Bibliographic record
Abstract
Byrne, Susan. Law and History in Cervantes' DON QUIXOTE. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2012. 240 pp. ISBN 978-4426-4527-1. Susan Byrne initiates her study by marking the contrast between two approaches to jurisprudence: the acceptance of historical legal codes (mos italicus) and their rejection as obsolete (mos gallicus), associated, as their names would suggest, with Italy and France, respectively. Although there was no official mos hispanicus, scholars in Spain did enter into the polemics. It has been noted, for example, that Juan de Orozco and jurists who studied under at the University of Salamanca sought a middle ground in the debate. Byrne proposes that Don Quixote fits within the parameters of the issues being pursued in the field of law, and, correspondingly, that Spain's contribution to the ongoing intellectual arguments was not a legal treatise or a developing tradition but a profound and multi-layered work of fiction. As his corpus of writings indicates, Cervantes had a wealth of knowledge and experience, along with a background in dealing with the judicial system, and not just in theoretical terms. Although he was neither a lawyer nor a student of the law sensu stricto, Cervantes was able to incorporate commentary on pressing questions of the day into Don Quixote, a socio-cultural, political, and historical document of the first magnitude. As she evaluates the ideological bases of Don Quixote, Byrne relies heavily on her investigation into sixteenth-century philosophical discussions of jurisprudence and concepts of history. She explores impressive number of primary and secondary materials, and this is clearly a strength--and ah innovative feature--of her analysis, which owes a certain impetus to Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria's Love and the Law in Cervantes (Yale UP, 2005). For Byrne, variations on the theme of justice--as ironically embodied in a well-intentioned lawbreaker--and the distinctions and interplay among history, historiography, and fictional narrative provide decisive unifying threads of Don Quixote. This is, in essence, a means of framing critical areas of philosophy as part of the creative arts, an encapsulation of verba, res, and mores in the mind of one man [...] and its impact on the test of the world around him (20). Byrne relates Cervantes's statements on law and history and his thought patterns, as reflected in Don Quixote, to the Italian historian Paolo Giovio (c. 1486-1552) and to the Spanish jurist Gaspar de Baeza (1540-C.1570), author of legal glosses and translations of Giovio's historical and biographical works. As Byrne reads Giovio and Baeza, one can note the dialectical strain and the tensions--ethical, doctrinal, social, historical, political--that link life and art, the world and the word. The angle of vision here does not affect the content per se of Don Quixote as much as its contexts. Byrne amplifies ways of looking at Cervantes's--and certainly Don Quixote's--consciousness of history and at the text's insistence on its historical veracity. Cervantes not only brings legal elements into the narrative, from classical antiquity forward, but he makes them profoundly entertaining, that is, profound and entertaining. He tailor[s] his protagonist Alonso Quixano in strict compliance with the Siete Partidas prescription for the perfect knight and then set[s] loose like a bull in a china shop, and he has the squire Sancho Panza use outdated language from the Fuero Juzgo but also make Solomonic decisions on legal matters (51). …
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.022 | 0.004 |
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".