6 - The Local Writ Large

Summary

Building on the themes of regionality in Chapter 4, and of empire in Chapter 3, this chapter focuses on Aquae Sulis’s place in the social, religious, and artistic networks of Britain, Gaul, and Germany specifically, and on how to put the site’s locally specific practices in dialogue with broader trends. It explores the significance of artistic connections seen in smaller iconographic works such as the ‘altar’ blocks, which can be linked to Viergöttersteine from the Rhineland, and the relief of Mercury with a local goddess, which is part of a regional cluster centred on Gloucester, and uses a series of case studies, in particular the ‘curse tablets’, to delineate the ways in which provincial religious knowledge may be characterized as a series of increasingly localized concentric circles of practice.