Mullen Alex (ed.) Social Factors in the Latinization of the Roman West

Oxford University Press, 2023. — 378 p.- First volume of its kind devoted to Latinization
- Contains comprehensive and interdisciplinary contributions from a set of leading international experts
- Presents major advances in understanding life and languages in the Roman West
- Questions assumptions about presumed factors in Latinization
- This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence.This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.Latinization is a strangely overlooked topic. Historians have noted it has been 'taken for granted' and viewed as an unremarkable by-product of 'Romanization', despite its central importance for understanding the Roman provincial world, its life, and languages. This volume aims to fill the gap in our scholarship. Expert contributors have been selected to create a multi-disciplinary volume with a thematic approach to the vast subject, tackling administration, army, economy, law, mobility, religion (local and imperial religions and Christianity), social status, and urbanism. They situate the phenomena of Latinization, literacy, and bi- and multilingualism within local and broader social developments and draw together materials and arguments that have not before been coordinated in a single volume. The result is a comprehensive guide to the topic, which offers original and more experimental work. The sociolinguistic, historical, and archaeological contributions reinforce, expand, and sometimes challenge our vision of Latinization and lay the foundations for future explorations.This volume will be accompanied by two further volumes from the European Research Council-funded LatinNow project: Latinization, Local Languages, and Literacies in the Roman West, and Languages and Communities in the Late-Roman and Post-Imperial Western Provinces.Contributors: Francisco Beltrán Lloris (University of Zaragoza), Alison E. Cooley (University of Warwick), Olivier de Cazanove (University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), Pieter Houten (University of Nottingham), Marietta Horster (University of Mainz), Anne Kolb (University of Zurich), Elizabeth Meyer (University of Virginia), Alex Mullen (University of Nottingham), Bruno Rochette (University of Liège), Michael A. Speidel (University of Zurich), María José Estarán Tolosa (University of Nottingham), Andrew Wilson (University of Oxford), Robert Wiśniewski (University of Warsaw), Catherine Wolff (University of Avignon).Alex Mullen (PhD, FSA, FRHistS) is Professor of Ancient History and Sociolinguistics at the University of Nottingham and Principal Investigator of the European Research Council-funded LatinNow project exploring life and languages in the Roman western provinces. She previously held research fellowships at the Universities of Cambridge (Magdalene) and Oxford (All Souls College). She is the author of Southern Gaul and the Mediterranean (Cambridge, 2019), co-author (with Olivia Elder) of The Language of Letters (Cambridge, 2019), and co-editor (with Patrick James) of Multilingualism in the Graeco-Roman Worlds (Cambridge, 2012).