This chapter explores the spread of Christianity in Late Antiquity, focusing on archaeological evidence and methodological challenges in tracing its expansion. It examines how Christianity transitioned from a marginalised faith to an institutionalised religion, emphasising regional differences in its adoption across the Mediterranean and beyond. The chapter discusses a variety of materials, including early Christian inscriptions, artefacts, funerary practices and architectural remains such as churches, baptisteries and monasteries. Sites like the house church at Dura Europos and early Christian catacombs provide crucial insights into the religion’s early development. The study also highlights the role of missionary activity and the influence of state policies, particularly after Constantine’s legalisation of Christianity in the fourth century. A major argument is that Christianity spread unevenly, with urban centres adopting it earlier than rural areas. The transition was not uniform, as some regions experienced periods of resistance or syncretism with existing religious traditions. The chapter underscores the difficulty of identifying Christian material culture due to the overlap with pagan symbols. The chapter rounds off by calling for a more critical approach to interpreting archaeological evidence and suggests that future research should focus on regional case studies to refine our understanding of Christianity’s complex expansion.

Chapter 17 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho gives an account of the papyri of Sappho discovered over the past century as historical artefacts in their own right – what do they tell us about who was reading Sappho, and where and when was this reading taking place? What do we learn from them about the transmission and eventual loss of her poetry?

This chapter introduces the life of Mani as mediated through the history of Manichaean Studies. It follows the field’s genesis in the confessional polemics of the Reformation to the twentieth century where repeated new and unexpected manuscript discoveries have allowed for an advancement of the field through textual studies and philology. Texts that survive in a wide variety of languages, ranging from Latin and Greek through Coptic, Arabic, various Middle Iranian languages including Parthian and Sogdian, even Uighur and Chinese. This chapter reconsiders the many variations of the life of Mani as depicted in Manichaean, apocryphal, pseudepigraphical and polemical texts in the light of these new discoveries and the scholarship that preceded it.