The background to this volume's publication makes this a difficult review to write. Originally conceived as a companion to The Religious History of the Roman Empire. Pagans, Jews, and Christians in the Oxford Readings in Classical Studies series (2011, cf. CR 63 [2013], 202–4), this volume was delayed by the passing of Simon Price, the intended co-editor of the volumes. As detailed by the remaining editor North in the volume's introduction, further complications resulted in work on the volume only resuming in 2019, with its final publication in 2023. These unfortunate and unforeseen challenges meant that the work could not serve as a companion to the 2011 volume discussing religion of the imperial period as originally envisioned, though some degree of organisational and conceptual connection is still visible. As described on the first page of the 2011 volume, this new volume also seems designed to ‘illustrate the work of some of the scholars who have influenced the arguments’ and to ‘indicate some of the key moments’ in debates on Roman Republican religion. As North notes in the introduction to the new volume, by the time of publication ‘the whole approach to thinking and writing about republican religious history had met with a dramatic challenge’ (p. 2). This reviewer found himself wishing that the postponement of publication and its resumption in 2019 might have allowed space for some of this critical work to have been included in this volume, especially since one of the earlier promised contributions had to be withdrawn from the collection due to the delay. Although some of this work has appeared in monograph form (e.g. D. MacRae, Legible Religion [2016], D. Padilla Peralta, Divine Institutions [2020]) and so could not have been reprinted here, space might have been found, for example, for articles stemming from the ‘Lived Ancient Religions’ project headed by J. Rüpke that have had such a major impact on the field.

Compounding this difficulty is the wide chronological spread of the essays chosen for publication: three of the fourteen essays reprinted here were first published in the 1980s and two essays in the 1990s, meaning that over one third of the contributions are at least 25 years old and that one is 40 years past its original publication. Although these articles, and indeed all the articles in the collection, are excellent and mark seminal moments in the debates on Roman religion, the field has moved on from many of these debates. While North writes that he hopes that ‘for some scholars it will still present a basis for future study’, this reviewer falls into the camp of the others, for whom ‘it will mark the end of one era and the launching of a very different one’ (p. 2). The volume has the feel of a historiographic review of the field rather than giving a glimpse into the major debates in the field.

With that caveat, the volume does have great virtues; chief among them is that it brings together in one easily accessible place a number of the excellent and formative articles on Roman religion from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s. In addition, half of the articles are published here in English translation for the first time, a great boon for Anglophone readers and especially students: ‘The Priest and the Magistrate: Reflections on the Priesthoods and Public Law at the End of the Republic’ (J. Scheid); ‘Religion and War: On the Relationship of a Society's Religious and Political Systems’ (J. Rüpke); ‘Not the One nor the Many; A Pragmatic Approach to Religious Behaviour in a Polytheistic Society: The Example of Rome’ (A. Bendlin); ‘Rites and Practices of Warfare in Italy between Romans and Samnites: Going under the Yoke and the Samnite Legio Linteata’ (O. de Cazanove); ‘The Lucus Pisaurensis and the Romanization of the Ager Gallicus’ (F. Coarelli); ‘Rome and the Great Places of Worship in Italy (J. Scheid); ‘The Peace of Augustus, the Equinox, and the Centre of the World’ (A. Schmid). As visible in these titles, the volume ranges chronologically from early Rome to the age of Augustus and thematically from priesthood and ritual to issues raised by warfare and Romanisation; shining a light on these articles and their authors is an important contribution.

Since, in keeping with the aims of the series, all the articles have been published elsewhere, it seems more profitable to discuss several aspects of the volume as a whole than to discuss them individually. As a rule, the articles are densely argued and do well in thrusting readers into several of the key developments or ideas in the study of Republican religion, such as myth and ritual. M. Beard's article on ‘Acca Larentia Gains a Son’ has long been a favourite of mine with which to teach, and North's piece on ‘Action and Ritual in Roman Historians: Or How Horatius Held the Door-Post’ explores specific elements of Roman ritual that often have not received enough attention. These articles should be accessible and enlightening for a wide readership, including both students and professionals in the field. In some cases the articles are clearly engaged in a more specific debate; for example, Beard's second article in the collection, ‘Cicero and Divination: The Formation of a Latin Discourse’, is open about responding directly to an article by M. Schofield that was part of its original publication. In these cases a student or non-specialist may have difficulty following the contours of the debate or in moving from that specific debate to a larger understanding of Roman religious practice. Here the volume may be more useful for specialists who are willing and able to track down the original debate than for students. In that regard, the bibliographies included with each entry, the afterwords provided by most of the authors and the suggestions for further reading at the end of the volume will be helpful to all readers.

