'Faeminae Lectissimae Dilectissimaeque': John Donne's Epitaph on his Wife, and the Elizabethan Homily of the State of Matrimony
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AS Joshua Scodel has observed, the English poetic epitaph, as a literary genre, ‘participates in the social, and therefore historical, construction of the dead’1 and ‘exploits both the distinctive features of verse and its own specific conventions in order to define the dead in ways that not only reinforce but also extend, challenge, and reshape prevailing cultural assumptions.’2 Because epitaphs eulogise the dead, but are written for the living, they have an inherent potential for propaganda. This appears to be the case with the Latin prose epitaph that John Donne wrote for his wife, Anne, which afforded him the opportunity to have the last word (literally graven in stone) on the controversial subject of their ill-fated decision to marry, some fifteen years earlier, without her father's consent. Donne's epitaph for Anne can be read as an attempt to depict their secret marriage as an act which, paradoxically, reinforced rather than subverted ‘prevailing cultural assumptions’ regarding matrimony in the Jacobean period.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".