Material Culture and Popular Calvinist Worldliness in the Dutch ‘Golden Age’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The juxtaposition of exorbitant commercial success and the relatively fast advent of Calvinism in 17th‐century Netherlands present an informative setting in which to explore historical Protestant perspectives on material culture. Max Weber’s 1905 attribution of ‘innerworldly asceticism’ to Dutch Reformed mentalities in this period has left a legacy in western intellectual tradition that is being challenged through an interdisciplinary approach to historical inquiry evident in contemporary historians and art historians of the Dutch Republic. This essay explores early modern Dutch Reformed mentalities towards material culture and worldly engagement as evidenced in popular religious texts (Willem Teellinck, Jacob Revius, Jodocus van Lodenstein, and Petrus Vander Hagen) in conjunction with visual images representing two genres (an Aelbert Cuyp cityscape and an Emmanuel de Witte architectural interior) and demonstrates characteristics shared by textual and visual sources that question Weber’s portrayal. These characteristics include graphic description, attention to material detail, earthbound idyllic allusions, sensory appeal, sacred space, and interest in religious‐political motifs. In contrast to reluctance towards material culture, my interpretation of visual and textual primary sources constructs a popular Dutch ‘Golden Age’ Reformed worldliness that, without denying the significance of nonmaterial (spiritual) conceptions and purported entities, affirmed material culture, sensory apprehension, corporeal identity, politics, and temporal existence as part of a comprehensive worldview and a holistic understanding of human religious experience.
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.
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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".