‘Falling to a diuelish exercise’: The Copernican Universe in Christopher Marlowe's <em>Doctor Faustus</em>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Frustrated with the limits to his knowledge, Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus uses black magic to gain access to 'all natures treasury' and, in particular, to discover the true nature of the universe. While Ptolemy's earth-centred universe, based on Aristotelian cosmology, was still the prevailing belief in Elizabethan England, Copernicus's sun-centred universe was slowly beginning to affect the conception of the cosmos. Scholars have often commented on the absence of Copernican theory in Marlowe's play. However, by comparing the two extant versions of Doctor Faustus--the 1604 'A-text' and the 1616 'B-text'--and drawing on the pivotal work of Leah S. Marcus, this note traces the ideological shift in the astronomy of early modern England and finds evidence of Copernican theory in the play. As Faustus becomes an intellectual explorer, searching for proof of this newly conceived world, Faustus's connection to Copernicanism causes him to become more transgressive than the devil himself.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".