Iain Ferris is a highly experienced professional archaeologist and prolific author whose name and work will be familiar to most, if not all, readers of this journal. His past scholarship frequently takes on topics of wide interest, such as the iconography of barbarians. Unlike that past academically oriented work, however, his present volume is intended as a collection of his ‘own thoughts on the uniqueness of the art from northern Roman Britain in the form of an extended essay’ (p. xiv), and in this way retails itself as the first book-length study on this topic.

As Ferris states, his book should not be treated as a traditional academic monograph, but rather as ‘a kind of guide for those visiting the museums of the region or those studying its art who often do not want to navigate the full academic history of the objects they are seeing but who want to be sufficiently informed to contextualize the artworks on display there’ (p. xiv). And therein lies the challenge of reviewing this volume; it has a different kind of mandate and thus makes different kinds of demands on the reader than most works reviewed in this journal (e.g. he references scholars by name in the body of the text but his book contains no footnotes, only a helpful but abbreviated section for further reading).

The volume consists of a brief preface and nine chapters. Chapter 1, ‘A Land Apart’ (p. 1–25), is functionally the introduction. There Ferris swiftly surveys the history and geography of the region, his understanding of the concepts of art and identity and the critical and unstable role played by viewers, the regional character of the art forms (especially their materiality, notably sandstone), and considerations of change over time, among other topics. Chapter 2, ‘Shadowplayers’ (p. 26–37), discusses the presence and absence of the emperor in official imagery, such as coins and sculpture, and via other types of objects, such as the head pots from York that may represent Caracalla and Julia Domna. Chapter 3, ‘Gods and Mortals’ (p. 38–69), is the longest and arguably the richest, with excursions into the full range of religious life through sections on sacred landscape, systems and practices, private devotion, the power of place, curing and healing, and more. Chapter 4, ‘Artifice and Transcendence’ (p. 70–91), continues the discussion of religion, but shifts focus to the worship of select eastern deities. Chapter 5, ‘The Good Soldier’ (p. 92–111), canvasses far more than the imagery of the Roman army alone, but also related types of iconography (e.g. mythological heroes, gladiators) and the issues that they raise, especially masculinity. The discussion of soldiers and frontiers leads seamlessly to Chapter 6, ‘Building an Image’ (p. 112–131), which looks at the inscriptions and imagery on commemorative legionary distance slabs, the enameled souvenir ‘pans’ or bowls connected to Hadrian’s Wall, and forms of disposal after the decommissioning of the Antonine frontier. Chapter 7, ‘Image and Identity’ (p. 132–155), attends to different forms of visual-self representation, principally through images and texts on tombstones but also through small handheld objects, such as cameos and figurines (with emphasis on their potential magical properties), and sexual representations (phalli). Chapter 8, ‘Remembering and Forgetting’ (p. 156–168), is short and speculative but highly rewarding in that it returns to and rethinks several objects discussed in the previous chapters (e.g. distance slabs, altars, silver treasure) while also introducing several new ones, all of which were recontextualized from their original use. Chapter 9, ‘A Landscape of Possibilities’ (p. 169–193), ties together the book’s arguments through discussion of a series of overarching themes, including ‘locale’, ‘landscape of memory’, and ‘written on the land’.

The book is clearly the product of an author with a deep and wide-ranging understanding of the region’s objects and monuments. Ferris demonstrates a thorough command of the region’s corpus as a whole and originality in mapping its defining features as well as its distinct particularities (e.g. he frequently cites percentages of object types and materials, such as ivory, to give one a sense of their incidence in the northern territories relative to Britain as a whole). Consequently, his overarching argument regarding the art forms of northern Roman Britain as a ‘distinct visual culture’ (p. xiv) is highly convincing. There is also much additional food for thought: scholars interested in topics as divergent as souvenirs (e.g. sports cups), polychromy (e.g. painted tombstones), and ethnicity (e.g. Black Africans), for instance, will find much to chew on here. And thus, when treated as ‘a kind of guide for those visiting the museums of the region or those studying its art’, this book places its readers in very capable hands.

That said, the book’s arguments are not always easy for the reader to follow due to the author’s penchant for free-flowing asides and language which sometimes obscures rather than elucidates. Consider these programmatic sentences in Chapter 1: ‘The stance adopted here is that the art of Roman Britain “is what it is” and that value judgements on it should not generally be made. The consolation of this approach is the knowledge that the dynamic ambivalence of many works surveyed had a dreadful vitality that must have reflected a dedication to universalizing particular messages’ (p. 15). I cannot claim to understand what that ‘dreadful vitality’ was exactly, even after reading this volume in its entirety. Visions of the Roman North is thus a highly appropriate title for a variety of reasons: this is a book bursting with ideas but the author at times has difficulty harnessing his diversity of thought into a tight and coherent narrative.

The volume has been carefully edited and beautifully produced. The chapters are exceedingly well illustrated (107 figures total, with the majority in color), all of which helpfully supports the author’s often detailed analyses of individual works (including multiple views of some).

All in all, Visions of the Roman North is a rich and challenging ‘long essay’ (p. 4) that should appeal to a broad spectrum of readers, from specialists of Roman provincial art to students to museumgoers.

Sinclair W. Bell

Northern Illinois University

sinclair.bell@gmail.com