This chapter brings the sensory potentialities of material objects used in Roman ritualized activities into discourse concerning the nature and production of ancient religious knowledge. By combining perspectives derived from lived religion and material religion it is argued that religious agency should be understood as the product of the intertwining of human and more-than-human things within assemblages. Lived experiences of this production of agency, in turn, cause people to feel and consequently think in certain ways, ultimately producing what can be categorized as distal and proximal forms of religious knowledge. The chapter uses the example of the frieze of the Vestal Virgins from the Ara Pacis Augustae to argue that different forms of ancient religious knowledge were actively created through a multiplicity of lived experiences of ritualized action that brought human and more-than-human material things together, rather than existing only as something that was expressed through ritual behaviours. Exploring the Vestals’ experience of ritualized encounters with material things makes it possible to establish new understandings of the real-world lived experiences and identities of these priestesses, offering significant insights into how individualized forms of religious knowledge could be sustained even in the context of shared communal or public rituals.

This chapter explores how religious knowledge, including rituals, was learned and transmitted by putting forward a novel, cognitive-based, theoretical framework for analysing ritual practices in the Graeco-Roman world. This framework, termed the Religious Learning Network (RLN) theoretical model, is tested within a case study of archaeological and epigraphic evidence of Nutrices Augustae, a cult of local Pannonian healing mother-goddesses. Applying the Religious Learning Network model provides an insight into the types of rituals that may have taken place within this cult as well as the cognitive and social effects that these rituals may have produced upon the ritual participants. This chapter demonstrates that rituals were learned and transmitted within intimate circles through cult members’ interaction with objects, places, and events; forming a dynamic network of memory associations that helped in the encoding, storage, and retrieval of religious and ritual memories.

Chapter 4 introduces the diverse Islamic epistemes and knowledges encountered in the zongos and discusses how these inform the assertion and contestation of religious authority in these wards. Offering an ethnography of the diverse Islamic knowledge practices and discourses in the zongos and portraying different Islamic scholars, I discuss the diversity of their ʿilm in relation to the literature of an anthropology of knowledge. Through portrayals of three Islamic scholars from Kokote Zongo, with their diverse biographies of Islamic learning, I highlight the irreducible diversity of Islamic knowledges and epistemes encountered among them. This applies especially to their salient distinctions and contestations of an exoteric and an esoteric Islamic knowledge. These different knowledges are transmitted in distinct ways and through a variety of institutions, adding to the lived diversity of this religion. In turn, the Islamic scholars deploy and challenge their distinct knowledges in their sermons and counselling and thus not only engage with but propel the lived diversity of their religion. As I argue in this chapter, ʿilm is not a pregiven Islamic knowledge but a varied and contested field on which various actors seek to assert their religious authority as they engage with and (re)make the discursive tradition of Islam.