Erasmus was the first European intellectual to become famous, in the majority of European countries in his own lifetime. He thus illustrates the increasing importance of the international scholarly community or ‘republic of letters’ (respublica litteraria), a phrase which he helped to launch and which was common currency until the age of Voltaire. This article examines the ideal embodied in the phrase and suggests seven ways of testing the extent to which it was translated into practice (invitations to foreign scholars; the internationalization of libraries; correspondence; visits to famous scholars as part of the practice of travel; the album amicorum; the learned society; and the learned journal). A final section discusses the extent to which the republic may be said to have survived until our own day.

The popular acclaim for Alan Sokal's ‘Intellectual Impostures’ suggests a deep-seated suspicion about the value of much theoretical work in the humanities. But if the heroic age of scholarship is past, what are the humanities for? To teach us how to lead better lives?

The common opinion that the history of Greek medicine can be characterized as the triumph of a rational, Hippocratic medicine, has been strongly attacked over the last 30 years. Instead of a single dominant theory of humoral medicine, scholars now point to the great variety of theories current in the time of Hippocrates, 450–350 BC, and to the great variety and number of those who offered healing in the medical marketplace. They are best described as craftsman, with similar behaviour and status to the local carpenter. Others sought the aid of the gods in temple medicine. The resulting picture emphasizes a dynamic situation.

Any reader of Tacitus' Annals may have noticed that poison played a prominent part at the imperial court during the Early Principate. In this article seven cases of suspected poisoning, mentioned by Tacitus in his Annals, are analysed and commented upon in some detail. The use of poison in general is studied against the background of Roman society, culture and mentality. It is argued that modern ideas about physicians, pharmacists, poisons and drugs may induce anachronistic interpretations of the texts. If the ambiguous position of the doctor, the root cutter, the drug-seller, the magician and of their products is taken into account, some cases of poisoning prove to be much more equivocal than they seem at first sight. It is likely that they are the unintentional result of medical practice – or of black magic.

Tiger, tiger burning bright

In the forests of the night

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame your fearful symmetry

Symmetry seems to be a desirable property, yet wherever we look we find asymmetry. This paper explores the presence and nature of asymmetry in biological systems.

Many of the nations of Europe have at some time traced their origins to barbarian tribes that settled inside the Roman Empire in the 5th and 6th centuries. In the course of the 19th and 20th centuries the Early Middle Ages were, as a result, manipulated to racist ends. Not surprisingly, scholars who have worked on the period since 1945 have been concerned to undermine earlier interpretations. In this they have been helped by increasing archaeological evidence and by changes in methodology. The current interpretation of the period is one that emphasizes variety – an emphasis which itself reflects present concerns in Europe.

here is a long and beneficial tradition of international collaboration in science and technology. There are, however, trends working against collaboration, and tensions between (for example) collaboration and competition, and European integration and increasing emphasis on national competitiveness. It is therefore important to have a clear understanding of when and in what form international collaboration is desirable. This paper considers these issues, drawing lessons from CERN – the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. CERN, which pioneered European collaboration, is now becoming in a sense a world organization. Physicists from 47 countries will participate in experiments at CERN's next project, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is set to be the first megascience project constructed by a global partnership, driven ‘bottom up’ by the scientists involved. CERN's experience with the LHC could provide an excellent precedent for other projects.

The geography and history of the minorities living under Islam is the subject of a new book by the noted French scholar Xavier de Planhol. This article sets Planhol's work in the context of 14 centuries of Islamic rule over non-Muslim groups. Islam itself was initially the religion of a minority, a fact that helped determine its treatment of Jews, Christians and some other groups as tolerated ‘Peoples of the Book’. Islam conceived of a society in which non-Muslims had a place, as second class citizens, whereas medieval Christendom saw the Jew or Muslim as an outsider who could not be part of society in a real sense. For the Jews in particular, the meeting with Islam was enormously stimulating, and occasional derogatory remarks about Jews, or bouts of persecution, bore no comparison with western anti-Semitism.

Far from being a simple and monolithic notion, man's biological identity embraces several closely related – but nevertheless partially autonomous – facets. Both the molecular identity and the easily identifiable body and face morphology derive quite directly from a unique set of genes. But the latter interacts, in a highly complex way, with a unique life-history in the progressive moulding of all the individual characteristics of brain functioning that underlie an individualized and evolving mental life, with the attitudes and behaviours that express it.

The development of self-consciousness and the questioning of identity appear to be closely linked in literary history and theory. The postmodernist assumption that the self is only a heterogeneous cultural construct is unwarranted. Besides inner experience, there is an objective basis for the singularity of the self in biology, psychoanalysis and psychology. The exploration of the modes of consciousness and imagination mirrored in literary creation can bring evidence of structures and correlations unnoticed in personality studies. The presence and permanent nature of individual traits and their characteristic interrelations may be detected in the works of the English Metaphysical poets and John Milton.

To the scientist, personality is the complexity of psychological structures and processes that contribute to the unity and continuity of individual conduct and experience. Personality psychologists explore the mechanisms that mediate person–environment transactions and the ways in which these psychological mechanisms give rise to the uniqueness of each person. This paper reviews the history of the discipline of personality psychology and the current status of the field. It urges investigators to attend to the proactive, self-regulatory features of personality. People are self-organizing, proactive beings, not just reactive organisms. Self-reflective and self-regulatory capabilities enable people to shape the nature of their experiences and life paths. This potentialist view of personality enables one to identify and promote the social conditions required for the full realization of human capacities.

Concepts, findings and methodological considerations regarding the influence of social circumstances on psychological functioning are selectively reviewed with respect to five different types of possible effect deriving from: the impact of social connotation or meaning of risk/protective factors; social comparison effects; compositional effects deriving from the make-up of a social group; a social contextual effect reflecting the ethos of a broader social environment; and a social group characteristics effect stemming from the behaviour/values of a peer group.