[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
Analyzing the material remains of the various cultures forming the Roman Empire tends to expose, above all, the Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen: the unevenness and non-linearity of developments. This is also true for the volume under consideration, which aims to reveal the highly contingent and regionally diverse responses to contact with the Latin language brought to Western Europe by the expanding Roman polity. The richly illustrated Latinization, local languages, and literacies in the Roman West, edited by Alex Mullen and Anna Willi, asks the question: How does Roman rule change provincial languages and literacies?
Together with its sister volumes published in 2023[1], it is part of the impressive output from the LatinNow project. In her introductory essay that also serves as an introduction to the projects’ methods, Mullen lays out the scope and aims, situated at the intersection of sociolinguistics, archaeology, and epigraphy. Geographically, it covers much of the Northwestern provinces (the Hispaniae, Gaul, Britain and the Germanies), with a wide-ranging temporal scope from the third century BC to the sixth century AD.
Three contributions are concerned with the Hispanic provinces. Noemí Moncunill tackles Hispania citerior, sketching the developments from the third century BC until the first century AD, connecting shifts in writing systems from Palaeohispanic and Iberian towards Latin to broader social and political changes. In an area characterized by ubiquitous warfare, colonization by Greeks, Phoenicians, and finally Romans, all with their own writing systems, she highlights the complexity of bilingualism as both a social practice and a marker of identity. Here, Roman conquest brought an intensification of trends already apparent in contact with Greek and Phoenician-Punic, and the gradual replacement of indigenous naming practices by Latin ones demonstrates that Latinization was neither linear nor uniform.
María José Estarán Tolosa and Javier Herrera Rando deal with Hispania ulterior, later Baetica and Lusitania, up until the second century AD. The densely urbanized Baetica is contrasted with more rural Lusitania, which highlights how the contingent factors of geography, settlement topography, mining, and trade networks influenced Latinization. It was largely an urban and colonial phenomenon, spurred by the interests of the local elites, veterans, and freedmen for self-representation. The authors’ attention to cultic inscriptions in Lusitanian—with a Latin incipit!—provides a welcome reminder that local languages could persist in ritual contexts even as Latin became dominant in public communication, though the chronology of the few examples remains uncertain.
Peter Houten provides a wide-ranging quantitative analysis of the epigraphy in post-conquest Spain, looking at the urban-rural divide and correlating epigraphic activity with the size and legal status of the cities. The big coloniae and municipia emerge (unsurprisingly) as the main producers of epigraphic output, especially in the category of monumental inscriptions in marble, underlining urban density (fostering intra- and inter-city elite competition) and legal status as important contributing factors to the epigraphic habit.
Roman Gaul is the subject of Mullen’s second contribution, again a vast and highly diverse region. Her survey of Latinization shows a relatively quick process, with the Augustan age as a watershed moment, but also a varied response in the uptake especially of the lapidary habit, not easily explicable by settlement density or road networks. One of the strong points is her case-study of the evidence from the potteries at La Graufesenque, discussing bilingualism and code-switching. The persistence of bilingualism into the third century CE is well argued, although the interpretive weight placed on a small number of cases occasionally feels disproportionate. This is a pattern found throughout this volume, dictated by the nature of the evidence.
Marie-Thérèse Raepsaet-Charlier, analyzing the onomastics of the Batavians, can draw on her decades of experience researching the onomastics and prosopography of the Northwestern empire. Her meticulous analysis of the names of the Batavian civitas, an important source of auxiliary troops in the early Principate, is compared to neighboring regions. Latinization was quick and far-reaching for the citizens, less so for the peregrines, while still allowing space for indigenous elements. However, the assumption that the onomastics of a civitas gives the best clue to the degree of Latinization runs the risk of being circuitous, and, inversely, people can be fully ‘latinized’ while keeping indigenous name forms, e.g. parents with fully Latin names giving their children indigenous ones. A different way to look at the material would be to explore the emergence of a shared ‘regional’ or ‘provincial’ onomastic culture in which our categories of ‘Celtic’, ‘Latin’ et c. do not carry the same distinctive power for the locals.
Michel Feugère and Willi consider the previously underestimated small-finds or instrumentum that can be used as proxy-data for literacy, using the artefacts database.[2] They make a strong case for how analyzing content and distribution of artefacts such as makers marks on lamps or fibulae and erotic graffiti on everyday objects can reveal different types of literacy and their uses, related to the materiality of the objects, with regionally specific patterns.
Willi’s study on the highly diverse province of Germania superior, where heterogenous population and split history resulted in a clear north-south divide, can serve as a model of regionally focused analysis. Particularly interesting is her detailed discussion of Augusta Raurica and Vindonissa, which demonstrates an early and significant indigenous participation in everyday writing practices, something that also characterizes the province at large. Her rejection of the outdated view of the province as a ‘heavily militarized frontier zone’ is welcome. However, the author should take into consideration that large parts of the Upper Rhine valley were devoid of large-scale human habitation in the decades preceding Roman conquest.[3] Instead, a major part of the population were immigrants from inner Gaul.[4] This is important for the analysis of ‘indigenous’ literacy and epigraphy in that part of the province, and the influence of these groups on the development of provincial culture has often been underestimated in favor of the Roman military.
Jasper De Bruin discusses the Roman Netherlands, with a focus on the civitates of the Cananefates and Batavi. The consideration of instrumentum, especially of finds such as inkwells, again helps to flesh out the difficulty to assess picture of literacy. Intriguing are the hints of literacy found in rural contexts, showing a tendency towards writing on ink. Writing implements seem to be ambiguous proxies for literacy, though. Considering their importance as status symbols for the local elites, the authors’ optimism about their evidentiary value for literacy may not always be warranted.
