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In the course of the eighteenth century, a wide array of social genres encompassed coronations, princely weddings, parades, masquerades, and operas. With its formulaic plots about ancient Roman emperors or Persian kings opera seria was attuned to the Russian monarchy. In La Clemenza di Tito, staged for the coronation of Elisabeth, the chorus praised Tito as Elisabeth; the Roman emperor was enacted by a female singer; with the empress situated in a majestic elevated space, she and the female Tito engaged in a play of reflection. Triumphant Minerva became a theatrical, visual, and audio identifier of Catherine II. Elsewhere the empress fostered an image of herself as the historical Russian hero, Prince Oleg. The operas reciprocated the empresses’ dual gender role as triumphant monarch-warrior and virtuous mistress of the court.

Chapter 4 shows further how Milton uses Ovidian forms to meditate on his own creativity. Like Ovid, Milton fills his work with characters who are doubles for himself. Through the figures of Satan, Sin, Phaethon, and Bellerophon, Milton suggests how the fall has wounded all creativity. Moreover, Milton imagines evil as a version of the poet's creative imitation, which has degenerated into sterile copying fuelled by the force of envy, the traditional enemy and self‐destructive double of all creativity. In the figure of Sin, Milton draws together Ovidian figures for self‐destruction from Narcissus and Scylla, as well as Envy and Minerva. Moreover, in the figure of the narrator, Milton shows how the desire to create is never fully separate from the desire to destroy.

A fundamental question in decision making has been how people make judgements of frequency and probability. This chapter describes a new theory, Minerva DM (MDM) that ties many of the heuristics and biases together within the context of a multiple-trace memory model for frequency judgements. It provides a brief tutorial on how Minerva 2 and MDM simulates non-conditional and conditional frequency judgements, and then demonstrates how the models can be used to describe two possible accounts of the availability heuristic. It ends by discussing where MDM fits within the context of other models of frequency judgement.

This chapter discusses Aaron Hill's years as an Essex man from 1738 to 1750. By the end of 1738, he had found a cheaper, rural property which he considered suitable for himself and his two younger daughters, Astrea and Minerva. Plaistow, now an unleafy London suburb, was in Hill's time a rural village, a day's coach journey to Westminster along rough and muddy roads. Hill presumably chose Plaistow through his in-laws associations with the region. He and his daughters initially relished the peace and quiet of Hyde House, but later were faced with the negative impact of the place on their health, as they were struck down with ague. The social isolation the Hills had to cope with may have been almost worse than the illness. All of Hill's relationships during the Plaistow years were overshadowed by his friendship with Richardson.

This chapter ultimately maintains that any comparative project runs the risk of reinforcing the very boundaries it claims to deconstruct. Afrodescendente literature does not stand in opposition to “other” literatures, but rather represents variant attempts to use language poetically to reconstruct history and, in doing so, to impose a vision of how the future should be. Frances Harper, Cristina Ayala, and Frances Harper’s engagement with language goes beyond specific formal or thematic considerations, ultimately placing language itself under the microscope. In doing so, these poets help us to see how poetics play a role in the construction of historical memory. During the critical years leading up to the turn of the twentieth century, the project of nation building called on the resources of intellectuals and poets alike. Frances Harper, Cristina Ayala and Auta de Souza’s poetry actively destabilized myths about afrodescendente peoples. Their poetry also provided a foundation for a viable tradition of afrodescendente poetry by women and demonstrated the influence of poetry on the process of nation-building and the construction of gender and race at the turn of the century.

