Reimagining sacred springs and empire: Aquae Sulis for the 21^st century

Dr Eleri Cousins

Ever since the first discoveries of temple sculpture in the 18^th century, the remains of Aquae Sulis and its great sanctuary to Sulis Minerva have inspired stories about the Roman town of Bath, and the connections we, from the Georgians onwards, have felt to the people who worshipped and bathed at Sulis Minerva’s hot springs almost 2000 years ago. But how much do we really know about the place of Bath in Roman Britain? What sort of goddess was Sulis Minerva, and why did people come to this sanctuary of hers on the edges of the Roman world? In this keynote lecture, I explore how new research is changing our understanding of how and why the hot springs were sacred to the Romans, what may have driven the foundation of the sanctuary in the 1^st century AD, and what this might mean for the story of Togidubnus and Aquae Sulis in the CLC.

Dr Eleri Cousins is a Roman archaeologist and Lecturer in Roman History at Lancaster University, where her students studying Roman Britain often have strong and fond memories of Togidubnus in the CLC. Her research focuses on the role played by religion and ritual in the societies of the Roman empire. Her first book, The Sanctuary at Bath in the Roman Empire (CUP, 2020), explored how Georgian and Victorian responses to Roman Bath have shaped modern understandings of the site, and re-examined our evidence for Aquae Sulis to tell a new story of the entanglement of the sanctuary with Roman imperialism, the role of the hot springs in the lives of worshipers, and Bath's place within the wider world of the western Roman Empire.

Image credit: GuidoB; license: CC BY-SA 3.0; adapted by CSCP.