<i>Mixed Matches: Transgressive Unions in Germany from the Reformation to the Enlightenment</i>, edited by David M. Luebke and Mary Lindemann
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mixed Matches: Transgressive Unions in Germany from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, edited by David M. Luebke and Mary Lindemann. New York, Berghahn Books, 2014. vi, 246 pp. $95.00 US (cloth). Mixed Matches: Transgressive Unions in Germany is part of the Spectrum series and published under the auspices of the German Studies Association; these are affiliations from which the book benefits, as the transatlantic character of the association and the dissemination of its ideas, are fostered throughout. Publishing the results of this German-American collaboration in the English language also makes it accessible to a broader range of students and scholars. By focusing on the shifting boundaries of acceptable marriage partners in exceptional and contested unions, the various contributions also illuminate broader changes in systems of regulation, including the law, the political system, and not least religious codes and practices during the early modern period. As David Luebke tells readers in the introduction, this volume should resonate not only with those interested in early modern history but also those engaged with contemporary issues about transgression. Same-sex marriage, mixed-race relationships, and binational unions are examples of contemporary debates that demonstrate the need to be mindful of the shifting boundaries of marital propriety, validity, legality, and definition. Given contemporary concerns about the definition of appropriate unions, this volume provides an important reminder that current debates on race, religion, sexuality, and gender in the context of marital and non-marital unions are not unprecedented but derive from early modern origins. The essays in the collection generally follow a chronological order and are organized in clusters related to a number of topics. They include the impact of the Protestant Reformation on the definition of marriage (chapters one to three); the issue of social status (chapters four and five); confessional barriers to marriage (chapters six to eight); race (chapter nine); and shifting understandings of the incest taboo (chapters ten and eleven). Marriage is placed at the intersection of private and public, and all of the contributions speak to the centrality of the institution to social organization. By examining relationships on the margins, the contributions to this volume make an in-depth exploration of the changes in power relations between the religious and secular context possible, while also pointing out the intersections that existed between the two frameworks. In particular, changing attitudes about sexual morality were at the heart of many deliberations related to suitable unions. Acknowledging sexuality as a fundamental aspect of the human condition also prompted the church and state to try channelling and thereby limiting sexual expression in officially sanctioned and narrowly defined marital unions only. Because the cases discussed in these chapters--clerical marriage, marriage across rank, inter-confessional marriage, cross-racial marriage, and incest--are those on the margins of propriety and acceptability at the time, they also generated attention. Thus, contributors to this volume have been able to draw on a rich cache of sources, among them theological tracts, court records, travelogues, and personal correspondence. One of the most prominent examples of a prospective transgressive union in this volume is discussed by Daniel Riches. His work traces the fifteen-year-long debate that ultimately failed to produce a marital partnership between Queen Christina of Sweden and Elector Wilhelm of Brandenburg. Opponents to the union deemed the prospective spouses an ill fit due to their differences in rank and religion. They also accused the queen of transgressing the norms of dominant sex and gender roles. As Riches points out, however, it was not just naysayers of the alliance who appropriated rhetoric of difference as justification, but those who were supportive of the union did as well. …
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".