The present book is not – as the title seems to suggest – a book detailing the archaeology of the Roman temple and bath at Bath, England (this has been amply achieved by earlier publications, the latest and most comprehensive of these is E. La Trobe-Bateman and R. Niblett, Bath: a Study of Settlement around the Sacred Hot Springs from the Mesolithic to the 17th Century ad. An Archaeological Assessment [2016]). What this book intends, and in the eyes of the reviewer succeeds in doing, is to re-assess the known facts about the sanctuary and its art and architecture in both a modern, theoretically informed manner and one that is in the best art-historical tradition of Classical Archaeology. By placing the sanctuary at Aquae Sulis, which traditionally was seen as being highly exceptional, into the wider network of towns and places with hot sources and/or votive depositions in water within the north-western provinces of the Roman Empire, C. is able to come to conclusions that overturn several preconceptions about Roman Bath, some of which had been cherished since the seventeenth century.

The study is better suited to advanced students and researchers with some knowledge of the comparative methods of Classical Archaeology, as these are not explained in depth. While the examples are carefully selected and introduced in a manner that is more than sufficient for scholars more or less au courant with the corpus of material, it is likely that beginners would struggle with it.

Chapter 1 explores the growing awareness of the Roman history of Bath by outlining the changing social and intellectual world of British antiquarians interested in Roman Bath between the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries and then charting the development of the archaeology of the town during the second half of the nineteenth century – from an antiquarian interest in single objects rescued during building works to the planned excavations of remains establishing the extent of the Roman settlement. Interestingly, C. can demonstrate that the conflict between a showy but inaccurate archaeology and a sober methodological approach was often also a class conflict, with the slapdash being tolerated because of its social superiority – membership of the professional classes being deemed more important than experience (a theme echoed in the recent film ‘The Dig’).

In the second chapter C. shows that the idea that Aquae Sulis was a Roman health spa owes more to the first explorers of Bath's Roman past and their firm belief in the curative powers of the waters than to its actual qualities. There is no proof that the sanctuary was seen as curative at all in the Roman period, as all the elements present in other known curative sanctuaries are lacking in Bath: no inscriptions giving thanks for healing, no tablets asking for healing, no masses of votive objects depicting afflicted body parts and no dedications to gods undisputedly connected to health such as Aesculapius and Hygeia. C. rightly maintains that the three finds that might form a tenuous connection with a curative function of the sanctuary would have been less stringently interpreted in this direction if they had been found in another settlement.

Chapter 3 first describes how Roman visitors would have experienced Aquae Sulis from arriving there to visiting the sanctuary with the source and bath building. The following part deals with the monumentalisation of the town, describing the architecture and placing it within building traditions in the Roman provinces. Curiously, Aquae Sulis seems to have been a walled town with a high number of public buildings and little else, missing the ‘normal’ elements of the urban fabric and with a misfit between the grand architecture and the assumed number of people living there. However, towns with large centres full of public buildings and only a very small population are also known from Italy, for instance Amiternum (M. Buess, Untersuchungen zur Siedlungs- und Wirtschaftsstruktur im zentralen Abruzzenraum in römischer Zeit, Amiternum 1 [forthcoming]). Here, the discrepancy is explained with the pastoral economy dominating the region. In any case, all the remains indicate that Bath must have been noteworthy for the size and the elaborate decoration of its stone buildings, certainly within Britain, but also in comparison with most towns in other north-western provinces of the Roman Empire, giving an impression of ‘Romanly sophistication’ (pp. 63–4).

Chapter 4 looks at the connections of Aquae Sulis in the wider Roman Empire, starting with the foundation of the Roman town at an indigenous sacred site as an ‘act of appropriation’ (p. 74). The technically sophisticated building operation of the reservoir as well as some of the elements of the architecture and art found at Bath indicate the involvement of craftsmen from other north-western provinces, demonstrating how well-connected the founding patron(s) must have been. C. then untangles the various influences on the iconography of the famous Bath Gorgon and looks at the many military consecrations of altars at Bath. These help to place Bath in a wider imperial context and demonstrate its strong connection to the rest of the Roman Empire, both during its founding as well as in later Roman periods.

In Chapter 5 C. concentrates on re-evaluating the votive depositions in the reservoir, comparing them with votives from other watery sites within Britain and in nearby Roman provinces, noting which find categories are typical and which are unusual. She also discusses the process of the creation of a curse tablet and the implications of coins as dedicated objects. The sixth chapter consists of two parts: the first analyses various elements of the Roman visual culture of Bath, exploring how the iconography ties into local as well as larger Roman networks. By carefully comparing them with other places within, but mainly outside of Britain, C. is able to discard the dichotomies of ‘Celtic’ versus ‘Roman’ and instead tease out the influences from very diverse areas within the Roman Empire, such as the Germanic provinces, Gaul and Spain, but also Rome itself. In the second part, elements of ritual practice are examined, which show that those at Bath were more typical of Britain and the other north-western provinces than of Italy or the wider Mediterranean.

The last chapter is a summary of the rather diverse results of the book, weaving a conclusion from the various components, which acknowledges both the importance of the local as well as that of the influences from elsewhere in the Roman Empire or, in C.'s words, ‘connected localism’ (p. 189).

This study sets Roman Bath and the art and architecture used to ‘Romanise’ it in relation to the rest of the Empire and especially the north-western provinces. It may be placed into a scholarly trend (‘glocalisation’) that looks at the very local indigenous traditions (instead of a general ‘Celtic’ art) as well as trying to recognise the specific origin of the non-local influences instead of connecting it to generalised ‘Gaul’ or ‘Rome’. Rather than depicting the sanctuary as a syncretistic merger of Roman and ‘Celtic’ traditions, what emerges is a far more colourful mix in which most of the influences from outside of Britain are ‘lateral’ – that is, from province to province rather than from the centre to the periphery. C. also replaces top-down coerced ‘Romanisation’ with the acknowledgement of the many different people that used these new traditions for a number of varied reasons, some ‘official’ and some private. The book offers much food for thought, not least that many Roman spa towns on the continent would profit from such a thorough and thoughtful re-evaluation of the available evidence.