Henk van Nierop . Treason in the Northern Quarter: War, Terror, and the Rule of Law in the Dutch Revolt . Translated by J. C. Grayson . Princeton : Princeton University Press . 2009 . Pp. x, 297. $39.95.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This is an important, remarkable, and extremely sophisticated study. Depending on one's perspective, it is also highly revisionist. Henk van Nierop traces the development and eventual punishment of an alleged conspiracy of Catholic “traitors” in the Dutch “Northern Quarter”—the peninsular north of Amsterdam—during spring 1575. Concurrently with a failed attempt to secure the area for the king of Spain, rumors ran wild about an alleged Catholic plot to support the enemy, and twenty‐three vagrants were rounded up and tortured for further information. In the face of further allegations of treason, local citizens, supported by their magistrates, successfully invoked the rule of law against arbitrary torture and the right to due process in their own defense. Van Nierop begins with a description of “the Northland” (chapter two), assesses its reputation as a hotbed of heresy (chapter three), analyzes the capture of control over the area by “beggars” and Calvinists from 1572—with the majority of the local population merely going along, though “popular revulsion … [and] deep rooted hatred of Alba's rule” (pp. 53–54) was widespread (chapter four), vividly describes the pursuit and impact of war (chapter five), and then assesses the treason rumor and its consequences in 1575 (chapter six). In particular, the letter authorizing the work of an extraordinary commission beyond and above the regular courts in arresting and extorting confessions took the fact of treason for granted and had no time for investigation of whether anyone had really committed a crime (p. 95). The subjects of this exercise became vagabonds (chapter seven), based not least on their already problematic reputation and on the fact that all but one were from areas still under enemy control: “refugees forced to take to the roads by war” (p. 129).
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.053 | 0.015 |
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".