Thank you for this very kind introduction and also for the invitation.

So, before I begin my presentation I shall say maybe two things.

First of all, I want to invite you to interrupt me at any time for asking questions.

So, this would be more easy for me because I will present a lot of things.

And secondly, I'm a religious studies scholar with a focus on the entire history of magic.

So, what I will present today is only one snippet in this history.

I'm not an early modern historian or a literaturwissenschaft or something like that.

So, I always try to interpret sources like the ones I present today from broader perspective on the entire history of magic.

So, I also work on action and also very contemporary stuff.

And this explains a bit my approach to the matter.

So, today, oh, and thirdly, I have not worked so much on divination yet, even though it appears permanently in my sources.

But I always considered it to be a rather marginal facet in this history of magic.

So, my perspective on divination may be a bit naive.

So, I'm actually curious about that.

But I'll come to that later.

Yeah, today I will talk about this collection of magical manuscripts Daniel and I encountered in the University Library of Leipzig.

And we'll try to elucidate the relationship between magic and divination in this collection,

but maybe with some thoughts about the entire history of magic.

That's the overview.

First, I will try to explain why this collection is special and unique.

Then I will try to explain to you what I mean by learned magic.

So, I always use this formulation.

I don't simply use the term magic.

Or often I use Western learned magic, which is even more complicated.

So, I'll try to explain that.

Then a brief glimpse into the history of the collection.

Then I will outline the contents of the collection.

And finally, in the final part, I will look specifically on the divinatory techniques and scripts in the collection

and try to ponder their relationship to the other ritual elements, which are not divinatory.

So, the collection in Leipzig is unique.

Why is it unique?

First of all, it is a cohesive collection in the sense that it belongs together.

It is one of the largest collection of manuscripts stemming from the late 17th, early 18th century.

Usually such manuscripts, they survive only in small quantities.

They are scattered across European libraries. They hardly survive in large, cohesive collections.

The reason for this is that this collection has been assembled by one single person, namely a Paratelian physician named Samuel Escheröer,

who is more or less historically unimportant and unknown.

But he must have had a lot of money and resources to acquire this substantial collection.

And this is important because it, so to speak, gives a direct look into state-of-the-art magic in the early 18th century.

And other collections are maybe similarly large, but usually they have been assembled over the course of centuries

by, I don't know, library staff, but not by one single person.

The second unique element is that it's a German collection, predominantly German.

Collection 113 of these 140 manuscripts are in fact translations, German translations, mostly from Latin templates.

So, this is the first German collection of manuscripts of learned magic, which is predominantly German.

Of course, there have been other collections in other European regions, foremost in Britain.

There have been quite a few Britain scholars who have acquired substantial collections,

but these were usually in Latin or partly in English then, but there is no similarly large and early German collection of such manuscripts.

And that's why the collection demonstrates that the vernacularization of this type of knowledge, which I call learned magic, which I will explain later.

So, the Germanization of this tradition happened much earlier than assumed so far.

So, most German Volkskundler, a tradition, a scholarly tradition almost extinct now at German universities,