'Speculum Britanniae'. Regional Study, Antiquarianism, and Science in Britain to 1700
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Local history has been studied in Britain for at least 500 years. In this comprehensive study Stan Mendyk examines many of the first county and regional histories compiled in Britain (focusing especially on England) up to about 1700. Mendyk considers first the precedent set by the ancients, such as Strabo and Ptolemy, in firmly establishing chronographical (i.e., topographical-historical) investigation, and then within that framework explores the work of a number of British historians: Bede, Gildas, William of Worcester, John Leland, William Camden, and William Lambarde. He offers summaries of the contents of their works, an identification of the authors and their connections with one another, and explanations of the means used to collect information. He notes trends within the works, such as the infusion of a patriotic element into history and they role of insularity in shaping them. Placing these works in a broader context, Mendyk discusses some of the changes in the study of history during this period and assesses their impact on local historiography: the conflict between ancients and moderns, the development of natural history and geo-history as fields of study, and the overall development of natural history and geo-history as fields of study, and the overall development of historiography in the Tudor-Stuart period. Political and social upheaval each play a part, as do a number of other factors: the voyages of discovery, the work of Sir Francis Bacon and the Royal Society in promoting the new science, and the continuing interest in such non-scientific endeavours as alchemy and astrology. Mendyk presents an approach that integrates history, geography, historiography, and science to expand the boundaries of conventional interpretations of local history, and in so doing illuminates a remarkable body of early work in the field
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".