particular attention to women’s engagement with song as a performance-based—and performative—genre in early modern England, a history whose richness is reflected in the companion recording. Even as the recording process exemplifies the impossibility of pinpointing the “drastic” in definitive terms, this acoustic archive—as well as the performers’ reflections on their experience of inhabiting the featured pieces—underscores the importance of tuning our ears to the musical matter of early modern literary texts, many of which were the products of embodied and musical processes of circulation.

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