Roman Britain is the topic of Mullen’s concluding chapter. Drawing on the databases of archaeological finds that are available through the RIB, PAS[5], and RSRB[6] projects, which allow an unprecedented and unparalleled look at the evidence for literacy, she convincingly argues against the view of the province as a barely-literate backwater, where only the militarized areas participated in literate culture, and against the concurrent picture of a Highland/Lowland divide. Evidence for literacy can be found also in the south and south-west, far from the fortresses and forts, often in rural centers of production and commerce (especially in the agriculturally important ‘Central Belt’). In absolute terms, the numbers remain small, though, and the larger part of settlements is without any evidence. Her hypothesis that the invisibility of indigenous languages – sparse evidence notwithstanding – can be explained by literacy arriving only after Latin was already firmly entrenched, deserves further exploration in a comparative perspective.
Greg Woolf’s ‘Intermezzo’ neatly ties together the volume’s strands, reflecting on the difficulty of modeling linguistic change in light of the complex, asynchronous evidence, and offering suggestions for further avenues of research.
Ancient literacy is a notoriously difficult subject to analyze, and the proxy-data available to us is far from straightforward to interpret, subject to numerous biases and filters of survival. Small finds went largely ignored and often unpublished until a few decades ago, but our historical understanding can be advanced when we consider them in our analysis. The synthetic approach to so many highly diverse areas, integrating archaeological and epigraphical sources, that is displayed in this volume is ambitious and largely successful. A central challenge with such an approach is that broad trends tend to mask local variation that only appears in detailed analysis. An example is grouping all inscriptions found near military sites in a military category. Not only do these sites often change their character over time, turning into civilian settlements, a close look often reveals a civilian epigraphic habit distinct from the military one found at the same site. But this can’t be helped, and the authors are to be commended for undertaking such a far-reaching endeavor that will surely serve as the catalyst for further regional studies. In this light, a central insight is the call for identifying areas of shared cultural patterns that cross provincial or regional borders as a basis for locally focused studies.
This book does not overturn the long-running debates and paradigms of Romanization, but complicates the picture in a welcome way, moving further beyond binary dichotomies of Roman/non-Roman. It demonstrates the highly contingent, patchwork nature of Latinization, shaped by urbanism, elite (and non-elite) agency, trade and ritual needs. An aspect that remains underexplored, though hinted at, is the relationship between the spread of literacy and the Roman legal system, whose penetration in provincial society has been the subject of recent research.[7]
The production values are high, with full-color illustrations throughout, though a few caveats remain. Some of the maps tend to be quite cluttered, and hard to read at the printed scale, and due to being color-blind, I found that choosing shades of the same color for different datapoints makes them impossible to distinguish. It should also go without saying that graphs without labeled axes can be misleading and should be avoided (e.g. fig. 5.5). When discussing the results of database queries, it should be considered good practice to give the queries used, which aids reproducibility.
In sum, this is an ambitious, methodologically self-aware, and source-rich book that succeeds in providing a better picture of Latinization across the Northwestern provinces, and will certainly become a standard reference for all historians, epigraphists and archaeologists interested in Roman provincial culture. As the authors themselves are aware, though, its statistical claims should be approached with caution. Perhaps the greatest value of this work lies in providing new and promising heuristics, methods, and hypotheses that deserve to be tested further in tightly focused regional studies.
Authors and titles
- Alex Mullen. Exploring Life and Languages in the Roman Western Provinces: Methods, Materials, and Mindsets
- Noemí Moncunill. Indigenous Languages, Bilingualism, and Literacy in Hispania Citerior, Third Century BCE – First Century CE
- María José Estarán Tolosa, Javier Herrera Rando. The Rise of Latin in Hispania Ulterior, Third Century BCE – Second Century CE
- Pieter Houten. The Epigraphic Habit in Post-Conquest Hispania. A Geospatial Analysis of the Epigraphic Data and Self-Governing Communities
- Alex Mullen, The Languages and Epigraphies of Iron Age and Roman Gaul
- Marie-Thérèse Raepsaet-Charlier. The Onomastics of the Batavian civitas in the Context of the Latinization of Gallia Belgica and Germania inferior
- Michel Feugère, A. Willi. Literacy in Gaul. The value of instrumentum
- Anna Willi. Writing Latin in Germania Superior
- Jasper de Bruin. Writing Equipment and Latin Literacy in the Netherlands. An Archaeological Perspective
- Alex Mullen. Languages and Literacies in Roman Britain
- Greg Woolf. Intermezzo
Notes
[1] Alex Mullen (ed.), Social Factors in the Latinization of the Roman West (Oxford 2023); Alex Mullen, George Woudhuysen (eds.), Languages and Communities in the Late Roman and Post-Imperial Western Provinces (Oxford 2023).
[2] https://artefacts.mom.fr/
[3] Currently under research in the archaeobotanical DFG-research project Helvetiereinöde und Birkengipfel https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/527250117.
[4] The locus classicus for this is Tac. Germ. 29,4.
[5] The Portable Antiquities Scheme allows member of the general public to record finds of archaeological objects.
[6] The Rural Settlement of Roman Britain is a research initiative aiming to combine research data from all available literature on the rural sites of Roman Britain.
[7] See e. g. Kimberly Czajkowski, Benedikt Eckhardt, Meret Strothmann (eds.) Law in the Roman Provinces (Oxford 2020).