To what extent, and in what ways, was Roman religion encoded within and understood through the human body and its engagement with objects in the performance of religious rituals? How did ‘thinking through the body’ enable ancient participants in cult activities to understand religious behaviour? Was the body merely a metaphor or did different types of bodies, objects, cults, locations or circumstances produce discretely localised or individualised forms of religion? This book addresses comprehensively for the first time these fundamental questions about the relationship between the human body, material culture and the production of religious knowledge in the Roman world. Through the investigation of a series of case studies this study reveals that Roman religion was a multifaceted religion of the body long before Christianity transformed human bodies into a religious ‘problem’. Addressing movement in sacred places, sensory engagements with the objects used to perform sacrifices and other cult activities, votive offerings dedicated to the gods, images of the divine and curse tablets which targeted the bodies of perceived wrongdoers, it demonstrates that through material culture human bodies produce religion and religion produces bodies.

Religion, Material Culture, and the Body in the Roman World PDF

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