Lillian C. McCabe

Yale University, Department of Religious Studies

2025 Honorable Mention (Humanities)

Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s (d. 606/1210) Book of the Hidden Secret and Its Reception

Dr. Lillian C. McCabe provides a biography of a single, misunderstood text: Fakhr al-Din al-Rāzī’s Book of the Hidden Secret. Through an exhaustive study of nearly eighty manuscript copies, she charts the remarkable journey of this grimoire on astral magic as it was read and translated from thirteenth-century Bukhara to eighteenth-century Cairo. McCabe demonstrates that the Hidden Secret was no marginal oddity but an influential classic, actively debated and adapted by elite Muslim scholars and sovereigns. Her work refines our view of the Islamic intellectual tradition, revealing the efforts of prominent scholars who did not reject magic completely, but sought to philosophically understand and master it.

The dissertation was completed at Yale University in the Department of Religious Studies under the supervision of Travis Zadeh.

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