“Mediterranean Magic: An Introduction”
Mediterranean Studies Summer Skills Seminar
2—5 June 2024 • Remote
The Summer Skills Seminar, “Mediterranean Magic: An Introduction” will be held via Zoom from Monday, 2 June to Thursday, 5 June 2025 from 10am to noon and 1pm to 3pm MDT.
Course overview
This four-day intensive skills seminar will not only provide participants with an overview of magic’s history (broadly defined) throughout the premodern period but also introduce them to recurring patterns in magical practice and representation, significant symbols, and even tools for bringing similar material into their classrooms or personal reflections. As much as possible the content will be catered to participants interests and needs. Medievalists of all disciplines and ranks, graduate students, qualified undergraduate students, library and archival professionals, independent scholars, and modern magic practitioners or enthusiasts are encouraged to apply. Participants will leave with a stronger grasp of magic’s significance in Mediterranean history, the ability to recognize important symbols, and a thirst for discovering further magical connections within their fields and interests. Hands-on sections will be dedicated to internalizing new symbols and patterns as well as developing strategies for classroom instruction and/or practice.
The first day is dedicated to conceptualizing magic. In the first section we will briefly introduce types of magic (benevolent/natural, divine, and maleficent) and how they manifested in the three main religions in the Peninsula (Christian, Jewish, and Muslim magic). This will lead us into a discussion on magic and the law as well as various translation efforts that sparked the continued spread of occult practices. The second section will be more theoretical as we explore how in the Middle Ages and today magic is at the “crossroads” between many other fields of knowledge. What effect did this have then and now with “modernity”? We will also explore the “myth of disenchantment” and how magic remains relevant today, albeit in different forms.
Since astrological knowledge was often the prerequisite for medieval magical usage, the second day will be entirely dedicated to this field of knowledge. What is astrology? How did it inform their Ptolemaic and Neoplatonic cosmology? What are some astrological glyphs and what correspondences (primarily drawing on the Picatrix/Ghayāt al-Hakīm) did the celestial bodies have? As we discover these connections we will do some hands-on inferences and practice as we learn the language of the sky. The second section will then provide an overview of astral magic and review some magical prologues further establishing the importance of mastering this discipline. We will close the day with one example of magic that deviates from this requirement with the more rural Morisco magic.
The third day brings us into the world of imagination and societal reflections. In the first section we will explore the way magic showed up in Mediterranean stories of miracles, movement, and go-betweens. The second section will focus on fictional monsters and the marvelous closing with some very brief pop culture references. We will also do a hands-on activity reviewing some magical symbols and references seeing how they manifest in fiction.
The final day takes us out of fantasy and into the practical. What type of solutions did magic offer? Beyond planetary manipulation, how else could magicians effect change? We will also explore the most profound change of all—the internal one. We will explore ways neoplatonic thought influenced the quest for unity with creation. The second section will take us into a recap of the various networks magic created and explore ways we could visually represent this using digital tools like Knightlab. We will also hint at modern echoes and contemporary practices like tarot since it too was has premodern origins and was dependent on Mediterranean networks.
Faculty
This course will be conducted by Dr. Veronica Menaldi (Phd: University of Minnesota, 2018), a specialist of medieval and early modern Spanish literature and culture. Previously she served as an assistant professor of Spanish at the University of Mississippi and is now an independent scholar based in Colorado. She is the Vice President of the Societas Magica. She was also a participant in two Summer Skills Seminars (Aljamiado and Ladino/Judezmo). Her numerous publications and interdisciplinary research explore socioreligious cultural contact primarily through the use and representation of magic or food originating from the Peninsula emphasizing Andalusi influence or Morisco production on both sides of the Atlantic and across the Mediterranean. Her monograph, Love Magic and Control in Premodern Iberian Literature was published in 2021 by Routledge. She continues to explore magic’s perennial role in both her scholarly work and guest presentations or other public humanities endeavors.
