EHL Seminar: “Deo Sancto Cocidio: Regional Gods and Roman Power on Hadrian’s Wall”

For Zoom, register here.

Recent research on Hadrian’s Wall has increasingly stressed the diversity and complexity of society on the edges of Roman Britain, along with the dynamics of imperialism on the frontier. Meanwhile, the Wall itself offers a telling story of the intersection of natural landscapes with human ones, moulding itself to the bones of the earth on the Whin Sill, and tensing at strategic crux points like the Typalt-Irthing gap.  Religion can offer a particularly compelling window onto how the inhabitants of the frontier negotiated these landscapes of imperial power; at the same time, the social functions of regional cults to local deities, often known only through short dedicatory inscriptions, can be exceptionally fraught to interpret. In this paper, I use the cult of Cocidius, a god known from the western half of Hadrian’s Wall, to move us beyond problematic lenses of ‘indigeneity’ or ‘Celticity’ for understanding local gods, and to consider how a more holistic approach to epigraphic landscapes can shed light on the complex intersection of religion, landscape, and empire on the frontier.

The Environmental History Lab is supported by a David A. Gardner ‘69 Magic Grant from the Humanities Council and the Program in Medieval Studies. This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Art & Archaeology.