The Votives Project is a network of people from different backgrounds who study, create or use votive offerings or other related ways of communicating with the divine. It aims to facilitate dialogue between academic disciplines, and between academics and religious ‘practitioners’, and in doing so to develop rich cross-cultural and multi-period understandings of votive material and contexts. If you would…
Professor Andrew N. Williams is currently studying for an MA in The Classical Mediterranean (University of Leicester), but is also an established medical practitioner and medical historian. In this post he reflects on the absence of particular types of anatomical votive and how new discoveries from San Casciano dei Bagni (Italy) might shed new light…
Last year, Dr Sally Waite (Senior Lecturer in Classical Archaeology) and Dr Olivia Turner (artist and postdoctoral researcher) at Newcastle University shared with The Votives Project their short film The Way My Body Feels (2022). This showcased some of the work they had been doing with experimental workshops as part of their project on Corporeal…
On the eve of our postgraduate workshop in ancient material religion and public lecture about the votive finds from San Casciano dei Bagni , we are delighted to share the recording of a conversation with our visiting speaker Dr Jacopo Tabolli. Tune in to hear about the latest excavations at the Etrusco-Roman thermo-mineral site of…
Announcing a forthcoming votives art exhibition! “When the heart of a pig has hardened, dice it small” is a contemporary art exhibition taking place in Tinos, Greece between 18-31 July this year. Spearheaded by KIRKI – a new nomadic gallery creating transnational dialogues between the UK and the Greek Cyclades – the exhibition showcases 30…
Dr Sally Waite is Senior Lecturer in Classical Archaeology and Dr Olivia Turner is an artist and postdoctoral researcher, both at Newcastle University. Sally’s research focuses primarily on Attic red-figure pottery and the history of collecting and collections, working closely with the Shefton Collection of Greek and Etruscan Archaeology at the Great North Museum: Hancock. Olivia is…
Jedediah Caesar is an artist and curator based in Los Angeles and Berlin. In this post, he introduces a new artist project on votive deposits and the photographic record, which focuses on the moment of ‘uncovering’….
Claire Heseltine is a PhD student in Classics at King’s College, London. Her doctoral project focuses on miniature representations of the gods on personal, portable items in the late Hellenistic period, and the importance of these objects as mediators between believer and divine referent. More widely, her research focuses on the material culture of personal religion,…
Contributions are invited for a new project on Gods’ Collections… Places of worship of all traditions – here for convenience all called ‘temples’ – have always accumulated collections. Today some temples have generated great art museums, while others just keep a few old things in a sacristy cupboard. This new project will look at why…
Becky Brewis is an artist based in Dundee. She has recently devised an art assignment – open to all – which guides participants through making an anatomical votive in response to this time of physical separation. She tells us about the project and how you can take part…
Readers of The Votives Project might be interested to learn about the publication of a new book by one of the website’s co-founders. Reassembling Religion in Roman Italy (Routledge, 2021) by Emma-Jayne Graham focuses on ancient material religion, and among other things chapters feature discussions of sanctuaries and anatomical votives in ancient Italy, as well…
As an artist Garry Barker has gradually evolved an art practice that was initially a response to community needs, such as how to visualise the need for lighting in poorly lit streets or communicating how the community was working to ‘design out crime’; to a practice that visualised stories told to him by people he…
The Memories for Life project, funded by the Swedish Research Council, was initiated in 2017 to study the hundreds of objects dedicated by non-royal individuals to the divine in the ancient Near East. These objects, inscribed in the cuneiform script in the Akkadian and Sumerian languages, inform us about worship practices and dedicatory traditions spanning…
Eleonora Colangelo is a PhD candidate in Ancient History and Classical Philology at the ANHIMA Centre (Anthropology and History of Ancient Worlds) in Paris and at the University of Pisa. Her research focuses on ancient Greek religion and aesthetics and she is working on a doctoral project exploring the evolution of Eros in ancient cosmetics/aesthetics.…
Tyler Jo Smith is Professor of Classical Art/Archaeology at the University of Virginia. Here she shares some of her ongoing research concerning rock-cut votive reliefs from the regions of northern Lycia and Pisidia, as well as her memories of the day she first encountered the ‘site with 40 horses’. One late summer afternoon in 1992,…
Milene Trindade is a PhD candidate in History of Art at the University of Évora, Portugal. She is currently writing her thesis on Devotion, Art and Technique: Photographic Ex-votos in the Alentejo Region in the 19th and 20th centuries. (Affiliations: HERCULES Laboratory – Cultural Heritage, Studies and Safeguard, and CHAIA – Centre for Art History and Artistic…
Anne-Lieke Brem has written for The Votives Project before, focusing on votive reliefs as ‘things’ and on specialisation in Greek healing cults. She returns here to share her latest thoughts about the significance of healing landscapes. A few years ago I became intrigued by the Greek Asklepieia and the Amphiareion of Oropos. Not merely by…
Valeria Motta has a PhD in the History of Art from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. She is an Associate Member of the Centre d’Histoireet de Théorie des Arts (CEHTA-EHESS). I wish to thank Gill Dilmitis for the revision of my English text Despite the fact that the reproduction…
Nadja Petersen is a Master’s student at the University of Copenhagen. She is currently writing her thesis on the anatomical votives from the Asclepieion in Corinth. When I began the research for my Master’s thesis in Classical Archaeology, I gathered inspiration from several different sources. I eventually chose the anatomical votives from Asclepieion (fifth and fourth…
Last year’s Making Herself Up (V&A 2018) narrated Frida Kahlo’s life through her personal belongings: family photographs, clothing, shoes, jewellery, cosmetics and – most notably – a significant collection of Mexican ex-votos (Spanish for ‘votive offerings’). In image and text, these tin votives paint scenes of illness, incarceration, hunting wounds, train crashes – any misfortune imaginable.…
Yoshiharu Kamino is Professor at Musashino Art University, and former chief of the university museum and library. He specialises in folklore studies and anthropology, and is currently studying Japanese anatomical votives. Shrines and temples are Japanese people’s spiritual hubs, and can be found everywhere. The former generally serve local deities, and the latter as a…
Maureen Carroll is Professor of Roman Archaeology at the University of Sheffield. Her recent research has focused on infancy and earliest childhood in the Roman world, and she is currently working on a project entitled ‘Mater Matuta and Related Goddesses: Guaranteeing Maternal Fertility and Infant Survival in Early Roman Italy’. In this post she discusses…
Welcome to our first TVP audio interview! Alongside our usual blog posts, we’ll now also run an ‘audio stream’ for sharing informal interviews with friends and colleagues who work on votive offerings (as well as other ‘votive sounds’, from rattly terracottas to religious processions). Please get in touch if you’d like to contribute, or if…
The Votives Project 