Alma mater

Several university campuses in North America have artistic representations of alma mater, depicted as a robed woman wearing a laurel wreath crown.

[6] In the Oxford Latin Dictionary, the full phrase's origin is attributed to De rerum natura, in which Lucretius uses the term as an epithet for an unnamed earth goddess: Denique caelesti sumus omnes semine oriundi omnibus ille idem pater est, unde alma liquentis umoris guttas mater cum terra recepit (2.991–993)[7] We are all sprung from that celestial seed, all of us have same father, from whom earth, the nourishing mother, receives drops of liquid moisture After the fall of Rome, the term was used in Christian liturgy to describe Jesus' mother, Mary.

[8][9] The first-known appearance of the device is on the title-page of a book by William Perkins, A Golden Chain, where the Latin phrase Alma Mater Cantabrigia ("nourishing mother Cambridge") is inscribed on a pedestal bearing a lactating woman wearing a mural crown.

[10][11] In reference works of English etymology, often the first university-related usage is cited as 1710, when an academic mother figure is mentioned in a remembrance of Henry More by Richard Ward.

An altarpiece mural in Yale University's Sterling Memorial Library, painted in 1932 by Eugene Savage, depicts the Alma Mater as a bearer of light and truth, standing in the midst of figures representing the arts and sciences.

The Alma Mater statue at Columbia University in New York City . Cast by Daniel Chester French (1903).
John Legate's Alma Mater for the University of Cambridge , written in 1600
The University of Bologna , the world's oldest university in continuous operation , known in Latin as Alma Mater Studiorum (nourishing mother of studies).