CATHERINE GIMELLI MARTIN, Milton among the Puritans: The Case for Historical Revisionism.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
THIS book is based on a simple claim. Contrary to ‘long-standing assumptions still widely held in the academic community, Milton was not a Puritan’. These assumption are maintained because literary critics rely on the now discredited historical thesis of the ‘Puritan Revolution’ (xi), unaware of the revisionist historiography that is ‘largely neglected in Milton studies’ (5). Catherine Gimelli Martin’s first chapter rectifies this, and challenges the ways in which Puritanism has been simplified and liberalized by historians and critics. Martin, whilst accepting that ‘Milton certainly sustained a career among the Puritans’, argues ‘he was probably never of them’. More radical figures may have admired him, but he did not admire them: ‘in the end, he was alienated from a Puritan regime whose “insanities” and other “crimes” he found “worthier of silence than of publication” ’ (quoting the Complete Prose Works 7: 515). So, Milton was not a Puritan. In the view of Martin, this seems a rather good thing, because Puritans are characterized as despairing, fanatical, and intolerant (or ‘negative, anxiety-producing, repressed’ in the words of revisionist John Morrill, 15). Instead, Martin’s Milton is progressive and secular, one of the ‘religious rationalists’ (25). His century is one of contingency rather than ideology, reluctant reformers rather than radical revolutionaries, a view shared by W. K. Jordan in 1942, whom Martin quotes admiringly: ‘The trend of constitutional development in England was determined by compulsive historical events which theorists influenced only very slightly’ (26, from W. K. Jordan, Men of Substance: A Study of the Thought of Two English Revolutionaries, Henry Parker and Henry Robinson (Chicago, 1942, p.141).
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".