Bibliographic record
Abstract
DATE, CIRCUMSTANCES AND HABITS OF COMPOSITION De Tristitia Christi , an unfinished commentary on the agony of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, is the last of Thomas More’s major works, composed while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London on a charge of misprision of treason. According to the preface to the work which William Rastell supplied for its first translation – by More’s granddaughter, Mary Basset, in the 1557 edition of the English works – More began De Tristitia ‘beyng then prisoner, and coulde not atchieue and finishe the same’ because he was ‘bereaued and put from hys bookes, pen, inke and paper’ ( 1557 sig. QQ 7 v; CW 14:1077–8). On the basis of this information, we can place the composition of the work sometime between April 1534, when More was taken prisoner, and June 1535, when his books and writing materials were confiscated by the royal authorities (see above, 128). Such circumstances as these are enough to stimulate interest in the work’s composition and content, but we are also fortunate that More’s manuscript has survived, having been found in 1963 at the Royal College of Corpus Christi in Valencia, Spain, and analysed in detail by Clarence H. Miller in the Yale editon of De Tristitia ( CW 14:695–724). The only surviving holograph of a major work by More, the Valencia manuscript affords a rare glimpse into his methods and process of composition, if not in general, at least under the straitened circumstances of his imprisonment. The Valencia autograph (reproduced in the Yale edition as a facing-page facsimile with Miller’s transcription and translation of the Latin text) leaves an impression both of the urgency of More’s circumstances and of the privations of his Tower cell. As Miller shows, More composed quickly, revising as he went, crossing out what he wished to change and making interlinear additions with carets ( CW 14:745–54).
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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 | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 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".