This book by Miranda Aldhouse-Green, Emeritus Professor at Cardiff University and a great authority on the religious systems of the Roman-Celtic world, is destined to become, like her other works, a key reference for the processes and transformations experienced in this field of Roman Britain. Along with a Prologue and an Epilogue, the author incorporates the latest research findings through eleven thematically-organized chapters. This update to the literature is one of the merits of the book; another, no less significant, is the excellent basis on which information in a work of these dimensions is organized, along with its clearly interdisciplinary methodological focus. The incorporation of relatively systematic comparisons with much more recent, even contemporary, situations and contexts is another virtue by which the author manages to bring the reader closer to her narrative, trying to make that remote past that constitutes the centre of her historiographical analysis a ‘less strange’ country (p. 13).
The essential question is already established in the introduction to the book: to what extent did the ‘new technologies of worship’ (using an expression of Jane Webster) contributed by the Roman occupation—especially in the field of epigraphy and iconography—affect and change the traditional concepts in the perception of the divine? How should we interpret the Chichester inscription in which Tiberus Claudius Togidubnus, ‘king of the Britons’, perhaps one of those young sons of the local elites sent to Rome, dedicates a temple to Neptune and Minerva?
The first chapter (‘The Druids: Priesthood, Power, and Politics’) focuses on the role of the druids, whose importance in the Celtic societies of Gallia and Britannia is fully recognized by the Greco-Latin sources. These sources generally deal with druidism in denigratory ways (in line with a rhetoric of alterity which has been well-established by authors such as Hartog (Reference Hartog and Lloyd.2001) for the Greek world or by Said (Reference Said1978), Todorov (Reference Todorov1993), or Maalouf (Reference Maalouf2012) for more recent instances), which are usually built around the topic of human sacrifices (more ambiguous and elusive in the archaeological record than the literary texts imply). The transformation or the disappearance of the druids in the new context of Romanitas is also considered in this chapter (for an interesting study of this topic in the Gallo-Roman area, see Pailler, Reference Pailler2008).
‘Foreign Conquest and Shifting Identities: New Cults and Old Traditions’ (Chapter 2) in reality summarizes the author's methodological approach to the key elements of the religious transformation that were in operation. The complexity of the process is very well illustrated at the beginning through the example of funerary monuments of two soldiers of diverse origins: a Trevirian and a Frisian, both represented spearing a defeated character representing the barbarian. Discussion of the Imperial cult, the rebellion of Boudicca, and the new reality represented by Bodicacia's tombstone (with the defaced representation of Oceanus in the pediment over the dedication to the Manes (p. vii)) complete these pages, which constitute a real introduction to the various problems dealt with in the remainder of the text.
One of them is that of ‘Religion and the Roman Army’ (Chapter 3), and I think the example chosen to illustrate the mobility of soldiers in the Imperial period is very appropriate: the votive altar to the genius loci (that is, the local deity) found in Chester and dedicated by a legionary from Samosata, by the Euphrates—that is, the other end of the Empire. The impact of the army on the transformation of Romano-British religious identities and on the ‘creation of the familiar’ (Creighton, Reference Creighton2006) was truly pronounced. And it is in relation to the military units garrisoned especially in the north of the province where a good part of the most interesting epigraphic and iconographic documentation of Britannia emerges, manifesting local divine personalities (the Genii Cucullati (i.e. ‘hooded spirits’), Antenocidius, Belatucadrus, Cocidius, Brigantia) or those from other western provinces (such as Germania—Mars Thincsus and the Alasiagae, Gaul—equestrian representations of Epona, or both—the goddesses Matres (‘the mothers’)).
Devotions in urban and rural areas are also analysed in Chapter 4 (‘Town and Country: Urban Devotions and Rural Rituals’). The documentation of rituals of human sacrifice at the height of the Roman period in a municipality such as Verulamium (St Albans), the old center of the Catuvellauni, may surprise the reader. Corinium (Cirencester), the capital of the Dobunni in the Cotswolds, has left rich and heterogeneous ritual evidence, including the Genii Cucullati, the Matres, the Suleviae, the god with deer antlers (here inappropriately called Cernunnos, for this theonym is mentioned only in the Pilier des nautes (‘the pillar of the boatmen’) in Lutetia (Paris)) or various deities characteristic of the Greco-Roman pantheon. Even fragments of a ‘column of Jupiter’, characteristic of Gallo-Roman cosmology, have appeared, dedicated by Lucius Septimius, provincial governor of Britannia Prima. These finds from large urban centres contrast with those of small walled centres such as Great Chesterford, where a Romano-British temple was built on a previous Iron Age structure. Here, abundant remains of ritual consumption corresponding to the left parts of sacrificed animals were found, while the right halves were offered to the gods (p. 87): an interesting and revealing fact regarding the distribution of sacrificial victims that is not attested by other types of testimonies. In contrast to these urban temples, the rural sanctuaries of Nettleton Shrub, venerating Apollo Cunomaglus, Wanborouh (Surrey), with important liturgical objects, and, especially, Lydney Park (Gloucestershire), with Nodens as patron deity, all testify to the importance of the professional clergy.