Program
Monday, 2 June 2025: Magic and Theory
10am—noon & 1—3pm
1. Defining Magic: Types of magic • Christian, Jewish, and Muslim magic • Magic and the law • Translation efforts
2. Theorizing Magic: Magic at the “crossroads” • Magic and modernity • The “myth of disenchantment”
Tuesday, 3 June 2025: Astrology Prerequisite
10am—noon & 1—3pm
1. Lay of the Sky: Cosmology • Astrological glyphs • Correspondences
2. Examples and Deviations: Astral magic • Magical prologues • Morisco magic
Wednesday, 4 June 2025: Magic in Fiction
10am—noon & 1—3pm
1. Miracles and Movement: Cantigas de Santa Maria • Necromancer of Toledo • Go-betweens
2. Marvels and Monsters: Review of magical symbols and references • Marvelous sights in Alexandre the Great legends • Monsters in Amadis and Don Quijote • Popular culture
Thursday, 5 June 2025: Magic in Practice
10am—noon & 1—3pm
1. Solutions and Elevation: Hermetic magic • Hermetic magic • Neoplatonic theories of unity in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam
2. Travel, Tourism, and Tarot: Tracing magic • Spain as a destination (past and present) • Modern echoes and tarot
Participants
Hazel Antaramian Hofman (Art: Fresno City College, Madera Community College, and Cuesta College)
Hazel Antaramian Hofman is an adjunct college instructor in art appreciation and art history at Fresno City College, Madera Community College, and Cuesta College. In April 2025, she received her Ph.D. in Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Art Theory from the Institute of Doctoral Studies for the Visual Arts (IDSVA). She holds an M.A. in art history with Distinction from the Department of Arts and Design at California State University, Fresno, California; her emphasis was on medieval studies of Mediterranean and Near East manuscript illuminations. As an independent scholar, her publications in the field of art history include “Artaudian Writing, Imagery, and Sounds That Conjure the Sublime: Performances Nearing Philosophy” in The International Journal of Arts Theory and History (2024); “Preliminary Visual Assessment of the Near East Relief Posters,” Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies 23 (2014); “An Art History Commentary on Queen Goranduxt in the Royal Family Portrait Miniature Painting of King Gagik-Abas and his Family,” Journal of the Society of Armenian Studies, 18:2, (December 2009); and a co-author of “Mining the Royal Portrait Miniature for the Art Historical Context (as evidenced in possible script),” in IEEE International Conference on Networking, Sensing and Control (2008). Antaramian is a practicing studio artist (painter) with Fig Tree Gallery in Fresno, CA.
Cathy Huang (Letters: Wesleyan University)
My name is Jiarui Huang, a rising junior at Wesleyan University. I double major in history and college of letters - a three-year, interdisciplinary major for the study of European literature, history, and philosophy, from antiquity to the present. Although I am still refining my academic focus, I am very drawn to the medieval Islamic world, especially its theology, and intellectual exchanges in Mediterranean region. I also delve into early modern intellectual history and am quite interested in early Ottoman empires and its intellectual exchanges with Europe.
I have taken several courses regarding the topics, including Sex and Sexuality in Islam, Sophomore Colloquium: The Middle Ages, and Sultans, Saints, and Scholars: The Rise of Ottoman Empires. Through the three courses, I’ve gained insights into diverse themes of Islamic societies from medieval to early modern periods, such as fluid sexualities, law systems, theology, mysticism, and intellectual exchanges, including Greco-Arabic translation movement and later exchange between Ottoman empire and Christian Europe. The courses also allow me to engage with various primary sources, including Qur’an, The Masnavi, legal text including ebussuud efendi’s fatwas, and Sufi texts like The Niche of Lights and The Seven Invocations and the Seven Journeys.
