Religions of Rome, Vol. 1: A History and Vol. 2: A Sourcebook by Mary Beard, John North and Simon Price (1998; ISBN 9780521316828 and 9780521456463) Entry-Level Religious – This two-volume monolith by three great Cambridge historians is really still the synthesis of Roman religion. The first volume covers over 1000 years of history of Roman religion, from the earliest Rome up to the age of Christian emperors in the 5th c. AD, and the second volume is a richly illustrated sourcebook for both archaeological and translated literary sources to the study of Roman religion. The book covers all the major institutions, cults, festivals, and regional variations, but what really makes it excellent is that throughout it pays attention to the more difficult theoretical and societal questions: what is and is not religion in Rome, how intertwined political and religious authority were, how did the religion of the Capital interact with the local cults in the provinces. At the time, the book set out to abolish many older views of how we understood Roman religion and introduced lots of fresh ideas, many of which have become more or less canon. Pantheon: A New History of Roman Religion by Jörg Rüpke (2018; ISBN 978-0691156835) Intermediate Religious – seems set to become ‘the standard’ on Roman religion – takes a long-view look at Roman religion from the 8th century BC through to Late Antiquity, emphasising the shift from a ‘religion’ as a set of rituals you did to being a community to which you might belong. In his chapters on the early period, Rüpke is particularly good at showing the differences between early religion and the more formalised, Greek-influenced beliefs and practices from the better-studied Classical period, drawing attention in particular to the multiplicity of ‘actors whose existence was not without doubt’, to the local nature of religious belief, and the limited extent to which these practices formed a unified, coherent system. Divine Institutions: Religions and Community in the Middle Roman Republic by Dan-el Padilla Peralta (2020; ISBN 9780691168678) [Advanced] – This book frames the social changes of the Middle Republic around religion, using archaeological remains and other methods to show how the increase in temples in this period helped shape festival, civic, and pilgrimage practices.