New book news: Reassembling Religion in Roman Italy

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…

Wax infant votives in Cyprus: ancient and modern parallels

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…

Miniature mirrors: votive or apotropaic (or both)?

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…

Things that matter(-ed): A biography of anatomical votive reliefs

  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). In this article for The Votives Project she reflects on how this project has prompted her to think more critically about the biography and…

Objects and Remembering

Last Friday (20th June) I attended a conference on ‘Objects and Remembering’ at the University of Manchester. The event brought together people working on the relationship between objects and memory from a number of different perspectives – archaeology, history, museum and heritage studies, forensics and geology. It was a highly stimulating day, full of lively…

Waxing lyrical on the materiality of votives

A few weeks ago I was alerted to a post on the MEDMED-L mailing list (medieval medical history) in which Jim Chevallier made the following observation: ‘In 1389, a merchant accompanying Charles VI to Avignon had a wax statue made in the ailing King’s image, as an ex-voto, to put on the tomb of Pierre…