Belief and emotion in Roman religion: Reconsidering John Sheid's "civic model"

Jacob Mackey: Belief and emotion in Roman religion: Reconsidering John Sheid's "civic model"

Was there any role for belief in Roman religion? Was there any place for emotion? I answer yes to both questions and moreover I argue that in Roman religion, emotion depended on belief. Simply put, only if a Roman believed that the gods were, say, vengeful, could she experience the religious emotion of, for example, fear. My approach to belief and emotion builds upon but goes well beyond that of John Scheid, a preeminent scholar of Roman religion at the Collège de France. In this talk I carefully reconstruct his position on the role of belief and the place of emotion in Roman religion. He takes what might be called a minimalist view on both questions, recognizing a certain rather basic role for belief and a sharply circumscribed role for emotion. Drawing on and building on my recent book, Belief and Cult: Rethinking Roman Religion (Princeton University Press, 2022), I show that careful attention to our sources and engagement with cognitive theory suggests that belief and emotion were much more deeply implicated in Roman religion than Scheid allows and I go beyond him in showing that they were in fact deeply interrelated.

N.B. - You can view a recording of this, and other past events on Paideia's Youtube Channel.