The 24 Presbyters in Hay 1 (British Museum EA 10391): Ritual Practice and Biblical Reception at the Intersection of Inscription, Materiality, and Gesture

In this paper, I focus on the magical use of the 24 presbyters in Hay 1 (a.k.a. the London Hay Cookbook; British Museum EA 10391), an eighth- or ninth-century CE magical handbook. I examine how these characters from the biblical book of Revelation were integrated into its spells, with particular attention to the diverse ways in which they were connected to the conceptual domains of writing, materiality, and performative gesture. I then reflect on the implications of the word–material–gestural relationships, which this object would have theoretically engendered, for biblical reception history. I argue that magical objects, such as this handbook, contribute to the reception history of the Bible by demonstrating the great extent to which biblical use in late antiquity and in the early medieval period was multi-traditional, multilayered, and multisensory.