The frustrated cry of the young Barry Cunliffe has an odd echo in these days of preservation in situ. Sitting in the Roman Baths on his first visit as a schoolboy in 1955, he was astonished at how much was unknown about the Baths, despite their international reputation: large areas ‘surrounded by big question marks . . . all around . . . the word ‘‘unexcavated’’ ’ (Cunliffe 1984: xiii; figure 1). His later understanding of the realities and constraints of excavation only sharpened his desire to know more. Now, fifty years on and more, due in large part to that drive to know, his curiosity, we can claim to have made as much progress in our understanding of the baths and the city around them as had occurred in all the years before his visit, a history of archaeological enquiry stretching back over 400 years. In 1955 the baths were much as they had been discovered in the 1880s and 1890s. They were not well understood. The town, or city, or whatever surrounded it, were almost completely unknown, or at best, misunderstood. It was still possible in that year to argue that the temple of Sulis Minerva was on the north of the King’s Bath, not, as records of earlier discoveries made clear, on the west (Richmond and Toynbee 1955). Yet as the young Cunliffe sat and mused, the archaeological world was beginning to take note and a modern excavation campaign was beginning; indeed had begun: Professor Ian Richmond, in a short eight years to become a colleague, had started ‘his patient and elegant exploration of the East Baths’ the summer before (Cunliffe 1969: v). Richmond initiated a small number of very limited investigations into the East Baths, elucidating a tangle of remains that, while clearly the result of a succession of alterations and archaeological phases, had never been adequately analysed. Richmond’s main aim was to understand the developmental history of the baths, and this approach, combined with a thoughtful and thorough study of the rest of the remains, led to a still broadly accepted phasing and functional analysis (Cunliffe 1969).

The attempt to find the first synthetic transuranium elements occurred via investigations completely different from anything that one could imagine. They were conducted in Rome by the renowned team of “the boys of Via Panisperna,” led by the young Enrico Fermi, affectionately called “the Pope” by his colleagues because, like the Supreme Pontiff, he was considered infallible. Nevertheless, this presumed infallibility in every area of the experimental sciences ought not stray into radiochemistry. Such hubris led to a spot on an otherwise splendid record: a clumsy interpretation of data that led to the doubtful attribution of the discovery of two transuranium elements. The hasty attempt to first name, and then retract, the two radioelements, would tarnish the prestigious and somewhat controversial figure of Enrico Fermi. On the other hand, this nonexistent discovery also sped the Roman professor to Stockholm, to receive the 1938 Nobel prize in physics. On March 25, 1934, Enrico Fermi announced the observation of neutron-induced radiation in samples of aluminum and fluorine. This brilliant experiment was the culmination of preceding discoveries: that of the neutron and that of artificial radioactivity (produced by means of α particles, deuterons, and protons). The following October, a second and crucial discovery was announced: the braking effect of hydrogenous substances on the radioactivity induced by neutrons, the first step toward the utilization of nuclear energy. The year 1934, thanks to Fermi’s research, was one of great expectations for the rebirth of Italian physics, an area that for centuries had remained in the backwater compared to the United States and the great countries of Europe. At the beginning of the 1930s, the members of Fermi’s team had explained the theory of. decay and, after 1934, with their induced radioactivity experiments, had also laid down the guidelines for research on the physics of neutrons. Rome became a reference point for nuclear research on the international level. The project of the director of the Rome Physics Institute, Senator Orso Mario Corbino (1876–1937), was nearly accomplished, a project that, from the end of the 1920s, Corbino had believed in and had not spared any expense to realize, investing all of his resources in the youthful Fermi, who was called to occupy the first chair in theoretical physics in Italy, created especially for him, when he was only 25 years of age.

This chapter explores the historical development of Rome's religion. If the oldest order of gods was adapted to the interests and needs of a small urban community living in the closest proximity, subsequent religious development was determined by Rome's expansion beyond its own territory and through its gradual absorption of neighboring communities and tribes. The changed political relations are clearly manifested in the area of religion. The old triad of gods – Jupiter, Mars and Quirinus – recedes and survives only in the prayer formulae that derived from an older time. In its place came a new group of divinities – Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva – which took its place on the crowning heights of the city. The foundation of this temple, which means the beginning of a new era in more than one respect, is attributed by the ancients unanimously to the Tarquins.

This chapter explains how Latin American feminists pushed women’s rights into the United Nations Charter at the 1945 United Nations Conference on International Organization (UNCIO) in San Francisco. Bertha Lutz and a number of Latin American feminists with whom she collaborated–Minerva Bernardino from the Dominican Republic, Amalia de Castillo Ledón from Mexico, and Isabel Pinto de Vidal from Uruguay–as well as Jessie Street from Australia, were responsible for pushing women’s rights into several parts of the UN Charter and for proposing what became the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women. They did this over the express objections of the U.S. and British female delegates to the conference who believed that women’s rights were too controversial or not important enough to include. These Latin American women also worked alongside representatives from “smaller nations” and from U.S. non-governmental organizations like the NAACP to push “human rights” into the Charter. At the UNCIO, the racism that Lutz experienced from U.S. and British delegates, lack of U.S. and British support, and overweening power of the "Big Four" in the constitution of the United Nations, caused her to turn away from her long-time Anglo-American-philia and identify as a "Latin American."

