PHIL WITHINGTON. Society in Early Modern England: The Vernacular Origins of Some Powerful Ideas.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Phil Withington could have put quotation marks around much of his short title, for a sophisticated keyword study anchors his argument about values and practices that made a moment in England into a watershed. The “early modern,” as Withington shows in a superb opening chapter, has a long and humane history. First coined in mid-Victorian debates over the legacy of the Middle Ages, the term offered a thematically expansive counter to “the Renaissance.” But, Withington insists, the self-conscious periodization of modernity was much older, going back to humanist and practical writers in the middle years of Elizabeth's reign. He bases his claim for their humaneness and activism on the proliferation in printed books at the same time and from much the same quarter of key associational concepts. Society, company, commonwealth: England was being reimagined as a place where people came together for all manner of purposes. While the assorted collectivities of early modern England—its theater companies, Inns of Court, trade guilds, East India Company, Society for the Reformation of Manners, even society itself—are familiar, they have not previously been presented as the hallmarks of that world. And there is little cause to doubt Withington's general claim that forms of association multiplied from the 1570s, to be written about in new ways by authors who took them, and likely themselves too, more seriously.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
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".