This thesis is a study of the religious life of the rural inhabitants of one peripheral Roman province, Lusitania. From archaeological, epigraphic and literary evidence it uncovers a wide array of cult spaces and monuments. These range from sacred springs, mountain shrines, rock inscriptions and sanctuaries, to temples, votive deposits, and clusters of altars. Together, they pertain to the countryside environment and date to between the 1st and 4th centuries AD: a period when the Romans were securely established in this corner of the Iberian Peninsula. The aim of this thesis is to contextualize these cult spaces and monuments by grounding them within the broader historical evolutions of the period, as well as the natural and man-made landscape of which they were a part. More specifically, this work sheds light on certain important patterns in rural Lusitanian worship. Chief among these are the observations that this worship was primarily small scale and private in nature, intimately associated with idealized natural settings, yet indivisible from the rural territorial infrastructure of its day. Rural cult spaces were not immune to historical developments affecting the province. The 1st to 4th century sacred rural landscape differed profoundly from that of the preceding, and following, periods. Finally, it is shown that the cult spaces and monuments in question, as well as the dedications and votive offerings associated with them, were incredibly varied. Their differences reflect a deep cultural rift between the northern and southern halves of this province. These assorted findings do not together furnish one cohesive picture of ‘rural religion’ as a single phenomenon divisible from ‘urban religion’ and homogenous throughout the province. Instead, the patchwork they create reiterates the diversity and varying levels of cultural interaction that existed throughout this provincial countryside.

This thesis tries to historize the phenomenon of teaching religion in the Czech lands, especially in the period 1950-1956. In the first part of the thesis, the subject of interest is the analysis of the relationship between the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPCZ) and the Roman Catholic Church in order to create an appropriate framework for the empirical part. The second part of the thesis describes both the CPCZ strategy in the field of religious education and the concrete social practice associated with their implementation. As a result, the study maps a certain imaginary space between the ideological claim and the daily practice that is created in communication between communist elites, church secretaries, local officials, teachers and directors, church representatives, and believers themselves. The thesis concludes that in socialist education there was a certain effort to use religious teaching in the sense of socialist upbringing. However, since the end of the first half of the 1950s, this effort has been gradually reduced and all signs of the normality of teaching religion should have been reduced to a minimum, but the study shows that local practice has not always achieved this claim. It has always been limited by an effort not to go beyond the "legality" framework that could jeopardize...

Dan-el Padilla Peralta beschäftigt sich in seiner vor allem in Stanford entstandenen und betreuten Dissertation mit den Religionen in der mittleren römischen Republik (begrenzt auf das 4. und 3.Jahrhundert v. Chr.) aus einer spezifischen Perspektive heraus: Es geht ihm vor allem um deren Rolle bei der Entwicklung römischer Staatlichkeit („statehood“). Wie er gleich in der Einleitung betont, sieht er eine relevante Beziehung zwischen religiösen Praktiken (und Bauten!) und der Verfestigung politischer Institutionen. Er verweist auf Fustel de Coulanges und spätere, die diese Verbindung schon betont haben, und hebt dann seine Ausgangsthese hervor: Bei den mittelrepublikanischen Transformationen kommt dem Bau von Tempeln eine besondere Bedeutung zu, so dass diese physische Seite religiöser Strukturen größere Aufmerksamkeit verdient (S. 9).

The Roman festival of the Lupercalia is one of the most discussed issues in the field of pre-Christian Roman religion. Hardly a year goes by without an article on the subject appearing in a major Classics journal. But the festival presents a range of issues that individual articles cannot address. This thesis is an attempt to present a modern analysis of the phenomenon of the Lupercalia as a whole, including literary, archaeological and historical evidence on the subject. The first section presents the ancient sources on the Lupercalia, and is divided into five chapters, each analysing a particular aspect of the festival: fertility, purification, the importance of the wolf and the foundation myth, the mythology of Arcadian origins, and Caesar's involvement with the Lupercalia of 44 BC. The second section places the Lupercalia in a wider context, discussing the festival's topography and the course of the running Luperci, its relationship to other lustration rituals, and its position in the Roman calendar, ending with an appraisal of the changes it underwent in late Antiquity. The third section employs methods from linguistics, anthropology and comparative religion to show that the Lupercalia involved a ritual of initiation, which was also reflected in the Roman foundation myth. The central chapter of this section discusses the methodology used in comparative Indo-European mythology, and offers a case study that parallels the god of the festival (Faunus) with Rudra of Vedic Hinduism. The last chapter considers other parallels with Indian religion, especially the relationship between flamen and brahmin. The thesis challenges a number of established theories on the subject and offers new evidence to show that the festival has Indo-European origins, but also that it played an important role throughout Roman history.

This thesis examines the changing form and function of non-funerary cult buildings in early Latial and Etruscan settlements in order to better describe and understand the advent of monumental temples in the archaeological record. It draws on a significant quantity of material excavated in the past forty years and developments in relevant theoretical frameworks to reconstruct the changing appearance of cult buildings from huts to shrines and temples (Chapters 2 to 4), and to place monumental examples within wider religious, topographical, and functional contexts (Chapters 5 to 7). This broader perspective allows a more accurate assessment of the extent to which monumental temples represent continuity and discontinuity with earlier religious architecture, and furthermore clarifies the respective roles of Latium and Etruria in the transformation of cult buildings into distinctive, prominent parts of the built environment. Although it is possible to find many different accounts of religious monumentalisation in existing scholarship, this thesis holds that traditional narratives no longer accurately reflect the archaeological evidence. It sets out a sequence of developments in which early religious architecture was a dynamic, rather than conservative, phenomenon. It demonstrates that temples were not the inevitable product of a natural progression from open-air votive deposition to monumentality, or simply an imported concept, but rather a deliberate response to the opportunities offered by an increasingly mobile Mediterranean population. It also contends that Latium played a more important role in formulating the characteristic components and functions of central Italic temples than previously thought. This thesis consequently offers a new account of early religious architecture in western central Italy as well as an alternative interpretation of its monumentalisation.

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