The organisation of the volume contributes to the feeling that the specialist is better served by the volume. The volume is notionally organised chronologically into five sections: ‘Early Rome’, ‘Republican Practices and Ideas’, ‘Sacrifice’, ‘Rome and Italy’ and ‘Late Republican Transformations’. For the non-specialist these sections may not be fully coherent and appear to sit somewhat uneasily on top of the material. For example, Scheid's contribution on priests and magistrates, though included in the section on Early Rome, deals as much with the place of priests in the Middle and Late Republic as it does with the archaic period. The middle sections should in theory focus on the Middle Republic, but the essays discuss themes across various periods; as North writes in the afterword to his essay on action and ritual in the Roman historians, an essay included in ‘Republican Practices and Ideas’, ‘this essay stretches widely in time from Rome's founders (Romulus and Numa) via the dedicator of the Capitoline temple (the rather less well known Horatius Pulvillus) down as far as Clodius, the attempted dedicator of a temple to Libertas within the site of Cicero's house’ (p. 181). As a historian, I appreciate the desire for a chronological schema, but North's comment makes clear how difficult this approach can be in a volume such as this one, especially for the student or non-specialist. The volume on imperial religion largely avoided this approach, with sections on ‘Changes in Religious Life’, ‘Elective Cults’ and ‘Co-existence of Religions, Old and New’ sitting alongside two final articles on late antiquity, and the current volume might have benefited from a similar structure. North's introduction offers some assistance here by pointing to a number of themes that are covered and also the specific articles in which they appear as a way of highlighting these topics – gods and goddesses, war rituals, priests, communication, innovations. One wonders whether this structure might have been more successful in giving readers a clear understanding of some of the main elements of Republican religious practice. Such a structure might also have brought more coherence to the middle sections, where sacrifice was singled out for its own treatment although the organisational schema suggests it might have been included among other Republican practices. Much recent work on sacrifice, for example, has seen it as a form of communication, and it might have profitably been considered alongside other similar practices rather than on its own. Such an organisation would have made it easier for readers to connect the article by C. Smith, ‘Dead Dogs and Rattles: Time, Space, and Ritual Sacrifice in Iron Age Latium’, to D. Feeney's contribution, ‘Interpreting Sacrificial Ritual in Roman Poetry: Disciplines and Their Models’. I also found myself wishing for more discussion of religious developments under Augustus; this period is represented by A. Schmid's article, which focuses narrowly on the Augustan sundial in the Campus Martius. The Augustan period has been considered ‘very late Republican’ as much as the beginning of a new era, and an additional article or two to spotlight debates around the substantial religious activities of this period would have nicely rounded out a volume on the religious history of Rome.

I feel compelled to make one additional observation about this volume, a comment that could be extended to cover both volumes: the relative lack of female scholars whose work is presented. This volume contains the work of two female scholars, M. Beard (who has two articles in the collection) and R. Flemming, alongside ten male scholars. The previous volume contained four female scholars and twelve male scholars. Even in 2011 when the volumes were conceived, this proportion should not have been acceptable, especially as female scholars of top quality had been publishing on Roman religion by that date. Names such as J. Champeaux, H. Flower, F. Glinister, B. Liou-Gille and C. Schultz (listed alphabetically) come to mind as scholars who had established strong reputations even a decade ago, and there are many others, including some who made substantial contributions between 2011 and 2019, who could be added to this list. While all the articles in the collection merit inclusion, so do the works of these scholars, especially as the future direction of work on Roman religion will depend on their efforts as much as those of anyone else.

The volume captures a moment in time in the debates on Roman Republican religion, and while some aspects of that moment are regrettable, other aspects are very much to be appreciated for moving the discourse to the place where it is now. Scholars of Roman religion have much work to do and much to look forward to. It is a delight to think about what the next volume of collected articles along these lines might look like.