Bibliographic record
Abstract
THOMAS Palmer's Two Hundred Poosees is now acknowledged as the earliest English emblem book, compiled some twenty years before Geffrey Whitney's Choice of Emblemes and Other Devises published in 1586. The contrast in their choice of title is striking: Palmer decided upon the more common English word ‘Poosees’ (posies) while Whitney opted for the more exact, but rather foreign, ‘Emblemes’. Whitney acknowledged that the word emblem was yet ‘not proper in the Englishe tonge’ and felt it required some explanation.1 Michael Bath has offered a number of reasons why Palmer chose posies for his title, and while these remain both valid and persuasive, there is an additional source that is worth noting: the use of posies in England's first state lottery held between 1567 and 1569.2 Palmer's collection remained in manuscript and it is likely that he never intended it to be printed. Bath has suggested that the volume was an exercise in rhetoric (Palmer had been the first lecturer in rhetoric at St John's College, Oxford), while John Manning notes that Palmer had no financial motive for publishing and may in any case have been disinclined to publish given that a later writer refers to his ‘bashfulness’. Both scholars acknowledge a more practical context that might have rendered publication unnecessary. Fellowships in St John's were intended for poor scholars and Palmer's inheritance of some property in Essex in 1564 caused him to lose his position. Given that he chose to dedicate his volume to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, the Queen's favourite and from 31 December 1564, Oxford's new chancellor, it seems likely that Palmer saw the manuscript merely as part of his (probably unsuccessful) campaign to regain his fellowship.3
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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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.037 | 0.009 |
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".