John Lowin's <i>Conclusions Upon Dances</i>: Puritan Conclusions of a Godly Player
Bibliographic record
Abstract
^L Otherwise forgettable little quarto entitled Conclusions Upon Dances, BothofthisAgeandoftheOIdeappeaTedmLondoncaûyintheyeaT 1607.1 say "otherwise" because although the thirteen-leaf pamphlet was published under the pseudonym "I.L. Roscio"-literally "J.L. the Actor" -it is under- stood to be the work of John Lowin, one of the "Principall Actors" listed in the Heminges and Condell First Folio of Shakespeare.Collier attributed the piece to Lowin on the basis of the initials in the pseudonym, and because of a long-hand inscription on the title page ofwhat he thought was then the only extant copy: "By Jhon Lowin witnesseth Tho.D. 1610."^T he DNB cautioned "Collier's evidence will be regarded with suspicion,"^but it paid lip service to Lowin's authorship, and no one has questioned it since.Every biographical summary of Lowin's career mentions him in connection with the tract, and every library either catalogues or crosslists the piece under Lowin's name.There is a problem, however: if Lowin the actor is the author of Conclusions Upon Dances, then Lowin the actor is also a Puritan.It is strange that the critical history of Conclusions Upon Dances -negligible as it is -should back itself into this rather heretical finding.Collier's declaration came first.Of the pamphlet, he adjudged "The main object (excepting that perhaps of raising a temporary supply of money) was to vindicate dancing from the attacks of the Puritans."^Sometwenty years later.Collier had diversified his opinion.Noting the "pious tendency" of the treatise, he went on to excuse the technique as "not much in Lowin's way, but a style adopted by him for the sake of obtaining a greater sale among the Puritans."'*Any allusions since have been disparaging if not dismissive; and Alan Brissenden's mention of the piece as "a defence of dancing on religious grounds"^is tempered by regret for the pamphlet's overall lack of spirit.I agree that the pamphlet has a religious basis; but its tenets are basically Puritan, and its stance is not one of defence.The most recent commentator on the subject, Sandra Clark, calls Conclusions Upon Dances "a solemn pamphlet," concluding that "the author, perhaps the
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.002 |
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".