It is no longer possible to conceive of the study of ancient religions as something separate from the study of their materiality. The modern study of materiality is quite distinct from the long tradition of studying material artefacts in the field of ancient religions, since it is not preoccupied with the objects alone. It does not focus on mere issues of the qualities of materials, fabrication, material representations, and typologies. Nor does it limit its focus to the interpretations of functions and meanings of objects that arise within the still-prevailing structuralist perspective on religion. Rather, the study of materiality places the agency of the objects in the foreground. Being an integral part of a complex web — an assemblage as it were — of intersecting and interacting bodies, ideas, beliefs and the sensory experiences involved, objects have the ability to shape religious practices, spaces, perceptions, and, in doing so, to shape religion as a whole. The increasing interest in this promising and multifaceted field has led to a corresponding increase in the variety of methodologies used for approaching its subject matter. Pioneering anthropological and sociological studies by Alfred Gell and Bruno Latour inspired ground-breaking archaeological and iconographical works by Ian Hodder and Jaś Elsner, who investigated the viewer's visual engagements with ancient art and archaeological objects. More recent studies of ancient cultures have applied various concepts and methods drawn from areas such as post-colonial theory, embodied practice, sensory experiences and the cognitive science of religion in order to develop innovative approaches to the impact and interplay of material objects within the globalisation of the ancient world, the urbanisation of religion, or the experiential quality of religion.
The three works assembled for this review represent and add new perspectives to this range of approaches to materiality in ancient religions. Not only do they contribute new and exciting archaeological evidence to the current debate, but they also contribute new perspectives on how to handle these objects and how to squeeze as much information as possible out of the agency of these objects regarding the hidden secrets of ancient religious practice, belief and experience.
Ritual Matters, edited by Claudia Moser and Jennifer Knust, encompasses a wide range of material, from the monumental (Moser, Várhelyi, Duday and Van Andringa, Huet) to the miniature (Ekroth, Gordon), from organic (Ekroth, Duday and Van Andringa) to crafted (Gordon, Huet, Várhelyi), and from the written (Knust, Duday and Van Andringa) to the figural (Huet). The volume brings together two major trajectories in approaching the agency of objects. In closely examining the handling of bones (Gunnel Ekroth, ch. 3), the reuse of burial sites (Henri Duday and William Van Andringa, ch. 5) and the rearrangement and ‘amending’ of altars (Claudia Moser, ch. 4) within the complex web formed by other objects, buildings and infrastructures, the first trajectory examines material agency in terms of resonating, updating and perpetuating collective rituals and religious tradition. From the arrangement of objects, these studies infer religious practices, the mentality of worshippers, and thus a collective memory. The agency of the objects is, according to this view, limited to their possible usage as items that guide the worshipper in their practice. The objects are markers of memory rather than agents that trigger the worshippers’ interaction with these objects, and thus change the use and meaning of the objects. The same holds true for the agency of visual evidence, as studied by Valérie Huet (ch. 2), who examines and compares Roman, Gallic and Mithraic sacrificial images as representations, indeed as ideologies and regimes of meaning-making, rather than as actual agents that are part of ritual practice and that elicit responses to themselves from the human agents.