While I didn’t undertake research projects in the courses, I have completed several papers that address the themes. For Sophomore Colloquium: The Middle Ages, I wrote two close reading papers. In one of the papers, I focused on sura 7, especially the animal imagery “heedless cattle” and “dog that pants with a lolling tongue”, and argued that human free will is a gift from God — capable of leading us to greatness or, if misused, to a deeper, self-inflicted degradation. God foresees the evildoers’ fate but doesn’t forcibly interrupt, as they deliberately turn away from God. As my first attempt to write a close-reading paper on the scripture, I learned how to connect animal imageries and interpret them by engaging with other textual evidence and understanding symbolic roles of the animals in Islam culture. For example, cattle represent blind followers of herdsmen. “People like cattle, even further astray” thus refer to those who are not merely blind followers like cattle, but deliberately reject divine signs – considered more misguided. In another paper, I compared the scene of crumbling mountain in sura 7 of Qur’an to that in the opening prose of the Masnavi, aiming to understand Rumi’s unique interpretation of Qur’an: He underscores an emotional bond between God and human, understanding God’s miracles as a reflection of love’s impact on internal states rather than a demonstration of God’s mighty power to highlight a God-human boundary. In this paper, I attempted to find nuanced distinctions between the original scripture Qur’an and its interpretive reworking. This experience develops my ability to engage with Qur’an and its reworking: It teaches me not to simply draw a dichotomy between the two texts but look for textual evidence to see how the interpreter adds their unique understanding to the texts. In addition to my particular interest in Islamic world, I also have some familiarity with antiquity – including philosophy, literature, science during the period. This background enables me to engage with important philosophical schools grounding cultural exchanges in the Mediterranean world during Medieval period. Also, I have studied Christianity, with a focus on the New Testament, and read selected Jewish texts in medieval period – like Chronicle of Ahimaaz. Building on my prior knowledge of andinterest in intercultural intellectual exchanges, along with my personal fascination with supernatural forces, this intensive seminar allows me to delve into the theme of magic and to explore how the intriguing subject functions as the “crossroads of different disciplines” and manifests differently in main religions. I am also excited to contribute my insights to class discussion and to engage with perspectives of my peers!
Aslı Igsiz (Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies: New York University)
Aslı Iğsız is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. Trained as a comparatist, her work can best be described as a history of the present. Her scholarship considers cultural politics within and about the Middle East, with a special focus on Turkey, and in connection with North American and European contexts, particularly Greece and France. Her research interests are situated at the intersections of political violence, cultural policy, and politics of representation, with a critical eye on the implications of the past in the present in the Mediterranean. Specifically, she is interested in the interconnections between the humanities and demographic engineering projects, and their afterlives, as well as the institutional, social, and academic interfaces generated in this process.
Her first book Humanism in Ruins: Entangled Legacies of the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange (Stanford University Press) was published in 2018. Humanism in Ruins sought to offer a critique of liberalism from the angle of the management of difference, and explored the underlying racialized logics of population transfers, partitions, segregation, apartheid, and border walls. Within this framework, it explored the implications of liberal and historicist humanism and cultural policy in a reconsideration of demographic and territorial claims and projects.
Currently she is working on two separate projects: one on the notion of civilization and related paradigms, their contemporary translations into cultural politics to support demographic claims and territorial visions, and another one on post-1945 cultural politics and initiatives to reform Humanities curricula in order to refute fascism and racism. Ultimately, she working on the implications of economically and politically motivated attacks on the Humanities, and how the consequently vacated public spaces by the Humanities education are refilled by neo-fascist, nationalist, and/or civilizationist discourse, policies, and movements to push for different demographic and territorial agenda.
Iğsız was previously a member in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study (2021-2022). She is also co-editor of the Middle East e-zine Jadaliyya’s Turkey page.
Monique O'Cwonnell (History: Wake Forest University)
I am a Professor of History at Wake Forest University with research and teaching interests in Renaissance Politics, Venice, the History of Science, Italy, and the Mediterranean world. I have a BA from Brown University (1996), a masters and PhD from Northwestern (1999, 2002) and did a post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford University before joining the faculty at Wake Forest in 2004. I have held residential fellowships at Villa I Tatti, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Newberry Library and my work has also been supported by the NEH, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the Renaissance Society of America. In Fall 2025 I am returning to the classroom full-time after a decade as department chair in two departments- History and English- and a term as Associate Dean of Faculty. My current research project is a book on political culture and empire in the Venetian Renaissance, tentatively titled Communicating Empire in Venice’s Renaissance State and several side projects also related to Venetian political culture in the Renaissance. More broadly, I am interested in Mediterranean networks of knowledge, and I regularly teach a course entitled "Magic, Science and Alchemy in Medieval Europe.” I will next teach it in Fall 2025. In this seminar I hope to learn about new pedagogical approaches in the field, to learn more about Iberian magic to incorporate into what is now an Eastern Mediterranean focused course, and to share when appropriate my experiential learning approaches to earlier iterations of the course. In 2018 and 2020 I offered this course in partnership with a chemistry professor, Dr. Paul Jones, and we added some experimentation with distillation, magnets, and chemical reactions. I have also collaborated with the Making and Knowing project at Columbia, and presented some early results in a conference paper, "“Exploring the possibilities of the Making and Knowing Project’s Digital Critical Edition of Ms. Fr. 640 in Research and Teaching,” (with Paul Jones), History of Science Society, Nov 2021. In this iteration of the course, my content goal is to include more material from the Iberian world, and my pedagogical goal is to incorporate a wider variety of activities for students.
