The study of Roman religion is no longer just about gods, no longer centred on beliefs, no longer concerned primarily with elite concepts, behaviours and institutions. In the last decade, research in the field of Roman religion has distanced itself from a reliance on texts and images as realistic representations of religious ideas and practices and has moved towards a more materially grounded study of lived religious experience. Such a cross-disciplinary research programme relies on the tangible objects and physical situations of ritual, and on novel ways of thinking about the interwoven relationships of things, places, gods and humans. G.'s volume delivers convincingly on the claim made in the book's title: it re-presents a picture of Roman religion that is at once solidly grounded in material evidence, site- and temporally specific, and cogently organised with respect to the latest thinking about the complex entanglements of the natural, cultural, human and supernatural worlds. The book is meant to be neither encyclopaedic nor comprehensive, but rather offers – in the form of a survey of ideas followed by detailed case studies – an impressively forward-looking rethinking of the range of different types of religious practice in Roman Italy – processions, sacrifice, votives, prayer, divination, curses and magic.
The volume brings a novel mix of theoretical approaches from a materialist, archaeological perspective to the study of Roman religion. Central to G.'s argument is her view of Roman religion not as ways of understanding but rather as agency – ways of knowing how, where, when and with whom to perform ritual activities. G. establishes connections between the ‘proximal’ behavioural knowledge of lived religion arising from material experiences of individual human ritual activities and the ‘distal’ knowledge of a Roman religion encompassing the broadly shared practice and experienced-based representations of ways of acting to which individuals deferred.
G. accomplishes her impressive materialist fusion of individually experienced and collectively managed religion through an eclectic merging of the posthumanist idea of assemblages with the anthropocentric concept of affordances. Assemblages consist, in G.'s preferred terminology, of human and more-than-human things actively resonating with one another; affordances are seen as agentic ‘qualities of material things which might cause other things to behave, act, move, think, feel, or otherwise change, and which when brought together can make things happen’ (p. 29). For G. the agentic proximal behavioural knowledge of individual lived religion emerges from the experience-producing processes involved when human individuals interact with the affordances of material things within ritualised assemblages. The concept of an overarching ‘Roman religion’, then, can be modelled as a complementary, ‘distal’ and representational knowledge that emerges ultimately from the formation of a collective ‘assemblage of assemblages’ of the individual, proximal kind (p. 36).
In five chapters on ‘Place’, ‘Objects’, ‘Bodies’, ‘Divinity’ and ‘Magic’ G. brings a range of different but theoretically related tools to bear on her appropriately disparate assemblage of practices, locations, periods and types of evidence. In the chapter on ‘Place’ G. sees places as active and as lived, and notes that religious places should be ‘encountered as material things’ in which rituals ‘formed relationships’ between a variety of ‘thingly components’ – such as location, time, human and more-than-human things (p. 76). G. examines the operation of these place-creating relationships through theories of agency, bodily movement, the senses, architecture, materiality and temporality (among others) at the Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia at Praeneste, at Tempio Grande at Tarracina and at the Temple of Juno Gabina at Gabii. At each site G. conceives the place itself as both thing and agent, a product and producer of religious experience, crafted by and crafting a type of bodily movement and sensory experience specific to the sanctuary and to its architecture.
In ‘Objects’ G. examines the active role played by physical objects in the performance of sacrifice – the instrumenta sacra – and thinks through the agency emerging from the combination of these objects and the actions of the humans touching, holding and using them within the ritual assemblage. G. discusses in-depth the object of the incense box (acerra) and the priestly headgear (galerus and apex). Observing how the things in themselves have particular affordances, each offering distinct material experiences for each person engaging with the object, G. problematises the privileging of human agency in distal representations of ritual at the expense of the ‘thingly’ agency of human-object assemblages.
In ‘Bodies’ G. focuses on the sense of touch, looking at the relationship between human and more-than-human things in the context of the Republican practice of anatomical votive dedication. G. explores the ways in which the simultaneously material and representational votive (in this case the replicated human body) both engages actively with the living body and distally channels action and experience. In looking at specific examples from mid-Republican sanctuaries in Italy, utilising the Pantanacci Cave as the point of departure and organising the chapter by specific body part (feet, internal organs, miniature bodies and body parts, and animal figurines and body parts), G. describes how conceptual boundaries between a human body and the votive object can be blurred.
Moving from the offerings to the recipients of the offerings, G. asks in her next chapter, ‘Divinity’, whether or not gods can be things in the same sense as other assemblage-constituting material things, how cult statues are agency affording things and not just images, and how and why divinities mattered. Discussing principally a group of terracotta figures from Aricca, G. proposes that we should think of the divine as possessing an agency only in so far as this capacity for action is the ‘shared product of the affordances of the whole assemblage’ (p. 149); ritual, she notes, is what itself allows for the affective ‘thingliness’ of the immaterial divine to form relationships with other things, in ways productive of religious experience (p. 149).
In her final chapter, ‘Magic’, G. investigates how we might arrive at an integrative view of the ritualised activities we heuristically distinguish as magic and religion. G. examines the chronologically overlapping confluence of both types of practices at the fountain of Anna Perenna in Rome. At this site, she finds a plurality of lived religions and argues that objects that have a ‘magical’ character should not necessarily be excluded from an assemblage categorised as ‘religion’. The issue of magic or religion becomes then a question of how the emergent agency is rationalised as a strategy ‘to make a difference in the world’ (p. 148). At this one Roman site G. ties together the ways in which place, objects, bodies and divinity can come together in their particular assemblages to afford a particular lived religious experience and the enabling knowledge consequent to that experience.
In the end, having established the religious agency of places, objects, bodies, divinity and magic, G. has convincingly argued that it is the involvements, in the course of ritual activities, of embodied humans with more-than-human thingliness that afford the experiences of lived religion, and that it is the multiplicity of these personal involvements that will, in turn, serve as the basis for the distal representations of religion in broader senses of the term. True to its title, Reassembling Religion in Roman Italy brings together a novel assemblage of a variety of data types in close coordination with a range of materialist theoretical perspectives focused on assemblage theory, affordances and ‘thingliness’, to show just how we can advance the material-centred approach of lived religion that is so prevalent in current scholarship on Roman religion. While grounded in the evidence of ritual from central Italy in the mid to late Republican and early Imperial periods, the volume will surely serve as a model for future studies of religion that look beyond this geographical and chronological frame. Whether a graduate student new to the field or a specialist, the reader will leave the book with a reassembled and greatly enhanced understanding of ‘religion’, Roman or otherwise.
