Bibliographic record
Abstract
How did the French come to accept a monarchy vested with absolute power? This question is the subject of Arlette Jouanna’s fine new book. Her answer is that the devastating traumas of the Wars of Religion caused a profound transformation in a political imaginary (‘imaginaire politique’) that had long subordinated royal authority to the sovereignty of reason. By Henry IV’s accession to the throne, a new and entirely different conception of the monarchy had taken hold, one that regarded untrammeled royal authority and unrestrained power as not only justifiable but desirable and even necessary. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Jouanna maintains, the French political imaginary remained dominated by the rich legacy of medieval thought. Challenging the division of French Renaissance political thinkers into ‘absolutists’ and ‘constitutionalists’ by William Farr Church, Quentin Skinner and James Burns, Jouanna argues that all jurists and theorists of the day emphasised the central importance of reason, which ‘designated at the same time the order of the world desired by God and the natural faculty which permitted human beings to comprehend it and embellish it by their actions’. The king was able to act unrestrained by laws, including ones that he had himself made. But he could only do so in moments of extreme danger and necessity: in other words, absolute power was extraordinary power. Moreover, all of his actions still had to conform to reason. This conformity in turn rested on deliberation and counsel. The other parts of the body politic could perceive reason and played an indispensible role in aiding the king to meet its dictates: the royal council advised him on the creation of laws; the Parlements verified and registered these laws; and the Estates General reviewed his financial demands. Thus, ideologically and institutionally, the Renaissance Monarchy was far from an absolute monarchy.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.027 | 0.005 |
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".