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Reviving Roman Religion Ailsa Hunt (Newnham College, Cambridge)

Reviving Roman Religion By Ailsa Hunt (Newnham College, Cambridge)

Reviving Roman Religion by Ailsa Hunt (Newnham College, Cambridge)


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Summary

This book argues that thinking about sacred trees in the Roman world forces us to rethink how we understand Roman religion, in particular challenging current scholarly constructions of what sacrality means in Roman culture, and revealing what is lost when when we write the environment out of our understanding of Roman religion.

Reviving Roman Religion Summary

Reviving Roman Religion: Sacred Trees in the Roman World by Ailsa Hunt (Newnham College, Cambridge)

Sacred trees are easy to dismiss as a simplistic, weird phenomenon, but this book argues that in fact they prompted sophisticated theological thinking in the Roman world. Challenging major aspects of current scholarly constructions of Roman religion, Ailsa Hunt rethinks what sacrality means in Roman culture, proposing an organic model which defies the current legalistic approach. She approaches Roman religion as a 'thinking' religion (in contrast to the ingrained idea of Roman religion as orthopraxy) and warns against writing the environment out of our understanding of Roman religion, as has happened to date. In addition, the individual trees showcased in this book have much to tell us which enriches and thickens our portraits of Roman religion, be it about the subtleties of engaging in imperial cult, the meaning of numen, the interpretation of portents, or the way statues of the Divine communicate.

About Ailsa Hunt (Newnham College, Cambridge)

Ailsa Hunt is Isaac Newton Research Fellow in Classics at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.

Table of Contents

1. Rooting in: why give time to sacred trees?; 2. A brief history of tree-thinking: the enduring power of animism; 3. How arboreal matter matters: rethinking sacrality through trees; 4. Arboriculture and arboreal deaths: rethinking sacrality again; 5. Confronting arboreal agency: reading the Divine in arboreal behaviour; 6. Imagining the gods: how trees flesh out the identity of the Divine; 7. Branching out: what sacred trees mean for Roman religion.

Additional information

NPB9781107153547
9781107153547
1107153549
Reviving Roman Religion: Sacred Trees in the Roman World by Ailsa Hunt (Newnham College, Cambridge)
New
Hardback
Cambridge University Press
2016-09-12
342
N/A
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