COVENANTER PROPAGANDA AND CONCEPTUALIZATIONS OF THE PUBLIC DURING THE BISHOPS' WARS, 1638–1640
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT This article investigates propaganda deployed in support of the Covenanting revolution in Scotland during the Bishops' Wars (1638–40). It attempts to broaden the category of ‘British’ history by focusing on discourse instead of high politics, and analyses printed tracts – complemented by select manuscript sources – to reconstruct the Covenanters' theoretical approach to creating an English public to support their cause. The novelty of the ‘explosion’ of print in England in the 1640s is now widely acknowledged, and numerous books and articles have argued about whether or not this constituted a public sphere. This article, however, presupposes a ‘space’ for public debate and focuses instead on the conceptual framework driving Covenanter appeals. It concludes that the Covenanters believed that rational debate in a public forum would expose truth, which would naturally persuade the English people to support their cause and, in turn, pressure the king into making the desired concessions. But this was not how the actual English public functioned: there was an important disparity between the theory of godly rational debate and the reality of a rather ‘wild’, competing, and self-interested plurality of publics.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".