Erasmus in the twentieth century: interpretations c. 1920-2000
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Erasmus in the Twentieth Century: Interpretations c 1920-2000. By Bruce Mansfield. Erasmus Studies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. xiv + 324 pp. CDN$70.00 (cloth); US$70.00 (cloth). The National Library of Canada describes this book, not inappropriately, as the final volume in the trilogy which includes Phoenix of His Age (1974) and Man on His Own (1992) (p. iv). In preface Mansfield is more precise: Erasmus in the Twentieth Century both is and is not a sequel to the two previous studies: does indeed continue the interpretations of Erasmus analyzed in the two previous volumes, but it has become a book of a different (p. ix). The change was caused by a fundamental shift in the study of Erasmus in the twentieth century from apologetics to scientific scholarship. In reflecting on the enormous growth of scholarly publications in the twentieth century, the variety of critical approaches, and the technicalities of scholarship, Mansfield has produced a work that is inevitably more difficult to read than the previous volumes. It is also less entertaining. In the previous volumes Mansfield was interested not only in the fortunes of Erasmus's reputation, hut also in the writers who shaped the images of Erasmus. Hence the portrait of the Anglican Evangelical Isaac Milner, or the brief but sympathetic biography of Mark Pattison, in rum Anglican Evangelical, Tractarian, and liberal (Man on His Own, pp. 98-99, 159-164). While we seek to understand apologies through the character of their authors, scholarship pretends to be validated by its sheer facelessness. There was little room, therefore, in Erasmus in the Twentieth Century to describe the nexus between the scholar and subject-though one should not overlook the acute psychological analysis of the tragic Stefan Zweig, distinguished Jewish biographer of Erasmus, who, unable to come to grips with the reality of the Nazi regime, committed suicide in Brazil in 1942 (pp. 8-10). Mansfield has not, however, been defeated by the challenges of twentieth-century scholarship. This book may not be easy to read, but in both eloquence and illuminating synthesis matches the preceding volumes. Mansfield s prose is energetic, imagistic, and varied, ranging between the language of high dignity and humble familiarity. Moreover, Mansfield's skill in organization and synthesis has brought coherence to the many-sided scholarship on Erasmus, and set in an illuminating perspective. Further, Mansfield has embarked upon an intellectual quest, an adventure in locating Erasmus within the geography of twentieth-century thought. Thus, in two separate chapters Mansfield considers the scholarship represented by the anniversaries of Erasmus's death (1936) and birth (1967-1970). In the former celebrations his name was attached to values that were manifestly under threat: peace, toleration, liberal education, even democracy (p. …
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".