“They Give No Cordials to Heighten the Fever”: Lady Mary, Corruption, and the Problem of Royal Influence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article considers the relationship between Mary Wortley Montagu’s letters from Turkey and her subsequent support for smallpox inoculation, her public criticism of the Royal College of Physicians and their approach to managing the outbreak of 1721, and her reputation as a woman of sexual excesses long before she left her husband in 1739. I argue that Montagu’s vilification in the press following her return from Turkey had little do to with any imagined sexual misconduct while travelling, but was rather the consequence of her vocal and insistent engagement in debates about inoculation during the 1720s. I attribute continued opinions about Montagu’s early years, including those expressed by her family after her death, to a combination of her desire for a public voice and the influence of her son-in-law, Lord Bute, whose opposition to the publication of the Turkish Embassy Letters after her death was directly tied to his own, rather than her, troubles with the public.
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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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".