Sacred Britannia
The Gods and Rituals of Roman Britain
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- 23,99 €
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- 23,99 €
Publisher Description
Two thousand years ago, the Romans sought to absorb into their empire what they regarded as a remote, almost mythical island on the very edge of the known world Britain. The expeditions of Julius Caesar and the invasion of ad 43 brought fundamental and lasting changes to the island. Not least among these was a pantheon of new Classical deities and religious systems, along with a clutch of exotic eastern cults including Christianity. But what of Britannia and her own home-grown deities? What cults and cosmologies did the Romans encounter and how did they in turn react to them? Under Roman rule, the old gods were challenged, adopted, adapted, absorbed and re-configured.
In this fresh and innovative new account, Miranda Aldhouse-Green balances literary, archaeological and iconographic evidence (and scrutinizes their shortcomings and how we interpret them) to illuminate the complexity of religion and belief in Roman Britain, and the two-way traffic of cultural exchange and interplay between imported and indigenous cults. Despite the remoteness of this period, on the threshold between prehistory and history, many of the forces, tensions, ideologies and issues of identity at work are still relevant today, as Sacred Britannia skilfully draws out.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Aldhouse-Green (Bog Bodies Uncovered) presents an intricate collage of the various religions that collided in Britain from Claudius's conquest in 55 BCE to the early fifth century CE. During this period, disparate faiths met, shared space, and borrowed from one another after the Romans took control of England, which, at the time of their arrival, was a strange, wild space. Aldhouse-Green begins with a discussion of the Druids then covers the various religions that came along with the Roman empire. Not only did Rome bring its imperial Jupiter worship but it also imported soldiers and mercenaries from far-flung places. An auxiliary of Syrian archers, for example, built a temple to the Syrian goddess Cybele near Hadrian's wall. Aldhouse-Green considers what statues, relief carvings, and tombstones say about ancient peoples' faiths (her section on Roman-Gallic tombs and human sacrifice is particularly revealing). With careful, methodical precision, Aldhouse-Green will convince readers of the accuracy of the facts and the reliability of her timelines about the intermingling of faiths. This will be an invaluable book for anyone interested in the early mixing and hybridized of faith in the ancient world.
