The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350–1700
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With her third book on female spiritualities Nancy Bradley Warren, professor of English at Florida State University, has produced an ambitious and worthy study, the fifth in Notre Dame's ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern series.The series aims to bridge the gap in writing on religion between the medieval and early modern periods.In this volume Warren has produced a comparison of at least ten (depending on what you count) female religious writers from St. Birgitta of Sweden to Elizabeth Cary.Her specific interest is, as the title suggests, embodiment and particularly "incarnational theology' , " the focus on God made human flesh, as well as "the corporeal aspects of textual encounters and of knowledge acquisition" (47).Studies that cross the artificial divide between medieval and early modern are not so rare now, but they are still in great need.The current trend of looking for continuities between pre-and post-Reformation religiosity is greatly welcome.Denominations were perhaps less set for early modern people than they were later.Even in the sixteenth and to a lesser extent seventeenth century, people could treat the religious environment more as a buffet than an entirely prix-fixe menu.This is particularly true for spirituality of the sort Warren looks at.Her book shows that for a certain broad class of female religious writers the continuity across denominations and eras, particularly in the use of spiritual imagery, is striking.Warren demonstrates that the authors' theology was never far divorced from their bodies and that physical, bodily imagery, specifically gendered (such as that of motherhood), was vital.Central to this was their experience, often mystical, of Christ's bodily incarnation and the physical suffering of the passion.Throughout this book Warren is admirably scholarlyshowing a good grasp of the very broad range of writings necessary.The best part of this is her demonstration that writers drew from similar sources.She has skilfully grouped the authors, not entirely by period and place but also by topic.Chapter 4, for example, joins Margery Kempe to Anna Trapnel and Elizabeth Cary.The women she focuses on are an interesting bunch and produce
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".