Chapter 5 (‘Cosmology in Roman Britain: Sky, Earth, and Water’) addresses the elements of a cosmology that has ancestral roots but manifests itself more clearly in Roman times. The discussion seems somewhat speculative in some cases (for example, the relationship of Sulis Minerva with the lunar deity), but the choice of documentation is generally spot on. This is, for example, the case with the inscription of the camp of Chester to I.O.M. (Jupiter Optimus Maximus) Tanarus by L. Bruttius Praesens, princeps of the Legio XX Valeria Victrix, a Hispanic from Clunia (p. 101), illustrating the enormous mobility of the soldiers and the assimilation of the supreme god of the official Roman pantheon to ancestral divinities, something also shown by the altars erected at Hadrian's Wall with the characteristic solar wheel decoration. Similarly, ‘divine marriages’ attested by epigraphy reveal an approximation between the existing religions systems: normally an ancestral female divinity appears as the partner of ‘Roman’ masculine one―the cases of Mercury and Rosmerta (Gloucester) or of Loucetius Mars and Nemetona (Bath) are characteristic. The chthonic and aquatic divinities are particularly related to fertility and healing, as is the case of Coventina in Carrabourgh and, especially, Sulis Minerva, venerated in the hot spring of Bath, an extraordinary complex in which, as pointed out by Aldhouse-Green (p. 122), there are no traces of pre-Roman cult, which would make its installation by (and for) Roman soldiers probable.
Activities related to divination, healing, or execration are the subject of Chapter 6 (‘Gut-Gazers and God-Users: Divination, Curing, and Cursing’), focused on the perception that disease (physical or spiritual) is caused by the intrusion of evil spirits. Considering this principle as something fundamental to shamanic systems, the author approaches these questions through the figure of the shaman, which in my opinion represents an excessive generalization. Several scholars have attempted in recent works to assimilate this figure (which corresponds to a well-defined religious specialist among Siberian peoples) to all kinds of cult or religious practitioners which do not fit within the priesthood categories known in societies of the Classical world, such as the Greek or the Roman. That said, the set of objects found in the mid-first century ad tomb of a high-ranking Roman-British individual in Camulodunum (Cochester) is extraordinary, composed of surgical tools and other elements that point to magical divinatory practices, such as the remains of psychoactive plants, a game board, and bronze rods. Also interesting are the sanctuaries that combine therapeutic practices with execratory ones. Prominent among these are the centres of Bath and Uley, which provide extraordinary information about activities traditionally considered ‘magical’ and that should rather be conceptualized within the field of the ‘lived religion’ of pilgrims and devotees.
The special role of the head as the seat of life, of the horns as attributes of various divinities, of hybrid anthropo-zoomorphic images, and of the triple images are also analysed within the broader context of the ancient or insular Celtic (Ch. 7. ‘Subverting Symbols: Heads, Horns, and Seeing Triple’). The interpretation of Aldhouse-Green, which sees these manifestations as expressions of alternative symbols (better than ‘subversive’ against the romanitas), is certainly suggestive, although it may be excessively hypothetical at times (for instance, the consideration of multiple sculpted heads as speaking heads of an oracular nature).
Eastern cults are the object of analysis of another chapter (Ch. 8, ‘Candles in the Dark and Spices from the Orient: Mystery Cults’). Especially interesting is the evidence of the mithraea, both in the vallum Hadriani and in Caernafon and Caerleon (where the finding of candles underlines the role of the light-dark dialectic in the cult), as well as in a Londinium that was already very cosmopolitan, with individuals coming from northern and eastern Europe, from North Africa or even from China—as recent research (Redfern et al., Reference Redfern, Gröcke, Millard, Ridgeway, Johnson and Hefner2016) has shown. The cults of the Doliche Jupiter (in Commagene) and the Egyptian divinities Isis and Serapis further emphasise the fascination that these Eastern cults exerted over Romano-British populations.
The arrival of Christianity is analysed in Chapter 9 (‘The Coming of Christ: From Many Gods to One’). The evidence documents practices of violence (such as the martyrdom of Alban and his companions in Verulamium or the iconoclasm of ‘pagan’ cultic statues such as that of Mercury in Uley), but also the Christian and pagan visitation of communal spaces (such as the sanctuary of Sulis Minerva in Bath) or even the recycling of statues of traditional gods. It would perhaps have been desirable for this chapter on the Christianization of Britannia to have drawn the book to a close. However, it is followed by another chapter devoted to ideology and funerary practices, spanning from Druidic understandings to Roman epigraphy to commemorate the dead (Ch. 10, ‘Journey into Avernus: Death, Burial, and the Perception of Afterlife’).
‘Worshipping Together: Acceptance, Integration, and Antagonism’ (Ch. 11), the last chapter of the book, analyses the ‘myth of tolerance’ with which much of the traditional historiography has described polytheistic systems. The chapter shows examples of religious hatred and iconoclasm such as at Uley (where, paradoxically, the head of the patron deity would have been recycled to represent Christ, as proposed by the author with, in my view, insufficient argument). Despite the criticism towards such generalizations of tolerance, the importance given to the two variants—indigenous and Roman—of interpretatio (the process of assimilation or translation of gods from another religious system to your own; see also Chiai et al., Reference Chiai, Häussler and Kunst2012) and the reflections on the resulting syncretism, suggest that, in the opinion of the author, common worship would have been more significant than prevalent antagonism.
One of the conclusions of the Epilogue is that the Britons never lost the sense of their local identity despite the adoption of new cult technologies (iconography and epigraphy in particular). The question is whether that ‘local identity’ was the same in the fifth century ad as in the first century ad. Equally questionable seems the idea that ‘Despite the demotion from sacral authority after its absorption into the Empire, it is highly likely that the Druids continued to orchestrate Roman Britain's religious vigour and spiritual independence’ (p. 235, my emphasis). But, in spite of these questions of nuance, there is no doubt that Miranda Aldhouse-Green's book constitutes the most successful of all the approaches to the religious conceptions and practices of ancient Britannia carried out in the recent historiography: an excellent summary of the state of the question, with a novel, critical, and original analysis that will undoubtedly arouse the delight of scholars and readers.
