The Iconography of Magic: Images of Power and the Power of Images in Ancient and Late Antique Magic

The study of magical texts of the Classical, Greco-Roman and Late Antique World has experienced a remarkable impulse since the last decades of the twentieth century until today. The so-called material turn in philological studies has promoted an ever-growing interest in the study of the materiality and other non-textual components of ancient documents, which has favored interdisciplinary studies aimed at a holistic approach to ancient texts. From this perspective, the articles collected in this volume offer a series of in-depth case studies of images and other paratextual elements of magical artifacts. Comparative studies, statistical analyses, image-text interconnections, and other analytical possibilities are applied to achieve a greater understanding of the magical objects in question, as well as of the belief system in which they were produced. The book illustrates the importance of iconographic analysis as a fundamental part of understanding Antiquity, its ritual texts, and its magical objects.