Mater Matuta, ‘Fertility Cults’ and the Integration of Women in Religious Life in Italy in the Fourth to First Centuries Bc

Abstract

This study explores social and gendered aspects of female fertility in popular religious practices in Italy in the last four centuries BC, and it investigates the role of supplication and votive dedications in promoting maternal health and family continuity. It tackles modern assumptions which have strongly aligned the religious activities of women in Republican Italy with their generative interests and specific ‘fertility cults’ or ‘women's goddesses’. Divinities associated with fertility are explored here, with particular emphasis on Mater Matuta who is often defined in modern research as a ‘mother goddess’. The study shows that cults purely concerned with fertility are unlikely to have existed. Fertility was only one of several fundamental personal concerns brought by women and men to the generalist and polyvalent deities of Republican Italy. Items associated with fertility, such as terracotta wombs, male and female genitals, and swaddled infants, always occur together with other anatomical ex-votos across a wide range of sites and were dedicated to many deities. Considering the archaeological and textual evidence, Mater Matuta can be shown to have occupied a more flexible and encompassing space in the pantheon, and her involvement in marriage, motherhood and childbearing was part of a wider repertoire of responsibilities. The study also focuses attention on a distinctive, but largely overlooked, votive assemblage from Capua which includes numerous tufa statues of women and babies. The paper proposes that they should be understood as votive objects offered to an unknown deity by Capuan women as thanks for support in the generative enterprise, personally and more broadly in the context of the city's religious and civic identity.

Cives Romanae. Roman Women as Citizens during the Republic

“…12 DiLuzio 2016: 14 Sobre este aspecto el estudio de los exvotos y otro tipo de ofrendas ha contribuido a percibir de forma más compleja y menos rígida las funciones de las divinidades y los vínculos entre estas y sus cultores. Al respecto vid., por ejemplo, Carroll 2019. 15 Vid.…”

Middle Republican Connectivities

“… 135 Schultz 2006 was path-clearing. Among the latest interventions in a now-crowded field: Carroll 2019; McDonald 2019; Moser 2019b; Padilla Peralta 2020.…”