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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
Kristel Henquet is a research masters student in archaeology and ancient history at Free University Amsterdam/University of Amsterdam & Leiden University. She specialises in votive practices and religious landscapes in Southern Italy and in this post she shares some of the research she has recently conducted at the Royal Dutch Institute in Rome. When I…
Margherita Clavarino is a PhD candidate in the History of Art at the Warburg Institute, where she is researching miraculous prints in early modern Italy. She has an interest in both printed ex-votos and votive offerings related to miraculous printed imagery. The Church of Saint Bartholomew of the Groom, in the namesake seaside town of…
This week, two things reminded me of something that I have been meaning write about for The Votives Project for a while. The first was the excellent Remarkable Things conference at the University of Warwick (10th March 2018), where several papers drew attention to different types of (broadly conceived) apotropaic object. This included, for the ancient…
Laura Aho is a doctoral student at the University of Helsinki (Finland), where she is working on a dissertation on Greek and Roman votive inscriptions. In this post she shares some aspects of her research to-date, as well as discussing some of the challenges that she has been facing. The problem with deducing motives for…
Anne-Lieke Brem, is currently a Masters student at the University of Groningen, studying both Archaeology and Cultural Geography. Her recent research focuses on the social landscape of illness and disease in ancient Greece (500-200 BC). You can read her earlier post on the biography of ancient votive reliefs as ‘things’ here. While broadening my research, I…
Stuart McKie is Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at The University of Manchester. He recently completed his PhD at The Open University, with a thesis entitled ‘The Social Significance of Curse Tablets in the North-Western Roman Provinces’. At last year’s combined Roman and Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference (RAC/TRAC) held at the Sapienza University in…
Helen King is Professor Emerita in Classical Studies at the Open University. She has a particular interest in midwifery and gynaecology and has published widely on ancient medicine and its reception, as well as gender and the history of the body. Is it time to revisit the identification of votive body parts? Specifically, votive wombs;…
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