However, material objects do not just leave their imprint on human actions. As Zsuszanna Várhelyi (ch. 6), a representative of the second trajectory in this volume, shows in her contribution, the engagement with objects was an embodied and therefore dialectical practice — a practice that results from the dialectical conjunction between the body and the material. As her study on statuary honours points out, these statuary objects did not just shape rituals. Being one element in the fluid web of objects and bodies, it was also the use and inclusion of these objects in a ritual context that shaped the individual's actions towards and with them. These statuary objects became active, indeed interactive participants within a ritualised encounter. In arguing in favour of a rather liturgical view of Christian miscellanies from the third to the fifth centuries, Jennifer Knust (ch. 7) takes up Várhelyi's lead and examines these texts as objects that change the reading habits, the ‘scriptural practices’ as it were, of different groups, rather than as objects that are influenced by canonical norms. Richard Gordon's contribution (ch. 8) makes this point even clearer. His study of inductive divination on different social levels points towards the dialectic between human-made structures and the agency evolved by the objects in the context of these structures. He complicates the views that precede him in the volume by pointing out that objects, and knowledge about objects, their use and the meanings elicited from them are entangled in various layers of society, from so-called popular culture to elite culture. Gordon points out that objects, in this case sieves and stones, developed what I would describe as an Eigensinn through becoming part of various intersecting discourses and practices. A special form of such an Eigensinn is presented by objects placed at burial sites. As Duday and Van Andringa demonstrate, some of these objects, such as epitaphs, act on and act with human agents so that, in certain cases, they seem to take over or replace human agency on the spot.
Aiming at a first comprehensive study of Sanctuaries in Roman Dacia as a complex network of agents, ideas and practices on both the local and imperial levels, Csaba Szabó's published PhD thesis dives into the complex theoretical frame constructed by Knust and Moser, amending this framework of interacting objects and bodies by drawing on the notion of religious experience. His book seeks to integrate the sensory-motor system of the human body into the framework sketched by Moser, Knust and their colleagues. Unlike Moser and Knust, S. seeks to encompass the discourse on materiality in its entirety; his aim is to provide a new overarching perspective for provincial archaeology. To this end, his take on material agency is embedded in a lived ancient religion approach that focuses on the entanglement of objects, practices, ideas and experiences from a rather spatial theoretical perspective. In applying the spatial taxonomy of primary, secondary and shared spaces, S. analyses the material objects as part of connected and interacting assemblages of architectural forms and objects rather than through the lens of binary concepts, such as private/public, urban/rural, and so forth. The material evidence discussed thus ranges from small, single objects, through altars and temples, and finally to cities, landscapes and the province itself. Given these various foci and materials, the book further includes theories on urbanisation, citification, sacralisation, communication and, most importantly, individualisation and the cognitive science of religion.
The organisation of the book follows this taxonomy. Typologies of ritual objects or sanctuaries play little role in structuring the volume, with the focus being almost entirely on the spatial typology mentioned. The three main sections of the volume examine some thirty case studies from 142 sacralised spaces uncovered so far. These sections are titled: ‘Sacralising the space in urban context’ (mainly Sarmizegetusa and Apulum), ‘Sanctuaries and networks in military settlements’ and ‘Sacralised spaces in the countryside’. Each section is then subdivided to allow for closer analyses informed by the theories sketched above. These subchapters include issues surrounding space and its monopolisation (II, 6), identities (II, 8), religious entrepreneurship (II, 8; II, 10; IV, 4), agency and experience of walls (II, 1), caves (IV, 5) or sensescapes (II, 3), the visibility and maintenance of power (II, 6), small group religions (II, 8–9), syncretism (III, 2) and memory (IV, 2). Each subchapter deals with specific sets of material artefacts, such as those related to Mithraism (II, 9; IV, 4–5), Liber Pater (II, 8), or Jupiter Dolichenus (II, 6; III, 2; IV, 4). In arranging the evidence in this way, the book provides detailed readings and re-evaluations of inscriptions, single objects, and the architectonic and social structures within which they were embedded.
Taken as a whole, the book offers a detailed yet comprehensive overview of the religious landscape of Dacia, its rural and urban sites and the various forms and context in which objects unfold their agency. The book does not lack for material, topics, nor theoretical input, as the impressive bibliography attests. An archaeological approach that draws on various theories from religious, social and cultural studies is clearly very promising. However, such an approach cannot but also produce many tensions, many links and threads, which are difficult to manage and whose relations to each other are not (indeed, cannot be) explained or unfolded throughout. For instance, the notion of religious experience as an ‘effect of religious communication’ is rather vague, especially as it does not explain the relation of the experience to materiality. The ambitious attempt to get to grips with almost all theoretical approaches to an extremely wide variety of issues — including complex topics such as hierarchisation, spaces, senses, or memory — means that the author at times loses control of the numerous threads, leading to a slight wilderness of concepts and terms, sometimes crossing and replacing each other (e.g. ‘lived ancient religious experience’ = ‘lived experience’ = ‘religious experience’ = ‘sensescape’). Other terms, meanwhile, remain underdeveloped (e.g. ‘highly individualised piety’).
