This is an Advanced Course for the MPhil/MSc in Economic and Social History. It is held in the Old Library at All Souls College on Wednesdays 10 a.m. – 12 noon in Weeks 1-8 of the Hilary Term of 2022. 

This lecture will be held online on Microsoft Teams. Click here to join. 

This lecture will be held online on Microsoft Teams. Click here to join. 

This lecture will be held in hybrid format, in the Old Library and on Microsoft Teams. Click this link to join on Microsoft Teams. 

Daily, domestic religion as it was lived, was a negotiation between older, indigenous practices and new ones that came with conquest.  Pre-Roman precedents––sacrifice, special deposits made in deep places, dog killing––were part of a repertoire of actions that continued throughout the Roman period, not in their exact Iron Age forms, but rather inflected with new ideas and practices from elsewhere in the empire.  The process, however, was two-way.  Soldiers, merchants, administrators, and others new to Britain came to embrace a host of local ritual practices, including dog killing.  Here, we take an in-depth look at a handful of communities where we can witness low-status locals and people from elsewhere in the empire participating side-by-side in ritual events centered on dogs.  We do this in order to discern the mechanisms and processes standing behind the development of a distinctly provincial, Romano-British society.

This lecture will take place online. Please see the History Faculty website for further information. 

In this lecture, we investigate how everyday religion happened materially in Roman Britain.  Religion for most people on most days was about doing rather than philosophizing and about deploying materials of religion in ways that protected, cured, cursed, or communicated with otherworldly powers and entities.  Fortunately, some of the period’s materials of religion, including the remains of over 1,500 dogs, survive.  This evidence opens up a window into the less discursive, more experiential religion that was so much a part of everyday life, enacted and experienced not only at temples, shrines, and cemeteries, but in farmyards, kitchens, and alongside property boundaries, where people participating in ritual activities often reached––with knife in hand––for a dog.

This lecture will take place online. Please see the History Faculty website for further information. 

Dogs were not only good to think with in the Roman period or to deploy when meditating on, performing, or normalizing Roman society’s stark inequalities.  They were also central participants in acts undertaken to mediate between the everyday and the uncanny.  In this lecture we explore their roles in engaging with the divine at temples, shrines, and in cemeteries.

This lecture will take place online. Please see the History Faculty website for further information. 

In the absence of a well-developed social history for Roman Britain, little has been written on the lived experience of the bottom eighty-five percent of its population, but looking at dogs and humans together helps us recuperate something of both species’ experience under Rome.  This lecture considers, on the one hand, the lives of pampered and self-feeding dogs; and on the other, low-status and enslaved humans.  A shared constellation of images, prejudices, and metaphors emerged in the period which explained the moral shortcomings of both canines and the poor and justified their terrible treatment. 

This lecture will take place online. Please see the History Faculty website for further information.