On the “very Brink between Time and Eternity”: Truth, Charity, and Last Dying Speeches in England, c. 1660–1700
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Late seventeenth-century England witnessed not only the rise of the coffee-house, the newspaper, and party politics, but also a proliferation of printed accounts of treason trials and executions, exposing hearers and readers to opposing religious and political truth claims. Such last dying words, spoken as they were on the “very Brink between Time and Eternity,” were equally compelling and controversial, dividing opinion along partisan and confessional lines. This study builds on recent scholarship emphasizing the dynamism of the Restoration public sphere and the degree to which the gallows was a contested space. It argues that the pamphlet wars over the meaning, veracity, and authenticity of the last dying speeches of late seventeenth-century condemned traitors, while largely overlooked by scholars of the Restoration crisis, have much to tell us about larger, shared preoccupations and mentalities. This article will focus in particular on two powerful contemporary credos which constrained and shaped the actions of authorities, malefactors, and pamphleteers alike: the equation of freedom of speech with liberty and Protestantism on the one hand and the association of charity with the good death, credibility, and truth, on the other.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
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".