<i>At the Dawn of Modernity: Biology, Culture, and Material Life in Europe after the Year 1000</i>. By David Levine. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Pp. vii, 431. $45.00.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This book's central message is summed up in the following sentence, which appears about midway through it: “The transformation of reproductive patterns was part of a massive shift in the nature of social relations because social change was experienced by thinking people who reflected on it and changed their behavior with regard to it” (p. 243). The statement epitomizes both the book's flaccid prose and its lack of intellectual rigor. According to its author, the birth of modernization in the west was marked by the establishment of a “western” demographic pattern based on the economic viability of the nuclear family and the unusual length of time between puberty and marriage. But since everything social is connected to everything else, explaining this demographic change—if indeed it happened, a question we cannot yet answer on the basis of current knowledge—seems to require explaining everything else as well. Some intimation of this sort seems to have tempted David Levine to take the reader on a ramble through the vast literature on the medieval economy and society that has accumulated since the rebirth of medieval studies in the 1930s. It is a temptation devoutly to be resisted.
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.007 |
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".