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This book examines the ways in which lived religion in Roman Italy
involved personal and communal experiences of the religious agency
generated when ritualised activities caused human and
more-than-human things to become bundled together into relational
assemblages. Drawing upon broadly posthumanist and new materialist
theories concerning the thingliness of things, it sets out to
re-evaluate the role of the material world within Roman religion
and to offer new perspectives on the formation of multi-scalar
forms of ancient religious knowledge. It explores what happens when
a materially informed approach is systematically applied to the
investigation of typical questions about Roman religion such as:
What did Romans understand 'religion' to mean? What did religious
experiences allow people to understand about the material world and
their own place within it? How were experiences of ritual connected
with shared beliefs or concepts about the relationship between the
mortal and divine worlds? How was divinity constructed and
perceived? To answer these questions, it gathers and evaluates
archaeological evidence associated with a series of case studies.
Each of these focuses on a key component of the ritualised
assemblages shown to have produced Roman religious agency - place,
objects, bodies, and divinity - and centres on an examination of
experiences of lived religion as it related to the contexts of
monumentalised sanctuaries, cult instruments used in public
sacrifice, anatomical votive offerings, cult images and the
qualities of divinity, and magic as a situationally specific form
of religious knowledge. By breaking down and then reconstructing
the ritualised assemblages that generated and sustained Roman
religion, this book makes the case for adopting a material approach
to the study of ancient lived religion.
The horror of the puticuli, the mass burial pits, and their
traditional association with the poor, has often led to this
socio-economic group being viewed as somehow different to the rest
of the ancient urban community in the Italy of the Late Roman
Republic. This is the theory questioned by the author of this
volume. Why should this part of the community care so little about
the disposal of the dead when other members of society were
devoting huge amounts of time and money to ensuring that the
deceased received not only burial, but also lasting commemoration?
In April 1485, a marble sarcophagus was found on the outskirts of
Rome. It contained the remains of a young Roman woman so
well-preserved that she appeared to have only just died and the
sarcophagus was placed on public view, attracting great crowds.
Such a find reminds us of the power of the dead body to evoke in
the minds of living people, be they contemporary (survivors or
mourners) or distanced from the remains by time, a range of
emotions and physical responses, ranging from fascination to fear,
and from curiosity to disgust. Archaeological interpretations of
burial remains can often suggest that the skeletons which we
uncover, and therefore usually associate with past funerary
practices, were what was actually deposited in graves, rather than
articulated corpses. The choices made by past communities or
individuals about how to cope with a dead body in all of its
dynamic and constituent forms, and whether there was reason to
treat it in a manner that singled it out (positively or negatively)
as different from other human corpses, provide the stimulus for
this volume. The nine papers provide a series of theoretically
informed, but not constrained, case studies which focus
predominantly on the corporeal body in death. The aims are to take
account of the active presence of dynamic material bodies at the
heart of funerary events and to explore the questions that might be
asked about their treatment; to explore ways of putting fleshed
bodies back into our discussions of burials and mortuary treatment,
as well as interpreting the meaning of these activities in relation
to the bodies of both deceased and survivors; and to combine the
insights that body-centred analysis can produce to contribute to a
more nuanced understanding of the role of the body, living and
dead, in past cultures.
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R398
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