Fellowship Report

During my stay at MagEIA in November and December 2026, I coincided with my colleague Christopher Faraone for a very productive five-week session. The generosity of the research group provided us with a superb environment to tackle our work on GEMF 55/PGM III, a magical handbook on a papyrus roll kept at the Louvre in Paris. We had observed that previous editions maintained an incorrect order of the fragments, so our work required close attention to the materiality as well as the text of the papyrus. The edition is part of our second volume of Greek and Egyptian Magical Formularies, which will be published—hopefully—by the end of 2026 in the University of California Classical Studies series.

We also worked on the final adjustments to our edited volume: New Approaches to the Great Paris Magical Codex: From PGM IV to GEMF 57.

This volume contains essays written by our research team members on a magnificent fourth-century codex containing the longest known Greco-Egyptian magical formulary. It appeared in April 2026.

I also participated in the activities of the MagEIA group, including both the Greek reading group and the weekly seminars, in which Prof. Faraone and I presented our research on oracles and the magical papyri. Moreover, our stay coincided with the second MagEIA Symposium, in which I participated with a paper on “Writing Implements in the Magical Formularies.”

It was an extraordinary time, during which we advanced enormously in our project while simultaneously exploring collaborations with the MagEIA team that are now starting to take shape.