Stranger than we knew it : Religious Landscapes and Ritual Practice on Hadrian’s Wall

Cousins, Eleri (2023) Stranger than we knew it : Religious Landscapes and Ritual Practice on Hadrian’s Wall. In: Hadrian’s Wall : New Insights on Frontier Culture. Britannia Monograph Series . Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, London. (In Press)

Abstract

Research on the religion of Hadrian’s Wall has long stressed the role of army and state institutions in structuring the lives of soldiers serving on the frontier. These factors were unquestionably important, but emphasising them to the exclusion of other considerations can be short-sighted. To this end, this chapter explores how an added focus on landscape and on ritual action can enhance our understanding of religion’s role on the Wall. In so doing, it also attempts to bring our methodologies for understanding the religion of the frontier into closer dialogue with scholarship on religion in Roman Britain as a whole.