Ancient Christian Liturgy and Magic with Ágnes Mihalykó

Ágnes Mihálykó is a specialist on Christian liturgical papyri. She has recently published a book on the topic, The Christian Liturgical Papyri: An Introduction, with Mohr Siebeck, in which she offered an extensive introduction into the topic, and she discussed the earliest liturgical manuscripts preserved. In the podcast, we discuss the relationship between liturgical papyri and magical texts.

Ágnes spent her undergraduate years studying mostly in Hungary, and obtained her PhD in classics at the University of Oslo in 2017. Currently, Ágnes is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas at the University in Oslo, and she is working on a project in collaboration with the project „Euchologia. Daily Life and Religion: Byzantine Prayer Books as Sources for Social History” lead by Claudia Rapp, at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Ágnes’ project centers around collecting and editing Christian liturgical prayers in ancient Greek and Coptic, which have been preserved on papyrus from the third to the ninth centuries, and which testify to a variety of practices and record the early history of the Coptic Church’s liturgy. Most of them relate to the Eucharist or are intercessions for various occasions, but there are also prayers for the liturgy of the hours, for the ordination of a monk, and blessings as well. The project will bring together these prayers in one corpus as well as in digital publication with a reliable transcription, an English translation and commentary, with reflections on the text’s liturgical function and relation to the intellectual and theological currents of its time.