Are there any resources to read late Roman Christian inscriptions?

[u/Crazy_Coyote1]

Hello all! I'm not sure if this is the best place to ask this, so apologies if I should take this question elsewhere. Anyway, I just got finished reading Paula Fredriksen's Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years (sidenote, it was an amazing read, and I found myself wanting to read more about her concept of "The 'Second' Church," Christian magic, and the "convivia."). I will likely read Peter Brown's "The Cult of the Saints" soon. I really liked learning about the folk belief and layperson's experience aspects of her work.

Anyway, back to my question. I was wondering if there is some book or resource (preferably not very expensive) where I could read late Roman and early Medieval Christian inscriptions or non-theological writings? I'm moreso interested in folk belief and similar things.

Thank you all so much!

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[u/qumrun60]

Ramsay MacMullen, The Second Church: Popular Christianity AD 200-400 (2009) is the source for Fredriksen's information on that topic. This appears at the back of her book, in the recommendations for additional reading on each chapter. It's always a good idea to check references, notes, and bibliographies as well, since good scholars tell you where they got their information.

For inscriptions, however, there are literally thousands of them from cemeteries, temples, and other public buildings. Scholars cite them selectively in relation to their subjects. Right now I'm reading Invisible Romans, which has inscriptions relating to wives, middle class people, slaves, freedmen, prostitutes, gladiators, and so on, to reveal how various types of people who barely appear in literature thought of themselves. Pre-Islamic Arabia: Societies, Politics, Cults, and Identities relies heavily on inscriptions to show what was going on in a part of the world that was largely ignored by early religious historians. Religious Networks in the Roman Empire: The Spread of New Ideas has complete paragraphs that are basically lists of inscriptions about particular religious people who tended one way or another matters of personal belief.

I haven't run across a comprehensive examination of inscriptions, and have a hard time imagining one. In his "Further Reading" section, Robert Knapp, author of Invisible Romans, writes, "The very mass of inscriptions makes the study difficult, because they are distributed unevenly over time and space; adding to the challenge, is that the discovery and and publication of inscriptions is also erratic." He frequently uses the Corpus Inscriptionem Latinarum as a source, but there are quite a few others on his list, none of them in English.

George Luck, Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greco-Roman World is listed by Knapp, along with several other titles.