Interpreting the Body in Early Modern Italy: Pregnancy, Abortion and Adulthood
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On the night of 13 November 1569 the nuns of San Paolo Converso in Milan witnessed an unfamiliar scene: a childbirth. A boarder in their convent, Costanza Colonna, delivered a dead male child after three days of hard labour. All the many people present professed profound surprise. The 13-year-old Costanza, her servants, her physicians and her husband had all insisted until that very night that she was a virgin, that her husband was impotent, and that her growing belly was a symptom of oppilation (an obstruction causing fluid retention) resulting in dropsy (swelling) of the abdomen. The delivery forced a dramatic volte-face in the efforts under way to annul Costanza’s marriage to Francesco Sforza, the marchese di Caravaggio. It also raised troubling questions of guilt and intent, and possible criminal charges, which drew the attention of the officials of the diocese of Milan. How could an avowed virgin give birth? How could expert physicians and experienced mothers miss a nearly full-term pregnancy? How could a young man who had sworn to his own impotence have fathered a child? For that matter, was it a child or a foetus, and who, if anyone, was responsible for its death? The next morning, the archbishop’s vicar general arrived to investigate. As episcopal investigators, family members and the young spouses themselves scrambled to make sense of an alarming situation, they drew on convenient but very real ambiguities regarding pregnancy and personhood.1 Costanza’s body, once constructed as virginal, would now have to be reimagined.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".