This chapter examines epiphany and its place in personal religion by focusing on narratives that feature Athena as the epiphanic deity across different periods, locales, and media. In all cases, Athena is construed as engaging closely with personal requests and concerns of particularly diverse nature from military excellence and political dominance to enhancement of socio-religious capital, and, perhaps more surprisingly, health. Athena’s epiphanies have thus been identified as particularly pertinent for our purposes, as they highlight the grey area that oscillates between personal and poliadic spheres of religious action, thus allowing us to witness the close and complex correlations between the two. Even if the two spheres draw from a common stock of religious schemata and behaviours, contrasting them reveals a wealth of useful information about how personal religious appropriation and innovation are situated in relation to more established forms or expressions of poliadic religious action. Above all, this contrast shows how even groundbreaking religious innovations needed to be anchored properly in easily recognisable, time-tested, and well-established religious schemata.

This chapter considers why conformation systems matter for scholars studying any aspect of human sociality; the importance of the book’s compilation of many hundreds of instances of conformations; how each of the four evolved dispositions for conforming constitutes a niche for the cultural evolution of congruent practices, artifacts, art, and architecture; and the selective forces on cultural practices and institutions in those niches.

In these pages we have witnessed the deep degree to which architectural rebuilding, as a practice distinct from new construction, was embedded in the Roman patronage system and served as powerful social currency in cities throughout the Mediterranean in the centuries spanning the early imperial to late antique periods. Overall, architectural rebuilding continued to be publicly celebrated as an honorific virtue through the sixth century, though the reach and impact of architectural euergetism shrank as patronage patterns changed, the overall volume of architectural construction declined, and spending on it was increasingly directed toward ecclesiastical and monastic architecture. This, I suggest, was principally due to the unique ways in which rebuilding leveraged site- and audience-specific connections to past and future communities. The high public value placed on rebuilding was also due to the opportunities it offered emperors, bishops, and other patrons to inflect cyclical celebratory calendars that enacted present order and implied future stability through their regular renewal and reperformance. While events of architectural destruction sorely tested that stability and regularly signaled divine displeasure to contemporaries, rebuilding concomitantly asserted current and future security through the reaffirmation (and simultaneous opportunity for reframing) of the empire’s pious relationship to their god(s).

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has become essential for the study of dementia. It is a supporting tool for the diagnosis of most neurodegenerative diseases and has shed light on many important aspects of disease etiology and progression. In Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal lobar degeneration in particular, it has helped to describe brain networks exhibiting selective vulnerability to neurodegeneration and facilitated the characterization of heterogeneity between clinical and genetic subtypes. MRI is also important for assessing vascular pathology and prion disease. Finally, most MRI modalities capture changes occurring up to decades prior to symptom onset, enabling early disease diagnosis and even prevention. Here,the main MRI techniques used to assess gray matter atrophy, among others, are described. We review recent studies in the different neurodegenerative diseases and describe the most common methodologies used, from visual rating scales to automated morphometry algorithms. Finally, we highlight progress in the theoretical modeling of neurodegenerative diseases and discuss more applied uses of MRI.

The years between about 1780 and 1850 can be understood as a meaningful period in the making of a romantic Ireland. Nestled within the cradle of that century, though, lie folds and divisions that lend a distinctive texture to the underlying political formations described. The introduction traces some of these textures while setting out the main phases and patterns through which Irish romantic culture can be analysed and understood.

This chapter analyses the role of anthologies in the documentation and shaping of feminist poetries. It considers how they perform cultural, political and aesthetic work for communities of writers and readers, and exist both within and beyond institutions. The chapter considers the engagement with feminism as developing in different generations but also as having important inter-generational connections. The chapter also undertakes close readings of major feminist poets in the late twentieth century to today.

The introduction provides historical and theoretical framings for this book. It situates the American military presence in postwar China within two interconnected contexts of China’s civil war confrontations and America’s global occupation. It engages with existing historiographies by locating China in the American empire and locating America in Communist propaganda. Through the micro-lens of the everyday, it also analyzes the actual and critical links between grassroots frictions and Sino-US relations.

Chapter 5 analyzes the everyday impact of American goods on Chinese lives and views of America. Massive quantities of industrial products such as instant coffee, Coca-Cola, canned food, penicillin, and DDT poured into postwar China through American aid and war surplus sales, creating new and the only direct experience many had of America. This growing consumption engendered Chinese fears of capitalism crushing domestic industries and US materialism corrupting Chinese morality. Meanwhile, American military’s stringent “halt or shoot” policy, implemented to protect US properties from theft and black marketing, led to frequent killings of civilians. The policy gave rise to the deadliest type of grassroots encounters, resulting in legal disputes and political crises.

This chapter puts two of The Wooster Group’s most salient productions into dialogue with each other, and with the question of the theatre’s representation of other media. While its Hamlet is now well-known for its live replaying of the John Gielgud/Richard Burton film of the 1960s, what’s less recognized is the stage’s remediation of several Hamlet films, notably Michael Almereyda’s 2000 Hamlet and Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 Hamlet. Restaging these films, The Wooster Group performance takes up a history of the interaction between stage and film, an interaction on the ground of obsolescence. More recently, the Group’s production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Mother uses the digital recording and broadcast of the human voice as the instrument to rethink the practices of ideological alienation in the theatre under the aegis of new technologies.

Ancient views of magic were extremely diverse. In order to examine the issue of personal religion this chapter sets out to bracket the over-familiar negative discourse, which sought to represent magic as the opposite of (true) religion, and shift the discussion to include the perspectives of actual practitioners. Of the many different types of historical practitioner, three are selected for longer discussion: ‘wise folk’, specifically ‘rootcutters’ (rhizotomists); the Hellenistic ‘Magian’ tradition ascribed to pseudonymous authors such as Persian Zoroaster; and the so-called magical papyri from Roman Egypt. Rhizotomists used ritualisation as their primary means of empowerment, with a clear sense of the divine origin of the potency of herbs. Drawing on this tradition, the Magian writers linked it to the materials made available through translation of the knowledge stored in Babylonian and Egyptian temples to create a sense of the inexhaustible powers of divine Nature. Ritual expertise and theological knowledge are most evidently in play in the hundreds of procedures included in the surviving Graeco-Egyptian magical papyri, exemplified here by the case of PGM IV 1496–1595.

Chapter 3 shifts focus to Seminole women. It tells the stories of their wide-ranging and vital involvement in the war. Women fed and clothed warriors, gathered ammunition, collected and shared information, spread misinformation, and lured enemies into attacks. They provided advice, leadership, diplomatic expertise, and negotiated conditions for surrender. The chapter also argues that by the war’s end in 1842, the army had reconciled its mission to remove Native groups from Florida with its imperative to protect women – ultimately choosing to frame the act of capturing women as the best way to bring women under military protection. The idea of capturing women to protect them (from savagery, from Seminole men, from white settlers) also drove changes in policy and military regulations that gave the army more freedom to take noncombatants as prisoners of war and violate flags of truce.

Chapter 2, a pendant to the first, argues for the importance of temple anniversaries and other festivals associated with rebuilding for writing, experiencing, and synthesizing chronologies in time and space at the lived, local level.

From 1830, Irish literature shares with official and state documentation an intense interest in the details of everyday life while also drawing energy from O’Connellite mobilisation of the mass of the Irish people. An uncertain new sociology of literature emerged, characterised by hesitations and questions, part of an Irish romanticism darkened by detail. The chapter tracks Irish romanticism through to the period of the Great Famine and offers discussions of works by Maria Edgeworth, James Clarence Mangan and William Carleton.