Stuart McKie’s reassessment of curse tablets sets itself up as a ‘paradigm shift’ in the scholarship and our understanding of these objects; and this is something he well achieves. The focuis on the examination of the tablets within the physical and social lived realities of the individuals who produced them, and the emphasis throughout the book is consistently on the actions of individuals and the objects they interacted with. There is very little of the detailed analysis of the written elements of the curses that has so often been seen in studies of curse tablets throughout the past century. However, he is careful to adduce linguistic discussions from the various works of A Kropp.
This approach is dubbed the Lived Religion Approach, a model first developed by J Rüpke (On Roman Religion: Lived Religion and the individual in Ancient Rome, 2016), which focuses on the idea that religion is inextricably based on the patterns of daily life rather than on abstract beliefs. McKie develops this approach by combining it with the work of E-J Graham (Reassembling Religion in Roman Italy, 2020) who suggests that individuals developed an understanding of how, why, and when to act through their experiences of performing religion, not by turning to a set religious doctrine. This approach works well for the study of curse tablets, as among our surviving tablets there is considerable variation, which well illustrates individual creativity and innovation.
Despite the large variation within our surviving evidence, McKie presents an extremely interesting overview of the physical experience of cursing, from the acquisition of a blank tablet through to its deposition. Some of the assertions appear obvious, but this clear and systematic laying out of steps, with the individual at their heart, is useful and helps to resituate this ritual within its lived reality. Throughout this, McKie brings in his own perceptions of the cursing ritual drawn from a sort of at-home experimental archaeology. He asserts that in previous scholarship the focus has been too strongly on just the written element of the curse and what this can illustrate about the impetus behind their creation, whereas a focus on the physicality of a curse tablet’s creation adds more nuance and understanding.
