Mother goddesses and their votive forms

Dedications to 'Matres' and 'Matronae' were common in antiquity and can be seen in many museums. Their cult was originally Celtic, but names and epithets often underwent Latin and sometimes Germanic adaptations. For the first time, 159 types of names are analyzed here without local and linguistic limitations according to the principles of comparative linguistics. A more precise application of Indo-European word formation rules and recent findings on Celtic phonetics allows for simpler and sometimes entirely new etymologies.

The typological study helps to better understand the gradual diversification as well as the functions of the deity, which align with the iconography. Separate sections address the temporally changing votive formulas, the equivalents of the main theonym and their distribution, the corpora of the three language areas, the structure, phonetics, and semantics of the epithets, as well as the history of research and the functions of the mother goddesses in general.