The project set out to collect a large and diverse set of texts related to magical ritual, in particular Greek and Latin incantations used in healing and protective magic as well as aggressive magic. The work proceeded in tandem with my Ph.D. dissertation; no corpus of such documents covering the period in question, from the Classical world through modern Greece, had previously existed. It was hoped that the digital database would facilitate the querying and display of the texts beyond what was possible in previous word-processor- based workflows. The availability of stable reference IDs for texts also promised increased ease of reference for the analytical portion of the dissertation. In the course of the project, a referential database was designed using Drupal. It was then populated with texts already gathered for the dissertation. The result substantially facilitated and informed the dissertation, which was submitted successfully in 2016, and continues to do so for its revised version as a pair of monographs, in preparation. Another significant outcome has been the purchase, with funds made available by the grant, of digital facsimiles of medieval manuscripts containing relevant material, which have been deposited in the Bancroft Library. Their study and incorporation into the database is ongoing, but meanwhile they are freely available to the public through the Library. The planned exposure of the resulting database to the public remains to be done. The temporal breadth of the project should make the data of interest to a large community of scholars in Classics, Byzantine Studies, Medieval Latin Studies, and Modern Greek Studies. Its use will hopefully be increased by expansions including the addition of translations and other texts in cultural contact with the core Greek and Latin, such as Coptic and Aramaic.
