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This chapter examines different ways in which people came into contact with temples, statues, and other representations of divine qualities. It explores festivals and rites honouring divine qualities; senate‐meetings in temples to divine qualities, and the extent to which this created opportunities for contemporaries and later writers to draw on the qualities in question; visits to artwork in temples; setting up statues of people in temples; the use of temples as reference points; and the reporting of prodigies involving temples or statues. The geographical and social range of those making surviving epigraphic dedications to individual divine qualities is explored. Taken together, these varied engagements show that divine qualities continued to be ‘good to think with’ for a variety of people both in and outside Rome, from senators to slaves.

Chapter 4 focuses on the expiation of prodigies, the Romans’ attempt to repair a perceived rupture in their relationship with the gods. During the third century, especially at the height of the threat posed by Hannibal, the Romans began to accept not only prodigies occurring on Roman soil but also those occurring on the territory of their Italian allies. This mechanism reveals an important stage in the Roman response to their expansion, the beginnings of a sense of community that included the cities of Italy. The Roman belief that portents occurring on foreign soil affected the Roman state began to mark that soil as part of the Roman community. The continuation of this practice into the second and first centuries reveals the changing nature of the relationship between Rome and the Italian communities up through the Social War.

This chapter surveys the children's literature detailing genius-level exemplarity and performance. The association between genius and childhood was already implicit in the image of innate genius in the eighteenth century, gearing it essentially to youth. From the start of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, child prodigies and the childhood of genius—though not necessarily the same thing—became the focus of new forms of attention that subjected them to particularly intense scrutiny in three major areas: children's literature, experimental psychology, and, in the middle of the twentieth century, the popular press. The chapter first examines Charles Baudelaire's claim that “genius is simply childhood recovered at will,” before turning to the subject of famous children as well as children's literature.

This chapter discusses the measurement of genius in Alfred Binet's “measuring scale of intelligence,” which he devised and successively refined between 1905 and 1911 (the year he died). Here, the chapter shows how experimental psychology had its own part to play in forming the basis of the child prodigy. And Binet's invention put France at the forefront of developmental psychology. In the words of the American introduction to the 1916 translation of Les Idées modernes sur les enfants, Binet's measuring scale was a “magnum opus” whose rapid acceptance worldwide was “little less than marvelous.” This invention established a language in which genius could be quantified, and precocity plotted against scientifically established developmental norms.

This chapter examines the controversies surrounding the Minou Drouet affair, with Minou being a previously unknown eight-year-old child poet who had captured public interest. The publisher René Julliard had distributed a selection of her letters and poems in the form of a little pamphlet sent to critics, writers, and friends “to put down a marker” and provide advance publicity for the first commercial edition of Minou's poetry, Arbre, mon ami (Tree, my friend), which was scheduled to appear in January 1956, whereafter it sold forty-five thousand copies. In the meantime, and in the absence of any book publication, the affair took off and developed into a full-scale controversy as the authenticity of Minou's talent was called into question. This chapter considers Minou's story in light of the public perception on child prodigies—initially as objects of collective curiosity, and hereafter as the target of suspicion.

This chapter describes the gradual discrediting of the notion of genius. In France in the 1950s, contemporaneously with the Minou Drouet affair, it became the object of a powerful cultural critique under the aegis of literary theory, when Jean-Paul Sartre and Roland Barthes—more or less simultaneously—portrayed it as an anachronistic legacy from the previous century, and denounced it as a one of the myths that lay at the heart of bourgeois ideology. Two of Barthes's texts in Mythologies (1957) specifically target genius—one devoted to Einstein's brain, and the other to Minou Drouet. Much the same goes for Sartre, whose autobiography, Les Mots, begun in 1953 (and finally published in 1964), targets genius and the child prodigy as central components of his farewell to literature.

This chapter examines the change in attitudes toward the human hermaphrodite that extant texts depict as occurring in the transition between the periods of the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire. It first considers Greek approaches to androgyny before explaining how the human hermaphrodite differed from other prodigies. It suggests that the slippery nature of their sexuality placed the hermaphrodites in the category of the religious sacred, capable of having unimaginable effects on the real world. The chapter also explores the concept of sacer and shows how the combination of the sacred and the mysterious finds analogues with the fluid-gendered nouns and the androgynous divinities of the Roman past. It concludes with an analysis of St. Augustine's discussion of the hermaphrodite, which unites the book's themes of grammar, divine power, human bodies with dual sexuality, and the origins of human culture.

This chapter reproaches some Reformation historians with what Amartya Sen might call a ‘solitarist’ approach to ghosts. According to many historians and literary critics, the return of the dead in early modern culture is by default a religious experience, requiring explanation in terms of one's confession. This chapter disputes that view. Four examples are considered in detail. The first embraces the many texts—not all theological—devoted to Samuel's apparition to Saul at the behest of the witch of Endor (I Samuel 28). The second is Pierre Boaistuau's histoires prodigieuses, in which sectarian debate is suspended in order to discuss ghosts as a species of prodigy. The third example is François de Belleforest's continuation of the histoires prodigieuses: central within his ghost narratives is the theme of occult sympathy or friendship. Finally, the chapter closes with an examination of a little-known text by Bénigne Poissenot (1586), in which ghosts are viewed from a stoic perspective.

Philippa's reputation as a gifted child grew more and more as she grew up. During the fall of 1937, Philippa was invited by Mother Stevens, director of the prestigious Pius X School of Liturgical Music at the College of the Sacred Heart, to play for her. During the same year, Philippa won the top prize from the New York Philharmonic's Young People's Society Concert Series at Carnegie Hall. For eight consecutive years, she was placed on the National Piano Teachers Guild Honor Roll. Philippa also began to travel and perform for many people. Philippa's days continued to be carefully regimented and choreographed.

