Persistence of pagan cults in Roman Britain

[guy]

Despite efforts to "Christianize" the Roman Empire after Constantine the Great halted the persecution of Christians and legalized their religion in AD 313, pagan cults persisted in Great Britain longer than in the rest of the Empire.

Here is an academic article that discusses the persistence and success of pagan cults in late Roman Britain.

 

 

Quote

In the first half of the fourth century AD, cessation of official persecution of Christians and the ensuing rapid, if uneven, increase in Christian influence in Imperial power structures led to greater material expression of Christianity within Britain, including among elites (Petts 2003; 2016; Rees 2020).⁵ Despite this, investment in pagan temples and displays of belief also continued well into the second half of the fourth century AD in Britannia (Woodward and Leach 1993; Esmonde Cleary 2014; Smith 2018: 203–204; Henry et al. 2020). The short-lived pagan revival under Julian (AD 361–363) has been suggested by Moorhead (2001) to be key to understanding a floruit of late Roman pagan shrines and temples in Britannia in the years afterwards, especially in the south-west, but the challenges of linking specific historical events to archaeological chronologies are considerable.⁶ It appears that, unlike in the German provinces (Kousser 2010) or Gaul (Goodman 2011), in Britannia the ‘end of the Gods’ did not take place until the early fifth century (Esmonde Cleary 2014). Overall, it is difficult to align the archaeological evidence of the highly diverse religious and ritual behaviours in late Roman Britain with wider political and religious change in the Empire, though undoubtedly disruptions to wider religious networks and shared vocabularies of religious practice must have caused responses in practices across Britannia. One of the key questions provoked by the glocalization paradigm here must be to explain the slow pace of religious change in mid to late fourth century AD Britannia in comparison to the rest of the Roman West; perhaps this hints at an already fragmenting network of connections to Britannia.

 

https://traj.openlibhums.org/article/id/10654/

Edited Thursday at 06:30 PM by guy