Brent Nongbri. God's Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts. Yale 2018.

I know of Brent Nongbri primarily from his lively and enjoyable blog Variant Readings, a spinoff of this book on early Christian manuscripts. This monograph looks at (some) early Christian manuscripts through the lens of "museum archaeology," attempting to ascertain what can be known about their actual archaeological context. Overall a fun and enjoyable read. Some things I've learned (lots others already knew):

• Oxyrhynchus papyri are almost always extremely fragmentary; getting more than 1 leaf from the same manuscript is unusual, and almost never more than that.
• The famous Dyscolus Menander codex is part of the Bodmer papyri. Most of these papyri are Christian, maybe from a monastic or school context (though Nongbri lacks confidence in those suggestions). Later Christian monks definitely did read Menander -- apparently archaeologists found at the Monastery of Epiphanius in Thebes a chunk of limestone with lines from Menander in alphabetical order (p. 210).
• Great details on codex-making (e.g. great photographs and diagrams of single vs multi quire codices).
• Great photograph of two codices in situ in an thoroughly scientific excavation:



• This is two codices as they appeared in situ when discovered while excavating a late antique egyptian village. They were found in a kitchen-turned-stable; apparently they were left behind when the stable was stripped for wood and abandoned. 

But even with a properly documented and published archaeological excavation, and despite how fun this photograph is, I'm not convinced much of value is learned from the context of this find. It's still something of a mystery whose books these were and why they were abandoned in this unlikely location. 

It's much worse for the other collections from the black/grey market that Nongbri describes (e.g. the Bodmer papyri), whose origin is basically contradictory hearsay. I think Nongbri shows there's some value in determining which manuscripts were found together and form an archive/library; but it doesn't seem to me to matter very much which Egyptian village they may or may not have been found in.