Diana is a goddess in Roman and Hellenistic religion, primarily considered a patroness of the countryside and nature, hunters, wildlife, childbirth, crossroads, the night, and the Moon. She is equated with the Greek goddess Artemis, and absorbed much of Artemis' mythology early in Roman history, including a birth on the island of Delos to parents Jupiter and Latona, and a twin brother, Apollo, though she had an independent origin in Italy.
Venus is a Roman goddess whose functions encompass love, beauty, desire, sex, fertility, prosperity, and victory. In Roman mythology, she was the ancestor of the Roman people through her son, Aeneas, who survived the fall of Troy and fled to Italy. Julius Caesar claimed her as his ancestor. Venus was central to many religious festivals, and was revered in Roman religion under numerous cult titles.
Cesare Lombroso was an Italian eugenicist, criminologist, phrenologist, physician, and founder of the Italian school of criminology. He is considered the founder of modern criminal anthropology by changing the Western notions of individual responsibility.
Physiognomy or face reading is the practice of assessing a person's character or personality from their outer appearance—especially the face. The term can also refer to the general appearance of a person, object, or terrain without reference to its implied characteristics—as in the physiognomy of an individual plant or of a plant community.
Joseph Martin McCabe was an English writer and speaker on freethought, after having been a Roman Catholic priest earlier in his life. He was "one of the great mouthpieces of freethought in England". Becoming a critic of the Catholic Church, McCabe joined groups such as the Rationalist Association and the National Secular Society. He criticised Christianity from a rationalist perspective, but also was involved in the South Place Ethical Society which grew out of dissenting Protestantism and was a precursor of modern secular humanism.
Clarence Joseph Bulliet was an American art critic and author.
Phosphorus is the god of the planet Venus in its appearance as the Morning Star. Another Greek name for the Morning Star is "Eosphorus", which means "dawn-bringer". The term "eosphorus" is sometimes met in English. As an adjective, the word "phosphorus" is applied in the sense of "light-bringing" and "torch-bearing" as an epithet of several gods and goddesses, especially of Hecate but also of Artemis/Diana and Hephaestus. Seasonally, Venus is the "light bringer" in the northern hemisphere, appearing most brightly in December, signalling the "rebirth" of longer days as winter wanes.
Eusapia Palladino was an Italian Spiritualist physical medium. She claimed extraordinary powers such as the ability to levitate tables, communicate with the dead through her spirit guide John King, and to produce other supernatural phenomena.
Guglielmo Ferrero was an Italian historian, journalist and novelist, author of the Greatness and Decline of Rome. Ferrero devoted his writings to classical liberalism and he opposed any kind of dictatorship and unlimited government.
Anthropological criminology is a field of offender profiling, based on perceived links between the nature of a crime and the personality or physical appearance of the offender. Although similar to physiognomy and phrenology, the term "criminal anthropology" is generally reserved for the works of the Italian school of criminology of the late 19th century. Lombroso thought that criminals were born with detectable inferior physiological differences. He popularized the notion of "born criminal" and thought that criminality was a case of atavism or hereditary disposition. His central idea was to locate crime completely within the individual and divorce it from surrounding social conditions and structures. A founder of the Positivist school of criminology, Lombroso opposed the social positivism developed by the Chicago school and environmental criminology.
Sulpicia was the wife of Quintus Fulvius Flaccus and earned everlasting fame when she was determined to be the most chaste of all the Roman matrons.
Aphrodite Urania was an epithet of the Greek goddess Aphrodite, signifying a "heavenly" or "spiritual" aspect descended from the sky-god Ouranos to distinguish her from the more earthly epithet of Aphrodite Pandemos, "Aphrodite for all the people". The two were used to differentiate the more "celestial" love of body and soul from purely physical lust. Plato represented her as a daughter of the Greek god Uranus, conceived and born without a mother. Hesiod described this aspect as being born from the severed genitals of Uranus and emerging from the sea foam.
Greco-Roman mythology features male homosexuality in many of the constituent myths. In addition, there are instances of cross-dressing, androgyny, and other themes which are grouped under the acronym LGBTQ+.
Nicole Hahn Rafter was a feminist criminology professor at Northeastern University. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, achieved her Master of Arts in Teaching from Harvard University, and obtained a Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from State University of New York in Albany. She began her career as a high school and college English professor and switched to criminal justice in her mid-thirties.
In astrology, planets have a meaning different from the astronomical understanding of what a planet is. Before the age of telescopes, the night sky was thought to consist of two similar components: fixed stars, which remained motionless in relation to each other, and moving objects/"wandering stars", which moved relative to the fixed stars over the course of the year(s).
Venus Barbata was an epithet of the goddess Venus among the Romans. Macrobius also mentions a statue of Venus in Cyprus, representing the goddess with a beard, in female attire, but resembling in her whole figure that of a man. The idea of Venus thus being a mixture of the male and female nature seems to belong to a very late period of antiquity.
Bogdan Raditsa was a Croatian-American historian, journalist, diplomat, writer, and translator.
Verbrechen und Wahnsinn beim Weibe mit Ausblicken auf die Criminal-Anthropologie überhaupt: klinisch-statistische, anthropologisch-biologische und craniologische Untersuchungen is the first book written by Dr. med Paul Näcke (1851-1913), which was published in 1894. The author aims to fill the gaps present at the time into the research of mentally ill and criminal women based on his own psychiatric observations in the psychiatric institution Hubertusburg, making it unlike literature already available in the era. With his work Näcke goes against the predominant notion of the time that criminals are born, which was based in the positivist school movement at the time and initiated by the "father of criminology": Cesare Lombroso. The main ideas Näcke proposes in his work are that criminals who are insane at time of crime should not be punished as harshly and one should view criminals not solely as objects under the penalty of law but also as subjects who could potentially suffer from mental diseases.
The historical evolution of the nude in art runs parallel to the history of art in general, except for small particularities derived from the different acceptance of nudity by the various societies and cultures that have succeeded each other in the world over time. The nude is an artistic genre that consists of the representation in various artistic media of the naked human body. It is considered one of the academic classifications of works of art. Nudity in art has generally reflected the social standards for aesthetics and morality of the era in which the work was made. Many cultures tolerate nudity in art to a greater extent than nudity in real life, with different parameters for what is acceptable: for example, even in a museum where nude works are displayed, nudity of the visitor is generally not acceptable. As a genre, the nude is a complex subject to approach because of its many variants, both formal, aesthetic and iconographic, and some art historians consider it the most important subject in the history of Western art.
