Ricerc@Sapienza

The present volume is mainly the outcome of the international conference Coptic Literature in Context.
The Contexts of Coptic Literature. Late Antique Egypt in a Dialogue between Literature, Archaeology, and
Digital Humanities, which took place at Sapienza Università di Roma on 25-27 February 2019, representing
the third annual conference organised by the ‘PAThs’ project.
As its title proclaimed, the aim the conference – exactly like that of the ‘PAThs’ project itself – was to create an effective dialogue among scholars active in different disciplines – including codicology, palaeography, papyrology, literature, history of early Christianity, epigraphy, art, archaeology, and archaeometry – and their related methodologies, in order to achieve a multispectral knowledge of late antique Egypt, in the consciousness that only a transdisciplinary approach may lead to the comprehension of complex cultural phenomena such as the production of the ‘Coptic book’. Manuscripts – in their double nature of carriers of texts (and therefore of intellectual products) and material objects – were of course at the core of the meeting, but always in their connection with the geo-archaeological context of production, circulation and storage.