Humanities Brown Bag Seminar

Abstract: A mysterious text in a manuscript discovered at the Bibliothèque Nationale de Tunisie in 2018 appears to originally have been composed in 10th century Anatolia, at the behest of the travelling companions of the author, Muḥammad ibn Ja'far bin Muḥammad al-Khwārizmī. The text itself contains a mixture of prayers to God and the prophets, demands for magical intervention by jinn and angels, incantations, and descriptions of magical charms, amulets, and talismans. Immediately evident in the manuscript are the full-page images of the sign of Tanit, the Carthaginian goddess of love and fertility, coupled with magical spells associated with the gendered topics of love and marriage. The sign of Tanit is specific to Carthage and so the appearance of this image in a tenth-century Anatolian text is noteworthy and provides contextual clues about this particular copy of the manuscript and its potential readership, which was copied in the late nineteenth century by a known Maghrebi scribe. This paper analyzes how gender may have shaped the selection of images in this manuscript copy of the grimoire by examining the interplay between image, magical incantations, and textual history.