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This book elucidates the significance of glosses on Prudentius' Psychomachia in the German or Weitz manuscript tradition. It redirects attention away from the philological concerns of conventional scholarship toward those of mainstream Carolingian and Ottonian intellectual history.

The Roman Self in Late Antiquity for the first time situates Prudentius within a broad intellectual, political, and literary context of fourth-century Rome. As Marc Mastrangelo convincingly demonstrates, the late-fourth-century poet drew on both pagan and Christian intellectual traditions—especially Platonism, Vergilian epic poetics, and biblical exegesis—to define a new vision of the self for the newly Christian Roman Empire. Mastrangelo proposes an original theory of Prudentius's allegorical poetry and establishes Prudentius as a successor to Vergil. Employing recent approaches to typology and biblical exegesis as well as the most current theories of allusion and intertextuality in Latin poetry, he interprets the meaning and influence of Prudentius's work and positions the poet as a vital author for the transmission of the classical tradition to the early modern period. This provocative study challenges the view that poetry in the fourth century played a subordinate role to patristic prose in forging Christian Roman identity. It seeks to restore poetry to its rightful place as a crucial source for interpreting the rich cultural and intellectual life of the era.

Prudentius' account of the martyrdom of the young Spanish girl Eulalia in Peristephanon 3 is particularly interesting because not only does it consist of her defiance of an order to pay homage to the pagan gods but also a rejection of pressures to get married. If martyrdom constituted an act of rebellion against the conventions of pagan society, then female martyrdom was doubly so and the ways in which it was presented to a community in which Christianity was still struggling to establish its reputation is worthy of detailed examination. Prudentius was arguably the Christian poet most influenced by his pagan predecessors, making an active effort to compose poetry worthy of the great Latin poetic tradition. When examining the classical antecedents of Peristephanon 3, scholars have largely concentrated upon its Virgilian echoes, emphasising the heroic dimensions of Eulalia's conduct by comparing her to Virgilian ‘heroines’ (the Sibyl, Camilla and Dido) who challenge conventional female roles. Some critics have pointed to elements of an epithalamium within the poem but they have related this imagery to late antique epithalamia or to the Song of Songs rather than looking for antecedents within classical poetry.

G protein-coupled receptors are seven transmembrane signaling molecules that are involved in a wide variety of physiological processes. They constitute a large protein family of receptors with almost 300 members detected in human pancreatic islet preparations. However, the functional role of these receptors in pancreatic islets is unknown in most cases. We generated a new stable human beta cell line from neonatal pancreas. This cell line, named ECN90 expresses both subunits ( GABBR1 and GABBR2 ) of the metabotropic GABA B receptor compared to human islet. In ECN90 cells, baclofen, a specific GABA B receptor agonist, inhibits cAMP signaling causing decreased expression of beta cell-specific genes such as MAFA and PCSK1, and reduced insulin secretion. We next demonstrated that in primary human islets, GABBR2 mRNA expression is strongly induced under cAMP signaling, while GABBR1 mRNA is constitutively expressed. We also found that induction and activation of the GABA B receptor in human islets modulates insulin secretion.