Metamorphosis

How Old Norse mythology endured in the Christian era

Talking infants in medieval French literature

A freewheeling Cavafy for modern times

The ‘Mona Lisa of manuscripts’, finally on view

Samuel Pepys’s self-incriminating diaries

Whether vestiges of paganism survived Europe’s Christianisation is a subject of enduring fascination. Scholarly debate navigates between the ‘maximalist’ position (much survived) and the ‘minimalist’