This chapter brings the sensory potentialities of material objects used in Roman ritualized activities into discourse concerning the nature and production of ancient religious knowledge. By combining perspectives derived from lived religion and material religion it is argued that religious agency should be understood as the product of the intertwining of human and more-than-human things within assemblages. Lived experiences of this production of agency, in turn, cause people to feel and consequently think in certain ways, ultimately producing what can be categorized as distal and proximal forms of religious knowledge. The chapter uses the example of the frieze of the Vestal Virgins from the Ara Pacis Augustae to argue that different forms of ancient religious knowledge were actively created through a multiplicity of lived experiences of ritualized action that brought human and more-than-human material things together, rather than existing only as something that was expressed through ritual behaviours. Exploring the Vestals’ experience of ritualized encounters with material things makes it possible to establish new understandings of the real-world lived experiences and identities of these priestesses, offering significant insights into how individualized forms of religious knowledge could be sustained even in the context of shared communal or public rituals.

From painted embellishments on altars and temples, marble flooring, dyed sacrificial ribbons and even the colouration of ritual animals, colour was an inescapable aspect of religious experience. Polychromy was not only decorative, it created a visual medium with which those navigating sacred spaces could interact, together with the written word and the language of shape and form. Colour could communicate to the ancient viewer associations of its source; the significance of both where its pigment or dyestuff was harvested and the journey it undertook, both in terms of manufacture and simple geography, in order to arrive before the observer. The very conception of ancient sight, with rays reaching from the eyes in a particularly haptic process of sensory feedback, meant that looking at colours was for the ancient viewer an experience in itself. How would visitors to the sacred spaces of the ancient world have ‘read’ the visual cues surrounding them, and how could the design of colours in ritual spaces influence the reactions and emotions of those witnessing sacred activity? This paper seeks to investigate and unpick some of the chromatic language found in religious spaces to better inform an understanding of ritual activity in Greco-Roman society.

Processions were among the earliest ‘moving pictures’ in which the brain could develop the cognitive process of ‘reading’ a landscape and embedding a memory through sensory experiences. Salutaris’ foundation, a text inscribed outside the theatre at Ephesus which records the organization of a ritual procession for Artemis, tends to be treated as a factual guide by scholars, rather than as aspirational script for an event: repeated legal clauses, claims of control and permanency, and the white marble on which it was carved, underwrite the vivid sensual experience and transiency of a ritual event. This paper endeavors to contextualize Salutaris’ foundation by incorporating directives of the text together with an analysis of the procession as a practical event and an emotional experience. As a sensorial experience, one can explore aspects of the performance that could not be controlled: the weather, the attitude of the audience, and the behaviour of the performers. Did aspirational directives of ritual behavior come to fruition in a ritual event? How did the experience of an event shape its role and meaning? This cognitive approach provides insights to both the ritual event and the ways that processions could be read by the viewer.

How do we experience ritual? What role does this experience play in the perception and codification memory? This chapter begins by considering the relationship between senses, cognition, and memory in ritual experiences, in particular, the complex interplay between ritual performance, emotions, and material objects, together with the limitations of script-based approaches to surviving accounts. Situating the volume within current debates on religious ritual in the ancient world from the perspectives of cognitive science of religion and sensory studies, this chapter explores how variability in ritual experiences can be assessed through cognitive approaches to rituals as lived experiences. Having outlined why this volume is timely, necessary, and how it contributes to challenging established views and furthering debate surrounding ritual experiences in the Roman world, the introduction also addresses the challenges of cognitive assessments and how these challenges are met across the volume, through a variety of different contexts and approaches. Lastly, the introduction briefly presents each of the five case studies, drawing on common themes and issues explored in each case study, and considering the global relevance and transdisciplinary applications of scholarship in this volume.

This chapter explores some of the practices, interactions, and preferences of readers and fans as part of their lived comics cultures. Engagement with the medium has taken various forms, from casual readership and sharing titles among friendship groups in childhood, through to being a collector. Beyond simply involving reading comics, fandom can incorporate a range of other activities as part of an enhanced commitment to the medium, and various activities are touched upon. Further, it looks at how readers, both historically and today, have accessed their comics in varied formats and across many genres in Britain and the USA, linking their lived experience with production. In looking into these issues, the chapter engages with the work of various publishers, genres, and titles. It also engages with how reading comics and participating in fandom intersects with both age and gender, which this chapter adopts as lenses to look at constructions of childhood and comics reading. A final aspect of the chapter relates to how fan and reader interactions in these spaces and participation in activities often vary according to gender. Indeed, it can be argued that comics reading and collecting has been heavily gendered regarding both production and reception.

The introduction outlines the aims, methodology and time frame of the book, explains its structure and briefly introduces readers to the eight individuals whose diaries are the book’s principal source material. A succinct review of the literature on elite and popular ruralism in Britain follows, emphasizing that there has been far more research on the former than the latter. The pathbreaking work of Helen Walker, Harvey Taylor and Alun Howkins on popular ruralism is acknowledged and summarized. Although we now know much about the macro-history of popular ruralism (at least as expressed through the outdoor movement), we know much less about its micro-history – how the countryside fitted into the lived reality of people’s lives. This is the gap which this book aims to fill.

This chapter introduces the handbook and outlines the volume’s organization, topics, themes, and intended audience. It clarifies the handbook’s goals of including both past and contemporary theory and practice as well as looking toward future trends in material culture studies. The authors discuss disciplinary contributions to material culture and provide the foundation for redefining the field’s relationship to disciplinarity. The guiding questions posed to contributing authors, what is material culture, and what are the implications of material culture scholarship, are presented. The chapter also introduces the geographic scope of the project, addressing and acknowledging differences and similarities that exist between the understanding of, framing of, and study of material culture in an international context.

The story of one African American woman's journey with substance use disorder and recovery. She examines the stigma that is associated with substance use disorder and how various interactions led to self-stigmatizing views.