Relevant Publications:
• with Eric R. Dursteler. The Mediterranean World: From the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Napoleon. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.
• “Orating the News: Printed Diplomatic Orations, Political Communication, and the Roots of Public Diplomacy in Renaissance Italy 1470-1513,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 53, n 3 (2022): 721-42.
• “Jem Sultan, Venice’s Intelligence System: Complex Archives, Information, and the Composite State,” part of a special issue on Information and the Government of the Composite Polities of the late-medieval and Early Modern World. European Review of History 30, n. 4 (2023): 580-599, DOI: 10.1080/13507486.2023.2207578. Published by Routledge as a book in 2025, 978-1-041-04127-6.
Morgan Schneider (Spanish: University of Tennessee-Knoxville)
Morgan Schneider is a Ph.D. student in Spanish at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville in the department of World Languages and Cultures. Morgan’s research interests are Hispanic literature and transatlantic approaches to the early modern period, including representations of magic and the occult through theatrical performance of varying genres. Her working dissertation title is “Imperial Devils: Representing the Diabolical in the Early Modern Hispanic Transatlantic”, in which she explores various representations of devils, demons, and other diabolical figures in the cultural production of the Hispanic transatlantic world using a range of literary genres and performances practices from the 16th-18th centuries.
Publications
Journal Articles
• Schneider, Morgan L. (2021). “Reyita y Reyita: Sus contradicciones narrativas y trasfondos afrocubanos.” Spanish and Portuguese Review, vol. 7, pg. 69-76.
M.A. Thesis
• Schneider, Morgan, “Voicing Narrative Through Transatlanticism and Transformation in Historia de la Monja Alférez by Catalina de Erauso.” Master’s Thesis, University of Tennessee, 2022. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_gradthes/6435
Education
The University of Tennessee-Knoxville –Master of Arts in Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures, 2022
The University of Tennessee-Knoxville –Bachelor of Arts in Hispanic Studies and Creative Writing, 2019
Sara Sisun (Boulder, Colorado)
Sara Sisun (b. 1986, Denver, Colorado) is an oil painter and visual artist based in Boulder, Colorado. She received a BA in Art Practice from Stanford University in 2009, an MFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute under a full tuition fellowship in 2011, and an MA in Art History from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2018. Her research interests include Early Modern anatomy and history of science, artist practices, and critical theory. She is a recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Grant, the Alpine Fellowship and the Audrey Beard Scholarship for graduate study in Art History. Her work is included in the public collections of Kaiser Permanente and in the private collection of Soledad O’Brien. She is currently an Assistant Professor and Head in the department of Foundations and Fine Art at Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design.
Madelyn Thompson (History of Art: Bryn Mawr College)
My name is Madelyn Thompson and I am finishing my first year as a graduate student at Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, pursuing a PhD. I previously studied at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, graduating in 2023 with Research Distinction in History of Art. My research centers around the medieval Mediterranean, exploring the movement of sacred objects, aesthetics, and ideologies across geographies and temporalities, with an emphasis on the Byzantine Empire. I am currently working on several projects at Bryn Mawr. Recently, I explored the intersection of geology, mineralogy, mythology, and phenomenology through an investigation of consumptive practices at the Milk Grotto in Bethlehem. The site has been revered for centuries for its miraculous white walls; the ingestion of which is believed to aid in lactation, fertility, and other health concerns. I am also working on a project which explores madness in the medieval and modern eras, thinking about the ways that 19th-century practitioners employed representations of hysteria in the same way that the Byzantine Christians used those of demonic possession to create and channel anxieties and ultimately promise a cure. Over the summer, I will determine a topic for my MA thesis project and begin preliminary work.