Jessica Hughes

Votive body parts in Greek and Roman religion

This book examines a type of object that was widespread and very popular in classical antiquity - votive offerings in the shape of parts of the human body. It collects examples from four principal areas and time periods: Classical Greece, pre-Roman Italy, Roman Gaul and Roman Asia Minor. It uses a compare-and-contrast methodology to highlight differences between these sets of votives, exploring the implications for our understandings of how beliefs about the body changed across classical antiquity. The book also looks at how far these ancient beliefs overlap with, or differ from, modern ideas about the body and its physical and conceptual boundaries. Central themes of the book include illness and healing, bodily fragmentation, human-animal hybridity, transmission and reception of traditions, and the mechanics of personal transformation in religious rituals. - Examines votive offerings from all over the classical world, enabling readers to perceive important changes in beliefs and traditions - Brings votive body parts into a conversation with other visual and literary sources from the classical world and emphasises their importance for a wide range of topics in classics - Demonstrates how votives intersect with modern theories about the body and draws connections between ancient and modern perceptions of the body.

'Souvenirs of the Self': Personal Belongings as Votive Offerings in Ancient Religion

Many of the votive offerings which survive from antiquity were purpose-made for dedication. These include things like anatomical votives, figurines, temple models, and sculpted reliefs bearing scenes of sacrifice or healing. Other types of votive offer- ing were not purpose-made for dedication but had served other functions before being brought to the sanctuary, such as jewellery, tools, mirrors, cups, clothes and children’s toys. Such ‘recycled’ (or, perhaps more accurately, ‘non-purpose-made’) votives arguably give us our most direct glimpses of individual agency in a religious context, since they not only bypass the intermediary figure of the craftsman but also relate closely to the worshipper’s own body and biography. This article considers the archaeological and literary evidence for such ‘non-purpose-made’ offerings, particu- larly those related to illness or healing – the theme of this special issue. I consider how these boundary-crossing objects differed conceptually from purpose-made votives like the anatomicals, for instance by entangling the different spaces (the house, workshop, sanctuary) in which ancient religion was experienced. Ultimately, I argue that the appropriation and re-use of household objects or medical parapher- nalia as votives enabled the individual to respond quickly and creatively to illness and other crises, creating deeply personal narratives of healing and transformation from the layered associations and memories that these objects embodied.

Studying Votives Across Cultures

open university , milton keynes , uk It was a rainy Saturday in August. I had driven up to a mountain sanctuary in the northern Italian region of Trentino on the trail of two hundred wooden votive tavolette dedicated to the Madonna di Pinè, which I had heard about from an elderly parishioner in Trento. Entering the church, I found it silent and empty except for the priest, who listened kindly while I explained the purpose of my visit. He shook his head, led me into a side room, and gestured at the empty walls: “They took them away a while ago for an exhibition. They promised they’d bring them back.” Left alone in the room, looking at the plastic chairs stacked up around the walls, I reflected on the panels’ absence. The outcome of my trip had been disappointing but not entirely surprising: after all, votives have always been mobile objects, and have always been transported into different places at some point after their dedication by the worshipper. In Greco-Roman antiquity this place was often a purpose-dug pit, into which votive offerings were “tidied” at regular intervals. This activity created room so that new offerings could be dedicated, and also had the function of keeping the old offerings within the ownership of the god or goddess. As such, these buried votives became an unseen but still-perceived part of the sanctuary’s fabric. In contemporary Catholicism, the more valuable votive gifts are often sold on to raise funds for the church, sometimes at the dedicant’s explicit request. And of course, thousands of votives have ended up in museums, where they might languish in storerooms, or hang in a permanent display, or alternatively be shuffled around periodically into new temporary exhibitions. These last—the temporary exhibitions—have a close and reciprocal relationship with academic scholarship on votives, and often point towards new ways of approaching the material. For instance, it turned out that the tavolette from the Madonna di Pinè sanctuary had been displayed in the museum exhibition alongside more recent photographic ex-votos from the site, allowing for (and indeed prompting) an investigation of change over time. This juxtaposition also raised broader questions about the relationship between medium and message, and provided fresh evidence for a question often debated by material religion scholars – that is, how do changing technologies alter the way that people experience the divine? Further south, another exhibition in the Antiquarium of Pompeii brought “pagan” votive offerings into a shared space with ex-votos from the nearby Catholic shrine of the Blessed Madonna of the Rosary (Figure 1). Visitors moved through two rooms of Catholic votives, including painted panels, coral necklaces and silver body parts, then travelled downstairs/ back in time to contemplate a series of Roman figurines and model body parts. The display panels highlighted areas of potential continuity and change, but the text raised as many questions as it answered: “What emerges is a strong parallelism that, despite historical and religious differences, replicates a ritual and ‘language’ of votive offerings that are identical in form but have substantially different meanings that it is important to emphasize.” It seems very likely that these basic questions about change and continuity will remain central to academic research on votives in future years, especially given the willingness of material religion scholars to talk across conventional discipline and period boundaries. Anthropological approaches can highlight the cultural specificity of practices across time and space; meanwhile, cognitive psychology and neuroscience are providing new avenues into the “problem” of shared experiences within and across votive religions. Ancient historians can make careful use of all these tools: so, anthropological approaches can help us to understand how classical votives fit alongside other ways of honouring the gods, such as prayer, animal sacrifice, and human initiation rituals, while a more nuanced understanding of the senses (to name just one relevant area of cognitive research) can help us (tentatively) reconstruct how these Greco-Roman objects looked, felt, smelled, and thereby signified to the people who first made and used them. Further exciting developments are taking place in the realm of digital technology, and it is easy to imagine how statistical tools such as cluster analysis might help us discover new and meaningful patterns in our votive data. Think of the wooden tavolette of Europe and Latin America, or the anatomical votives scattered across the ancient Greco-Roman world. The classification of these large data sets has often been seen as a dreary task with few tangiJessica Hughes is Lecturer in Classical Studies at The Open University. She is author of Votive Body Parts in Greek and Roman Religion (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and co-founder of The Votives Project (www.thevotivesproject.org). jessica.hughes@open.ac.uk