Without specifically seeking to do so, Daniele Miano's study of Fortuna in Rome and Italy contributes significantly to the current debate on materiality. M. makes an ambitious attempt to put the vast amount of literary and material evidence on Fortuna into the web of interacting objects, bodies and ideas. To this end, his approach deploys Koselleck's notion of ‘concept’, which M. uses to highlight and manage the tension between the structural level of a ‘semantic system’ and the individual cognition that takes place in the context of practice. The idea of concept as an ‘entirety of meaning and experience’ — an inconsistent set of meanings, as it were — opens new perspectives on countless perceptions and conceptions of a deity that are dependent on the current socio-political constellation in which the deity is embedded and experienced.
The chapter titles accord with M.'s general aim of not limiting himself to authoritative and functionalist explanations, maintaining throughout the picture of a multiplicity of meanings, indeed concepts, of Fortuna. We read, for instance, ‘Fortunae in Italy’ (ch. 2), ‘To Each his Own’ (ch. 5), ‘Fortuna in Translation, Fortuna as Translation’ (ch. 6), or ‘A Godless Goddess’ (ch. 7). Every chapter follows its own agenda related to the ‘semantic struggles’ that M. pursues. In ch. 3, ‘Archaic Rome’, for instance, M. sketches an evolutionary model of the increase of Fortunae — an increase which he sees as being intrinsically tied to the evolution of social stratification in Rome. M. unveils a strong connection between dedications, vows and the plebeian elite, who seem to have conceived and disseminated an image of the mythic King Tullius to whom this elite group then related itself. He also detects a strong connection between the evolving social layer of knights (equites) and the evolution of Fortunae.
Koselleck's notion of ‘concept’ permeates ch. 6, ‘Fortuna in Translation, Fortuna as Translation’, the most, although this chapter limits its approach to the linguistic notion of translation. In terms of translation studies, M. focuses his investigation on the ‘translation proper’, unintentionally educing a binarism between Latin and Greek instead of going beyond these borders by acknowledging an even larger level of ‘concept’. Ch. 6 thus exemplifies the problem that the theoretical model does not always permeate the book in the way that one might expect. As M. himself admits at the end of certain chapters, there is a tension between his new perspective and the actual execution of this perspective. At some points, the reader is given the impression that the author would like to go much further than his theoretical model allows him to. The key perspective focusing on ‘variety’ and ‘semantic struggle’ tends to shade into a notion of plurality, in the sense of co-existing options rather than processes that intersect and interact, indeed that even create amalgams that emanate from the web of ritual practices, beliefs and the material objects of Fortuna.
Ultimately, the approaches to materiality found across these varied works are as multifaceted as is the material they approach itself. These books assemble various innovative methodologies, ranging from ‘ritualisation’ (Várhelyi), ‘social imprinting’ (Moser), ‘lived religion’ (Szabó), ‘concepts’ (Miano), or Bourdieu's distinction between ‘dominated practice’ (systematizing and fixing of knowledge) and ‘intentional profanation’ (special and detailed knowledge about the power of objects) (Gordon), just as they assemble recent excavations (Duday and Van Andringa, Szabó) and re-assessments of marginalised visual evidence (Huet, Miano). David Frankfurter's afterword to Ritual Matters complements this variety. There he sketches an impressively comprehensive theory of material agency that will provide a perfect introduction to the topic for those scholars who decide to contribute to the promising field of materiality in ancient religions.
