COVENANTER PROPAGANDA AND CONCEPTUALIZATIONS OF THE PUBLIC DURING THE BISHOPS' WARS, 1638–1640
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it