John Pearce (King's College, University of London)
Roman sanctuaries are among the richest repositories in northern Europe for the discovery of inscriptions. Texts carved on stone, punched on metal plaques or incised on lead tablets petitioned gods, acknowledged their actions and offered gifts to solicit their favour. This paper examines encounters between worshippers and monumental texts in Roman provincial sanctuaries as a component of religious experience, primarily using case studies from Roman Britain. It explores how the ‘material turn’ identified in Roman epigraphy can be applied to votives and related dedications from Britain, their attributes in terms of text, form and preservation being typical of Rome’s northern European provinces.
The texts placed on and within sanctuary spaces have been central to the study of religion in Britannia and beyond. Of all the elements which are typically attested - names of deities, names (and more) of worshippers, descriptions of ritual action - it is the theonyms which have dominated scholarly attention. Their analysis has illuminated the provincial pantheon, Rome’s appropriation of indigenous deities (Webster 1995) and local negotiation of divine identities (Aldhouse-Green 2004; Haussler and King 2007).
However, perhaps because of their de-contextualised and sometimes fragmented condition, the materiality of these inscriptions has remained in the shadows. This is not for want of attention to key material attributes – recent publications of individual texts consistently give substantial detail on material, form, layout, lettering, decoration and so on while individual studies have addressed some characteristics more systematically, for example altar size (King 2017), letter cutting (Raybould 1999) or decoration (Kewley 1974). However with the exception of curse tablets, whose making, form and deposition has been analysed as integral to their efficacy (e.g. Tomlin 2002), the challenge remains to use material attributes as objects central to the experience of (some) sanctuaries. Study of altars has also fragmented along disciplinary lines, with art historians, epigraphers and archaeologists separately examining their decoration, texts and archaeological contexts, inhibiting a holistic appreciation of their materiality in a temple setting (Adrych and Dalglish 2020).
This paper therefore integrates the texts on altars and related inscriptions with their material attributes so as to assess more fully how these monuments expressed the ambitions of their commissioners in sacred space. To meet this challenge, this paper advocates two approaches. After identifying the diverse manifestations of writing in temple contexts, it first illustrates how selected material characteristics of dedications on stone, including size, material, colour, letter cutting and framing, interacted with the text to represent the votary to human and divine audiences. Second, it contextualises this composite monumentality within the embodied experience of temple space. It explores the material constraints, for example proximity, and the sensory circumstances, for example participation in sacrifice, which conditioned worshippers’ encounters with texts.