Posted by Emily Selove
24 February 2025Our recent ‘Spotlight’ entries have tended towards broadening definitions of what constitutes the ‘medieval’. While Richard Flower’s entry took us back in time to late Antiquity, this week’s post — courtesy of Dr. Emily Selove — invites us to look beyond the geographical confines of Western Europe. Emily is an active member of both the Centre for Medieval Studies and the Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies, and devised and convenes our unique MA programme in Magic and Occult Science.
I focus on Medieval Arabic literature about magic and parties.
I really like challenging some of the most common preconceptions that people have about medieval Arabic literature. Topics like magic, obscenity, wine, and parties, are actually central, omnipresent, and essential to understand. They are also fun, and featured in a recent book of cartoons that I published set in Abassid Baghdad.
The Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies and the Centre for Medieval Studies provided me a home where I could be myself and explore my idiosyncratic interests in a creative and rigorous fashion. The campus is also beautiful. The Exeter Special Collections also contain all kinds of magical treasures, including everything from Arabic manuscripts to the letters of local Devon folklorist Theo Brown. It is so exciting to visit these in person and see, for example, how marginal notes show the ways that these rare books were used and loved by readers over the ages. I also like to (surreptitiously) smell them. You can’t do that with a digitised copy.
I love to work with old manuscripts and rare documents, such as the magic archives here at Exeter. For the past ten years I have been working on hand-written manuscripts containing a 13th-century Arabic book of magic spells compiled by Siraj al-Din al-Sakkaki. I mainly work on digital photographs of these, but you can visit some of the manuscripts in person right here in the UK (in London and Manchester). I hope to publish three volumes of edition and translation of this work, starting (hopefully!) by the end of 2025.
Some days I spend talking to students and colleagues about their fascinating research interests within the history of magic, and other days I spend translating medieval Arabic books of magic spells. These days I am always reading, writing, or talking about “magic” very broadly defined. Angels, witches, ghosts, aliens, you name it– so long as it somehow relates to Medieval Arabic Literature. AndĀ everythingĀ relates to Medieval Arabic Literature if you know where to look!
Featured image: a talisman from SirÄj al-DÄn al-SakkÄkÄ«’s KitÄb al-ShÄmil wa-bahr al-kÄmil, DÄr al-Kutub al-Misriyya, Cairo 1735.