Thomas More, <i>A Treatise (Unfinished) upon these Words of Holy Scripture</i> (1522)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
About the author Thomas More (1478–1535), lawyer, under-sheriff of London, hunter of heretics, Lord Chancellor, martyr and saint, canonically known for writing the prototype for utopian fiction. He held several civic and court positions and composed various literary, spiritual and polemical works befitting an intellectual who fraternised with leading European Renaissance humanists. About the text The treatise apparently is the outcome of a meditative exercise that More and his daughter Margaret, embarked upon, taking as the starting point of their separate treatments Ecclesiasticus 7:40: ‘Remember the last things and thou shalt never sin.’ Thought to be written in 1522, the transition between More's humanistic and polemical periods, the text may have been partially motivated by the Duke of Buckingham's sudden downfall in Henry VIII's court. Its extensive and rather elaborate design promised to contemplate the ways in which each of the four last things (death, doom, pain and joy) would enable the reader to fend off each of the seven deadly sins (pride, envy, wrath, covetousness, gluttony, sloth and lechery). The treatise, however, remains unfinished, terminating at the first last thing only and its relationship to the first six sins. More demonstrates a rich working knowledge of the traditions, practices and iconography of penitence, contemptus mundi , danse macabre , ars moriendi and the seven deadly sins. The arts of memory Turning to medical discourse, More conceives of the Ecclesiasticus quotation as a religious prescription for the sickness of sin. Remembering thus becomes a therapeutic action of dealing with wayward interiority. It accomplishes this remedy through recalibrating the subject's economy of pleasure from the fleshly to the spiritual. In this excerpt, More encourages readers to practise a profounder memory art, one that stimulates the imagination, personalises the imagery of death and roots it deep within the individual's heart. Textual notes The Workes of Sir Thomas More Knyght, sometyme Lorde Chancellour of England (London, 1557), E7 r . Treatise (Unfinished) upon these Words of Holy Scripture For nothing is there that may more effectually withdraw the soul from the wretched affections of the body than may the remembrance of death, if we do not remember it hourly, as one heareth a word and let it pass by his ear without any receiving of the sentence into his heart.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.037 | 0.008 |
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".