This special issue of the Open Arts Journal takes a fresh look at the relationship between religion and material culture in the ancient city of Pompeii – our most comprehensively preserved archaeological site from any period of antiquity. Its central aim is to use the case study of Pompeii to bring our work on Greco-Roman religion into conversation with some key theoretical movements in the disciplines of religious studies, anthropology and art history, and particularly the set of approaches grouped under the title of ‘material religion’. The essays collected here build on earlier studies of Pompeian religion to explore different aspects of the dynamic relationship between bodies, matter and senses in a range of Pompeian spaces, including bedrooms, kitchens, gardens, streets, temples, bars and theatres. Contributors focus on the materiality of objects, bodies and senses, investigating how these things worked with (or against) the literary texts which have often been the starting point for the study of Roman religion. What does our Pompeian evidence suggest about how webs of relations were created between human and other-than-human persons? How were the qualities of material objects activated through the senses? How might some of the emergent ‘key terms in material religion’ (S.B. Plate, 2015) – amongst them ‘time’, ‘emotion’, ‘space’, ‘ritual’, ‘food’, ‘maps’ and ‘magic’ – be brought to bear on our ancient data?

Click here to read issue 10.

Material religion in Pompeii

Contents

Jessica Hughes