Apart from Christianity and the Oriental Cults, religion in Roman Britain is often discussed as though it remained basically Celtic in belief and practice, under a thin veneer of Roman influence. Using a wide range of archaeological evidence, Dr Henig shows that the Roman element in religion was of much greater significance and that the natural Roman veneration for the gods found meaningful expression even in the formal rituals practised in the public temples of Britain.

In Christians and Pagans in Roman Britain, first published in 1991, Professor Dorothy Watts sets out to distinguish possible Pagan features in Romano-British Christianity in the period leading up to and immediately following the withdrawal of Roman forces in AD 410. Watts argues that British Christianity at the time contained many Pagan influences, suggesting that the former, although it had been present in the British Isles for some two centuries, was not nearly as firmly established as in other parts of the Empire. Building on recent developments in the archaeology of Roman Britain, and utilising a nuanced method for deciphering the significance of objects with ambiguous religious identities, Christians and Pagans in Roman Britain will be of interest to classicists, students of the history of the British Isles, Church historians, and also to those generally interested in the place of Christianity during the twilight of the Western Roman Empire.

Using the latest archaeological evidence David Petts traces the growth of Christianity in Roman Britain from its earliest beginnings to the end of Roman rule in the province and beyond.

'A heavenly book, elegant and thoughtful. Get one for yourself and one for the church-crawler in your life!' Lucy Worsley Christianity has been central to the lives of the people of Britain and Ireland for almost 2,000 years. It has given us laws, customs, traditions and our national character. From a persecuted minority in Roman Britannia through the 'golden age' of Anglo-Saxon monasticism, the devastating impact of the Vikings, the alliance of church and state after the Norman Conquest to the turmoil of the Reformation that saw the English monarch replace the Pope and the Puritan Commonwealth that replaced the king, it is a tangled, tumultuous story of faith and achievement, division and bloodshed. In If These Stones Could Talk Peter Stanford journeys through England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland to churches, abbeys, chapels and cathedrals, grand and humble, ruined and thriving, ancient and modern, to chronicle how a religion that began in the Middle East came to define our past and shape our present. In exploring the stories of these buildings that are still so much a part of the landscape, the details of their design, the treasured objects that are housed within them, the people who once stood in their pulpits and those who sat in their pews, he builds century by century the narrative of what Christianity has meant to the nations of the British Isles, how it is reflected in the relationship between rulers and ruled, and the sense it gives about who we are and how we live with each other. 'There is no better navigator through the space in which art, culture and spirituality meet than Peter Stanford' Cole Moreton, Independent on Sunday

This book offers a new assessment of early Christianity in south-west Britain from the fourth to the tenth centuries, a rich period which includes the transition from Roman to native British to Saxon models of church. The book will be based on evidence from archaeological excavations, early texts and recent critical scholarship and cover Wessex, Devon and Cornwall. In the south-west, Wessex provides the greatest evidence of Roman Christianity. The fifth-century Dorset villas of Frampton and Hinton St Mary, with their complex baptistery mosaics, indicate the presence of sophisticated Christian house churches. The fact that these two Roman villas are only 15 miles apart suggests a network of small Christian communities in this region. The author uses evidence from St Patrick’s fifth-century ‘Confessions’ to describe how members of a villa house church lived. Wessex was slowly Christianised: in Gloucestershire, the pagan healing sanctuary at Chedworth provides evidence of later use as a Christian baptistery; at Bradford on Avon in Wiltshire, a baptistery was dug into the mosaic floor of an imposing villa, which may by then have been owned by a bishop. In Somerset a number of recently excavated sites demonstrate the transition from a pagan temple to a Christian church. Beside the pagan temple at Lamyatt, later female burials suggest, unusually, a small monastic group of women. Wells cathedral grew beside the site of a Roman villa’s funeral chapel. In Street, a large oval enclosure indicates the probable site of a ‘Celtic’ monastery. Early Christian cemeteries have been excavated at Shepton Mallet and elsewhere. Lundy Island, off the Devon coast, provides evidence of a Celtic monastery, with its inscribed stones that commemorate early monks. At Exeter, a Saxon anthology includes numerous riddles, one of which describes in detail the production of an illuminated manuscript in a south-western monastery. Oliver Padel’s meticulous documentation of Cornish place-names has demonstrated that, of all the Celtic regions, Cornwall has by far the highest number of dedications to a single, otherwise unknown individual, typically consisting of a small church and a farm by the sea. These small monastic ‘cells’ have hitherto received little attention as a model of church in early British Christianity, and the latter part of the text focuses on various aspects of this model, as lived out in coastal and in upland settlements, on islands, and in relation to larger Breton monasteries. Study of 60 Breton sites has demonstrated possible connections between larger Breton monasteries and smaller Cornish cells.

This book provides a twenty-first century perspective on Roman Britain, combining current approaches with the wealth of archaeological material from the province. This volume introduces the history of research into the province and the cultural changes at the beginning and end of the Roman period. The majority of the chapters are thematic, dealing with issues relating to the people of the province, their identities and ways of life. Further chapters consider the characteristics of the province they lived in, such as the economy, and settlement patterns. This Handbook reflects the new approaches being developed in Roman archaeology, and demonstrates why the study of Roman Britain has become one of the most dynamic areas of archaeology. The book will be useful for academics and students interested in Roman Britain.

A compelling new account of religion in Roman Britain, weaving together the latest archaeological research and a new analysis of ancient literature to illuminate parallels between past and present Two thousand years ago, the Romans sought to absorb into their empire what they regarded as a remote, almost mythical island on the very edge of the known world—Britain. The expeditions of Julius Caesar and the Claudian invasion of 43 CE, up to the traditional end of Roman Britain in the fifth century CE, brought fundamental and lasting changes to the island. Not least among these was a pantheon of new classical deities and religious systems, along with a clutch of exotic eastern cults, including Christianity. But what homegrown deities, cults, and cosmologies did the Romans encounter in Britain, and how did the British react to the changes? Under Roman rule, the old gods and their adherents were challenged, adopted, adapted, absorbed, and reconfigured. Miranda Aldhouse- Green balances literary, archaeological, and iconographic evidence (and scrutinizes the shortcomings of each) to illuminate the complexity of religion and belief in Roman Britain. She examines the two-way traffic of cultural exchange and the interplay between imported and indigenous factions to reveal how this period on the cusp between prehistory and history knew many of the same tensions, ideologies, and issues of identity still relevant today.

In Christians and Pagans in Roman Britain, first published in 1991, Professor Dorothy Watts sets out to distinguish possible Pagan features in Romano-British Christianity in the period leading up to and immediately following the withdrawal of Roman forces in AD 410. Watts argues that British Christianity at the time contained many Pagan influences, suggesting that the former, although it had been present in the British Isles for some two centuries, was not nearly as firmly established as in other parts of the Empire. Building on recent developments in the archaeology of Roman Britain, and utilising a nuanced method for deciphering the significance of objects with ambiguous religious identities, Christians and Pagans in Roman Britain will be of interest to classicists, students of the history of the British Isles, Church historians, and also to those generally interested in the place of Christianity during the twilight of the Western Roman Empire.