Women, wax and anatomy in the ‘century of things’
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In eighteenth‐century Italy, anatomical waxworks were considered particularly apt to represent the human body. Life‐size, coloured, three‐dimensional and soft and moist‐looking, they could offer compelling replicas of the living body. This essay explores the significance of material properties of wax, such as softness and malleability, in the fashioning of anatomical wax‐modelling as a reliable source of medical knowledge. It does so by focusing on the case of two eighteenth‐century Bolognese women, the anatomist Anna Morandi Manzolini and the holy woman Laura Chiarini, who became famous as skilled wax‐modellers. Attention is drawn to the gendering of wax‐modelling as an activity that resonated with long‐standing views linking generation with the impression of soft matter. The shifting meaning of wax in the context of the fluid boundaries of early modern domains of the natural, preternatural and supernatural is also considered in the light of Morandi's and Chiarini's different practices of wax‐modelling. (pp. 522–550)
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it