Worobec, Christine D. <em>Possessed: Women, Witches, and Demons in Imperial Russia</em>.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Several years after its appearance in 2001, Worobec's monograph still remains a solid multidisciplinary study on a problem that Russian authorities, both Church and secular, have struggled with for centuries.Klikushi, or shriekers, were mostly women who believed they were victims of black magic, possessed by evil beings who made them convulse, shriek in non-human voices, and do other abnormal things in the presence of holy objects.Klikushestvo was a widespread phenomenon and at times mass epidemics occurred.The author study is wide-ranging.She looks at the perception of the phenomenon of klikushestvo among various strata of Russian society, as well as the culture of klikushestvo itself over the span of several centuries, from the 16-17 th centuries when it became commonplace till the 1930s when it was repressed -but not rooted out -by Soviet policies.Worobec builds her arguments on 260 individual cases of klikushi and 80 published cases of witchcraft in the countryside.These are drawn from religious, psychiatric, legal, and ethnographic sources.A captivating picture emerges of the Russian peasantry, the Orthodox Church, and civil authorities and the interrelations between all three.Chapter One, State and Church Perspectives, describes how the Church and the state joined forces against all forms of superstitions for the sake of the State's advancement.In the 18 th century this impacted klikushestvo in the form of imperial decrees and Senate decisions.Klikushestvo was, on the one hand, persecuted by civil authorities as a crime while, on the other, the Church defended it as a true spiritual illness, as real as miraculous healings.Although secular commissions helped to investigate both miraculous healings and epidemics of possession, the Church could not accept their materialistic view of the impossibility of such phenomena and emphasized the devil's dangerous role in a secular society.While initially men as well as women were known to become klikushi, demon possession was gradually feminized and sexualized.Chapter Two, Peasant Views, presents how the mostly uneducated peasant masses in the empire subscribed to the idea of klikushi and believed in hexing by witches and in the contagious nature of possession.The author portrays the liminal status of those who were possessed and
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".