Manichaeism in the Later Roman Empire and Medieval China, 2nd edition

Samuel Lieu is a historian of Manichaeism, and this academic monograph, now in its second edition from Mohr Siebeck, is one of the standard scholarly treatments tracing Manichaeism's spread from its origins into the later Roman Empire and separately into medieval China, using primary sources in multiple languages including Chinese, Greek, Latin and Iranian material. Its strength is exactly that comparative reach across two very different regions where Manichaeism survived under different pressures, drawing on original documents rather than later secondhand polemics against it. Because a second edition exists, it reflects updated scholarship correcting or extending the first. Its limit is that Manichean primary sources are fragmentary and often survive only through hostile critics, a constraint the book is explicit about rather than concealing.