This chapter describes the early life of Erich Korngold. As a child, Korngold was a prodigy the likes of which had rarely been encountered before. He was not only an accomplished pianist but also a composer of preternaturally mature and astonishingly modern-sounding music. He was even called “the little Mozart.” In 1907, at the age of ten, Korngold began contrapuntal studies with Robert Fuchs, a venerable teacher at the Vienna Conservatory, and Alexander Zemlinsky (1871–1942). From there, Korngold embarked on his early musical career. The chapter also describes the reviews and criticisms of Korngold's work, as well as the controversies surrounding the boy and his growing fame, during this period.

This chapter argues that critics have overestimated the extent of the Victorians' investment in the ideology of innocence. The “otherness” of children was not an accepted fact in the 19th century, but the subject of a long, drawn-out fight. The phenomenon of the cult of the child reflects this larger cultural ambivalence. While cultists such as Carroll, Burnett, and Barrie were indisputably drawn to and affected by Romantic figurations of childhood purity, they also resisted the growing tendency to conceive of children as a separate species from adults. Thus, even as they extolled the child’s innocent simplicity, they also opposed activists' efforts to erect a strict line of division between youth and age. For example, during the century-long controversy over the popularity of child actors, many commentators complained that the phenomenon of the stage child constituted a threat to the Romantic ideal of innocence. Yet the cultists eagerly embraced these figures, glorying in their precocious abilities and resisting reformers' attempts to portray them as incompetent victims who needed to be shielded from the glare of the public spotlight.

The chapter focuses on the various aspects of pre-Reformation practice and belief, and explores how traditional cultural paradigms were subtly altered and rehabilitated rather than permanently effaced by the advent of an era of rapid doctrinal and devotional innovation and change. The early modern canon of providential signs and wonders was a mosaic and an amalgam of a cluster of superficially inconsistent intellectual traditions. The post-Reformation repertoire of omens and portents owed much to pagan mythology. Protestant Ministers acknowledged that prodigies of all kinds could be a medium for conveying messages from heaven, and were against popular techniques of predicting the future as ‘heathenish’, ‘superstitious’, and incompatible with a true understanding of the doctrine of providence. The chapter also highlights the tension and interplay between Protestant theology and the preexisting cultures of divination, and explains how ancient cultural patterns serve as templates for the interpretation of current events, simultaneously throwing their own preoccupations into sharp and vivid relief.

The book focuses on the contrary views of various sections regarding the theories of God's judgement and divine intervention. The tales of God's judgements and stories of prodigies and portents have revealed that novel priorities interweave with inherited formulas, and orthodox religious tenets blend with proverbial wisdom and indigenous folklore. The degree to which providential preaching and cheap print were interacting spheres of discourse in early modern England is highlighted in this chapter. The overall effect of Protestantism to leave the universe saturated with supernatural forces and moral significance is emphasized.

This chapter considers the emergence of Mozart as a published composer at age seven. Commentators imputed the astonishing quality of his first sonatas not (as later generations would assert) to a productive deficit of reason on the part of their prepubescent composer, but to his having attained mature reason preternaturally early. Accordingly, Mozart was understood by critics, court chroniclers, and philosophers not as the latest or most exceptional in a long line of child virtuosos, but rather as a prodigy of languages and letters—a puer doctus (child scholar). That the proofs of Mozart’s genius, his compositions, appeared in print gave them an authority and a permanence that eyewitness accounts of his performances could not equal. This changed the terms by which children’s capacity to reason was adjudicated. When he served as “evidence” in an imperial court case on child baptism (and its later reversal), Mozart was made to stand for the potential reasoning capacity of all children. The import of this episode cannot be overstated: assumptions about childhood autonomy, aesthetic and moral judgment, and music as a rational art, were all being reevaluated in the wake of Mozart’s success, with real consequences for children and families across the Monarchy.

This concluding chapter offers a two-part assessment of the book's major findings, first through an examination of one of the institutional religious procedures that arose from the repetitive patterning of those collective commitments surveyed in the previous chapters, and second through the formulation of one final model that attempts to visualize the cumulative force of religious practice on the design and experience of civic time. It begins with the institutional procedure: prodigy expiation. The chapter then illustrates two key dimensions of the middle Republic's timescapes that bear directly on the understanding of Roman state formation during the fourth and third centuries. The first is that religious practice must be mentioned in the same breath as political engagement in any study of what held the res publica together. The second proposition is about method, and about quantitative methods in particular. Systematic quantification is a great boon to those seeking to study the interrelation of religious observance and state formation, and in particular those who are seeking to build bridges between otherwise isolated or (artificially) partitioned bodies of evidence.

One of the most contentious debates in psychology, education, biology, and other related disciplines centres on the source of exceptional ability. This chapter addresses fundamental issues surrounding the nature/nurture debate in music and, in doing so, scrutinises much of the folklore that typically accompanies remarkable musical abilities. Specifically, it outlines a broad framework that distinguishes between ‘giftedness’ and ‘talent’ and discusses, in turn, six core components of this framework: giftedness, the developmental process, intrapersonal factors, environmental catalysts, chance, and talent. It then explores the scope and potential for identifying musically gifted children. Throughout, it draws on the early experiences of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, commonly evoked as the paradigmatic example of childhood accomplishment, to elucidate these components.