John Donne, ‘Sermon, preached at Lincoln's Inn’ (1649)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
About the author John Donne (1572–1631) was a poet and Church of England clergyman. He was born in London, educated at Hart Hall, Oxford (now Hertford College) and received legal training at Lincoln's Inn. Donne found work as a soldier, a secretary, a professional author (seeking patronage) and Member of Parliament, before finally accepting a role in the Church of England, rising to the eminent position of Dean of St Paul's. Although best known now for his dazzlingly inventive ‘metaphysical’ poems, with their extended metaphors and elaborate conceits, in his own day Donne was a celebrated preacher. About the text This excerpt derives from Donne's second sermon discussing Psalm 38, in which a penitent David chastises himself for his sins and asks for God's support (‘be not far from me’), for his ‘iniquities’ are ‘too heavy’ a burden for him. The sermon was included in a collection of fifty of Donne's sermons, first printed in 1649, eighteen years after Donne's death. It is not known when the sermon was first preached, but it almost certainly dates from the late 1610s or early 1620s when Donne was employed as preacher by the Lincoln's Inn Society. Potter and Simpson date the series of sermons about Psalm 38 to the spring or summer of 1618, based on a reference to the construction of a new chapel at Lincoln's Inn in the sermon on verse 9 (‘Introduction’, pp. 13–14). Donne's congregation for sermons at the Inns of Court would have largely consisted of members of the Inn, including ‘the benchers (the governing body of the Society), the barristers, and also the students’ (Rhatigan, p. 109). The arts of memory Donne often makes recourse to the art of memory in his sermons. For example, in a sermon on Psalm 90:14, preached at St Paul's, Donne compares the distinct words of that verse (and, thus, the order of the sermon) to ‘land-marks that must guide you [i.e. the listener] in this voyage and the places to which you must resort to assist your memory be pleased to take another survey and impression of them’ (Zzz2 v ).
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.004 |
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".