Calling Forth More Witnesses: Claiming the Voices of Preachers Silenced by History
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Examples of preaching by women are relatively rare until the modern era. This issue is compounded by some restrictive aspects of present definitions that delineate a sermon from other forms of spoken discourse by limiting the act of preaching to the context of a worship service, spoken by one who is authorized by the Church. Expanding definitions of preaching to include spoken addresses by spiritually qualified individuals in other contexts would generate more potential sermons by women. “M.G.,” a nineteenth-century British woman known only by her initials, serves as a test case. Her work, Women like Ourselves, survives in print but was originally a series of short addresses given for mothers' meetings or other women's gatherings. M.G. was qualified to speak to other women within the boundaries of traditional women's roles of the Victorian era, as women were viewed as having special spiritual and moral qualities that allowed them to be spiritual leaders in the home and private sphere. In addition to being rhetorically and organizationally similar to sermons from the late nineteenth century, M.G.'s addresses also display “feminine qualities” and address women's experience, which represent patterns noted in women's preaching. This article introduces a more inclusive definition of preaching and explores M.G.'s addresses as sermons, which opens the possibility of finding more women preachers from throughout history, empowering women today and acknowledging the important work women were doing for the Church within their own sphere of influence.
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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 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| 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".