The Constitution and the ability of the judiciary to protect it gained and lost ground in the years of Indira Gandhi's return. Scepticism greeted her government's policies affecting the judiciary, national security, and civil liberty, despite that they may have been well intended. The Supreme Court's reaffirmation of the basic structure doctrine in the Minerva Mills case restored the balance between the judiciary and the legislature and definitively gave the Constitution the protection of judicial review. However, during these years, the government's resort to preventive detention and its enactment of other repressive legislation diminished constitutional liberties and the courts' ability to protect them. The Prime Minister had not left all her authoritarian tendencies behind.

This chapter argues that Silius’ excursus on Anna Perenna in Punica 8 is closely linked with the battle at Cannae, recounted in books 9 and 10 of the epic. As a figure who assists Hannibal in securing victory there, but contributes to his ultimate undoing, Anna shows herself to be less sympathetic to the Carthaginian cause than is usually recognised. She is, rather, comparable to pro–Roman gods in the epic, such as Minerva and Jupiter, who similarly oppose Rome in the books leading up to and including Cannae, but do so to help the city prepare herself for victory in the war and her future empire. Anna’s personal story, in which she is transformed from a Carthaginian mortal into an Italian divinity, also sets in bold relief the short–sightedness of Hannibal himself and the pro–Carthaginian goddess Juno.

Franco-Italian Christine de Pizan rereads mythographic glosses on female deities in Ovid’s Metamorphoses as protofeminist in her Epistre Othea. Having participated in the university debate over Jean de Meun’s misogynistic allegories in the Rose, she learns to valorize female gods in part from an Aristotelian mythographic commentary on an adaptation of the Rose by Picard scholar and court physician Evrart de Conty in which an innovative role in the Garden of Deduit is provided for Diana, goddess of virginity. Christine begins to reject as misguided the very nature of clerical or scholarly commentaries themselves and to present herself as a magister, a teacher of others, if not in schools or universities then in her own writing, modeling herself on Lady Philosophy in Boethius’s Consolatio Philosophiae. Her reinterpretations of the gods in the Othea reflect her personal agenda, which involves the creation of a female classical mythological analogue to the Christian Trinity in Diana, Ceres, and Minerva, and a world in which wisdom is guided primarily by female deities. Christine also projects herself into her invented pseudo-classical deity, Othea, goddess of prudence, who reinterprets earlier moralizations and of classical mythology and history to reveal their patriarchal weaknesses.

Universities and science policy were key areas of Edward Shils’ concerns. His commitment to the research university ideal as the central institution for the production and dissemination of knowledge and the essential role of higher education for social and economic development led him to establish the journal Minerva. This journal became central for research on higher education and for debates on science policy. Shils wrote thoughtfully on the role of the research university, and was one of the first scholars to focus on universities in developing countries, pointing out their centrality for emerging economies. Shils belief in the Weberian ideal of the research university led him to analyse the history of universities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and defend the traditional ideal of faculty autonomy and governance.

In this chapter, the analysis of the last three chapters is extended through today. The first major point is that, while the foundations continue to provide considerable support to the social science academy, the federal government has become the major source of funding. There are three major agencies in support of the science project and academic research more generally, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Institutes of Health. These agencies today largely define the terms for central directions in interdisciplinary research; until recently they also supported “big” social science and they supported the science of “big social science” as well as the social problem as their first goal. The federal government also provides vast support for the study of various public policies, public affairs, and the like, and use the Minerva Initiative as one such example.

This paper presents an examination of the existence or non-existence of the collegium poetarum in Rome with a close look at the evidence of other collegia and a wide-ranging and detailed survey of the literary, textual, epigraphic, archaeological, and topographic evidence for the existence of the collegium poetarum. In the present state of knowledge, no definitive conclusion for the existence of the collegium poetarum can be reached.