Argues that thinking about sacred trees in Roman culture forces us to rethink how we understand Roman religion.

Ailsa Hunt is Isaac Newton Research Fellow in Classics at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.

1. Rooting in: why give time to sacred trees?; 2. A brief history of tree-thinking: the enduring power of animism; 3. How arboreal matter matters: rethinking sacrality through trees; 4. Arboriculture and arboreal deaths: rethinking sacrality again; 5. Confronting arboreal agency: reading the Divine in arboreal behaviour; 6. Imagining the gods: how trees flesh out the identity of the Divine; 7. Branching out: what sacred trees mean for Roman religion.