The volume is the result of two days of discussion on ‘what use we should or could make of the concept of Sanctuary’ by a group of researchers gathered at Max-Weber-Kolleg in Erfurt (p. 9). The book originated from the Sanctuary Project. This is a continuation of the ongoing research dialogue initiated by the ‘Lived Ancient Religion’ (LAR) project developed at University of Erfurt, connected with the recent interest in the materiality of ancient religion, which evolved from discontent with previous work on religion centring on political institutions and polis-religion. It explores the experience of lived religion, especially by individual agents, through cognitive, literary and social engagement with rituals (J. Albrecht et al., ‘Religion in the Making’, Religion 48 [2018]; V. Gasparini et al. [edd.], Lived Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean World [2020]). Material religion focuses on material objects and practices in religious life (E.J. Graham, ‘Material and Experiential Religion’, CR 75 [2025]). Therefore, it is not a surprise that the volume has chapters explicitly using the LAR approach (contributions by J. Rüpke, Norman, M. Serino, R. Sassu, C. Szabó and J. Alvar Ezquerra together with J.C. López-Gómez).
A central aim of this project and the volume was to investigate the sanctuary, the place where individuals experienced religious practices through objects, particularly as to how it shaped human experience and religious knowledge in the ancient world. As outlined in the introduction, previous work on sanctuaries focused on the examination of material culture, including temple architecture, artworks and votive materials (p. 17). The chapters of the volume, instead, are centred on religious experiences, emerging from interactions of spaces, objects and participants. The introduction defines the term ‘sanctuary’: the editors identify it as a space where religious life and practices took place and where institutions were anchored. It is marked as special, separated from other lived environments; but a clear distinction between the lived-in and the sacred area does not always apply, especially in the prehistoric and the archaic periods. The sanctuary is identified as a point of contact between the ordinary and the sacred, a space where people can bond. Therefore the editors conclude that ‘sanctuary’ is a fuzzy concept, encompassing cemeteries, areas where the festival of Parentalia was held, and the Roman atrium that houses the lararium. Religion in a domestic context is rarely discussed (see the chapters by A.-K. Rieger and Serino).
The volume is mostly about permanently special homes or houses of the gods, where the cult statue was placed. However, with an epilogue by J. Kindt the volume rightly ends by arguing that future research should focus not just on sanctuaries but on material evidence that can exist in a sacred house, such as mobile altars, portable icons and the human body; they are the ‘quintessential location of religious experience’ (p. 470). Future research needs to open up towards sacred spaces more broadly, including cognitive approaches, narrative and storytelling (p. 471).
The volume presents a wide variety of Greek and Roman case studies from ancient Egypt to the late Roman period. However, only one chapter is about Egypt (T. Gamelin), and one covers Greek and Roman examples (K. Sporn). The material discussed ranges from archaeological evidence (ceramics, stelae, architecture) to iconographic, epigraphic and literary sources. Despite the broad division of the volume’s chapters in the epilogue – ‘Lived Religion’, ‘Focalization and Sacralization’, ‘Embodiment, Communication, Memory, and Storytelling’ – it would be a challenge to group the volume’s chapters within subsections.
Starting with an introduction to the delimitation and boundaries of the concept of sanctuary or sacred place, Rüpke provides an overarching theoretical overview of religion, which is considered a form of communication with special agents, sometimes including objects, frequently conceptualised as gods. He moves on to discuss how altars, including miniature ones, should be considered essential items in ancient religions, more than the actual images of the divine. Altars were widespread in the ancient Mediterranean, including its periphery, and enabled a focus on the act of divine communication.
Gamelin emphasises how Egyptian temple architecture, together with inscriptions and images on the temple walls, did not only have a practical function but also an emotional impact on priests, creating an atmosphere and influencing the movement of priests during religious ceremonies.
E. Angliker, Y. Kourayos and K. Daifa explore varied personal experiences in the sanctuary, which is socially constructed through the interplay of material culture, religion and individual agency. Their chapter focuses on dance and travel associated with the cult of Apollo at Despotiko and in the Cyclades. The analysis of depictions of objects unravels the religious experience of dancing. Mythological stories help travellers create mental maps to memorise landscapes. Although there is no literary source for travelling from Paros to Despotiko by sea, it is possible to refer to sources for Delos. A relevant comparative study is the work undertaken by S. Blakely on Samothracian gods, religious network and seascape (S. Blakely, ‘Beyond Braudel: Network Models and a Samothracian Seascape’, in: C.W. Concannon and L.A. Mazurek [edd.], Across the Corrupting Sea [2016]).
Norman explores the boundaries between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’ through imagery on Daunian stelae. She combines the LAR approach with ‘Ritual Ecology’, which focuses on reciprocally casual relationships among people, places, animals and things, including seasonal cycles and the weather, as well as the human and the non-human life cycles (p. 90). This twofold methodology supports the argument that performance was embedded in everyday living, enmeshed in a localised ritual context through communal participation and the repetition of the reproduction, retention and recreation of (religious, ecological, social and historical) knowledge.
