Resources > Place
On February 10th 2021, Dr Claudia Moser (University of California, Santa Barbara) and Dr Jessica Hughes (Open University) joined Dr Emma-Jayne Graham (Open University) to discuss concepts of religious place, as part of the seminar series ‘Reassembling Ancient Religion’.
Follow this link or click on the image above to watch a recording of the three presentations.
About the Reassembling Ancient Religion seminar series…
The seminar series (running in Spring 2021) has been designed to explore the key themes and approaches to ancient religion that are adopted in a new book by Dr Emma-Jayne Graham, entitled Reassembling Religion in Roman Italy. The series comprises five online seminars, each of which is connected with one of the book’s broadly themed chapters - (1) Place, (2) Objects, (3) Bodies, (4) Divinity, and (5) Magic. During the seminars we will explore how the new materialist and relational approach to ancient lived religion that is advocated by the study might relate to lived religion as it was experienced in other chronological, geographical and cultural contexts across the ancient world.
Abstract of ‘Place’ chapter from ‘Reassembling Religion in Roman Italy’
“The ritualised assemblages of material things discussed in all chapters of this book can be contextualised in relation to experiences of place, encompassing the performance of discrete ritual activities which brought to the fore the physical qualities of locations as diverse as urban and non-urban sanctuaries, caves, fountains, altars, and temple structures, as well as other groves and physical locations in the landscape. It is therefore necessary to begin by assessing the significance of place before examining what happens when ritualisation forges relationships between it and various other material things. Focusing on a discrete group of so-called terrace sanctuaries built across late Republican Latium, including the sanctuaries of Fortuna Primigenia at Praeneste, Juno Gabina at Gabii, and the so-called tempio grande at Tarracina, this chapter argues that we should stop defining Roman religious place in relation to a checklist of architectural features and instead ask new questions about how religious place as lived afforded proximal and temporally specific experiences of religious agency.”
