Women, the devil, and a cat's head: The trial of Anna and Tobbe Mall in Reval, 1594
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article reconstructs and analyzes the trial of two women in the Reval Lower Court in 1594: Anna, a young woman of Swedish extraction from Finland, and an old Estonian woman, Tobbe Mall, both arrested on suspicion of infanticide. Over the course of repeated interrogations, some of which were conducted under torture, the dark outlines of a crime emerge, along with the relationships between the two women and their social milieu. Although the circumstances of the birth and death of two of her other children form part of the context, the trial is focused around the ostensible killing of Anna's child from her liaison with Bodt Schröder, an old member of the Reval City Council and former judge from a long and distinguished local lineage. In the court records allegations are raised that the two women might have had dealings with the devil, that is to have been involved in witchcraft. These aspects reflect changes in the social climate of Reval at the end of the sixteenth century, when witchcraft trials increased in frequency. The period following the end of the Livonian Wars was a time of general social crisis and deteriorating economic circumstances, weakening the boundaries of the traditional class society. The article considers a range of specific methodological and source-critical problems raised by the interpretation and analysis of a trial as an event, and calls attention to the need for more extensive research on court documents in the future.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".