Contagion and Blame in Early Modern England: The Case of the French Pox
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the first century of its epidemic spread through Europe, the venereal disease called Morbus Gallicus or the French pox occasioned a major shift in the cultural interpretation of contagion. This change can be traced in medical and literary texts dating from roughly 1530 to 1630. As a sexually transmitted disease that threatened the social fabric of Europe, the pox elicited deep medical concern and strong moral condemnation from secular and religious authorities. Throughout the sixteenth century this disfiguring and disabling disease was said to be the result of God's wrath, but by the start of the seventeenth century another, quite different construction of the origin and spread of the pox came to share the stage with the punitive, providentialist explanation. Satiric literature such as Shakespeare's Timon of Athens shifted the focus squarely onto the role of the individual human agent in spreading the pox and so expanded the ethical discourse of contagion far beyond obeisance to God and blaming the victim.
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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 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".