G. Mastronuzzi, D. Tamiano and G. Vizzino examine archaeobotanical evidence and the remains of dining vessels in sanctuaries in Apulia (Italy) during the Archaic and the Hellenistic periods through digital calculations of vessel capacities.
By considering the Greek ritual norms and the cliffs of the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, E. Eidinow discusses how the networks of interrelations between human/non-human and human/object create different socially constructed narratives, also called ‘spatial stories’, by groups and individuals over time.
Serino analyses the distribution of ritual artefacts within the sacred house in Himera in Greek Sicily, questioning scholarly dichotomies (e.g. public/private, sacred/profane) and reassessing the concept of sacred space outside canonised space. To understand fully a sacred space, including the one in Himera, we need to consider the furnishings, the movement of the people, their gestures and the location of the objects within the house as well as ongoing interactions between the city-space, different human agents, religious agencies and practices in the city.
Bultrighini demonstrates how the topography of the Eretrian cult of Artemis at Amarynthos was reproduced in Athenian territory, linking the asylon and the chora through ritual processions.
According to Sassu’s chapter, the signs left by human actants (meaning the different types of dedications made in sanctuaries) enable us to understand and value the logic behind the arrangement of Greek sanctuaries and their multifaceted and polyfunctional nature.
J. Steinhauer presents the overlooked foreign female active voice from the Levant in religious experience within the sanctuary of the Syrian gods at Delos, reconstructing the relationships between female social and family lives through archaeological data and written dedications. As a result, the study demonstrates a more diverse and balanced socio-religious community and experience.
Sporn offers an insight into female and male individual agency in religious experiences through an overarching geographical and temporal study of their portraits in temples across the Roman Republic and Empire, which originated from contacts with the Greek world, especially in the East.
Starting with a clear overview of ornamenta and simulacra and their differentiation on a legal level, considering both written and archaeological evidence in imperial Rome, M. Arnhold discusses the difficulty for viewers to distinguish the two visually, especially in small sanctuaries, and how their divine images were both historically and socially rooted.
Through a thorough analysis of iconography in different contexts across Pompeii, Rieger emphasises the female active voice of both human agents (mainly priestesses) and goddesses in constructing religious experiences in public and private spaces, influencing, generating and connecting with the urban fabric. The experiences of the viewers, the inhabitants of Roman Pompeii, were shaped and challenged by visual and material similarities, repetition and changes in motifs, attributes, media and spatial contexts.
By examining a group’s conversation in the temple of Apollo at Delphi described by Plutarch, E. Franchi considers how the walking through a sanctuary by a group, while conversing, helps reconstruct memories of the past and discuss philosophical problems. It is a tradition rooted in Greek culture, later adopted by Roman culture.
G. Petridou proposes that Aelius Aristides’ personal, relational matching of illness to initiation was modelled on the Athenian relational matching of the cult of Asclepius to the mysteries of Demeter and Kore at Eleusis.
D. Dalglish observes how the experience of constructing a temple over time and the temple itself influenced the naming of a god already worshipped in that temple. The god’s name evolved during a different phase of the temple, becoming a god of the place (toponymic name). He considers the Temple of Jupiter at Baalbek/Heliopolis, which became associated with Jupiter Optimus Maximus Heliopolitanus during the second phase of the temple’s construction.
By combining the LAR approach with Graham Clark’s systemic model of past societies and the spatial archaeology of David Clarke, a new taxonomy of sacralised spaces is proposed in relation to other spaces on different scales (micro-, meso- and macro-spaces) in Danubian provinces during the Principate in Szabó’s chapter. This approach helps identify how sacred places’ constant interaction with other spaces, such as cities and other settlements (mezzo-spaces) and a Roman province (macro-spaces), plays an important role in the Roman religious communication between humans and divine agents.
By applying the LAR approach to the crisis of the third century in Roman Hispania, Alvar Ezquerra and López-Gómez argue for a shift of focus from ‘civic religion’ to their newly coined term ‘administered religion’, when the behaviours of individual actors (local elites) stopped funding public religious rituals and festivals, leading to a collapse of the temple system and thus creating the social instability characterising the fourth century.
Although the project and the volume use the term ‘sanctuary’, it might have been more appropriate to use the more inclusive and comprehensive term ‘sacred place’, which appears in most of the contributions, as a synonym or alternative to ‘sanctuary’. Some chapters have a more theoretical engagement than others, integrating specific theoretical frameworks, such as Ritual Ecology (Norman’s chapter) and Graham Clark’s systemic model of past societies and the spatial archaeology of David Clarke (Szabó’s chapter), aside from the LAR approach. Although the agency of the sanctuary, or better sacred place, in religious experiences and knowledge is not entirely clear in each chapter, this volume and the Sanctuary project are significant and necessary research milestones in the study of ancient religion: scholars need to consider the specific sacred place where individual agents experienced religion. This volume reminds us that sacred places are focal active agents in shaping religious experiences, manifestations and communication, together with material culture and individual human actors.
