Reims and the Remi

Reims and the Remi is a study of the behaviours, linguistic landscapes, and identity-making of the Remi of north-eastern France within the Roman period. The Remi were a group situated within the northern Champagne plain, through the southern fringes of the Ardennes Forest, between the Meuse and Marne rivers, and along the Aisne valley, which sits roughly within the modern French départements of the Marne and Ardennes. This research is deliberately Remi- and Gaulish-centric, concentrating on the people living in and around Reims, and placing these findings within regional, that is Belgic and eastern Gaulish, patterns through a bottom-up approach. Driven by the frequency and quantity of available distributions in the data, much of this book is devoted to the description and analysis of ‘middling’ social and economic people. The epigraphic habit, stone funerary monuments, dress and accoutrements, scene, and the use of everyday writing are principally investigated among the Remian corpora and across Belgica, the Rhine-Moselle, and northern Bourgogne to establish and detail a shared entrepreneurial and production-oriented visual syntax. This analysis proposes a nuanced hierarchy of the interrelated social and economic groups that are represented amongst the Remi within Reims and contextualises them within the behaviours of their neighbours, positioning their choices within broader social and linguistic backgrounds established through close study of textual and artistic data. Together, this research presents an integrated sociolinguistic and archaeological approach dedicated to further understanding the Remi as a people across multiple social domains and demographics and offers novel insights into the nuances of eastern Gaul and how urban settlements and the people living in them interacted socially, linguistically, and economically.