Religious Thought in the Victorian Age: Challenges and Reconceptions. By JAMES C. LIVINGSTON.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For too long historians of Victorian theology have focused on the well-worn ecclesiastical debates and controversies, dominated by Anglican clergymen and reactionary polemic. Yet now in this stimulating study, James Livingston argues that the most sophisticated and rigorous discussion of theological issues was not in mainstream church publications. Instead he sets out to paint on a broader canvas, exploring the writings of ‘the Victorian intellectual class’ (p. 4). He presents an account of some crucial challenges to traditional British theology in the period 1860 to 1910, showing how many established doctrines were reconceived. The final decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a flourishing of the new social sciences and an increased specialization in the natural sciences, which brought in their wake a flood of fresh ideas, what Livingston calls an ‘extraordinary quickening’ of intellectual life (p. 31). The dominance of clerical naturalists was broken as both science and theology became increasingly professional disciplines, with their own sophisticated methods. The age of the polymath was dead. Weighty early Victorian journals were forced to popularize in order to survive, and a new rash of academic journals sprang up for a limited readership. The Oxford anthropologist R. R. Marrett spoke of this post-1860s era as a Second Renaissance: ‘Immense vistas opened out on all sides, with philology, biology, archaeology alike eager to break the dusty windows of the academies and let in light and air’ (p. 31). Livingston shows how Christian theology was caught up in this maelstrom and profoundly shaped by it.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
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".