Bibliographic record
Abstract
Thomas More, ‘the man for all seasons’, could also be characterized as ‘rhetorical man’. As Peter Ackroyd observes, rhetoric was ‘the basis of all his work. His wit, his ingenuity as a writer, his skill as an actor, and his public roles, were all part of the same dispensation’. A single essay cannot cover all these aspects of the man or his writing. More wrote voluminously, and even the Yale edition of his Complete Works – in fifteen volumes, two languages and multiple kinds – needs to be supplemented with editions of his personal letters and with his professional writings as lawyer, judge, king’s secretary, orator, diplomat and lord chancellor, in so far as they are extant. Furthermore, for More and his fellow humanists rhetoric was essential and indispensable to writing, regardless of type. Obviously formative in what we call literature (which they thought of more broadly as bonae litterae – ‘good writing’), it was equally important in polemics; and devotional writing, too, had its rhetoric, even if it was little interested in aesthetics. More excelled in each of the rhetorical kinds he used. Among readers in general, Utopia and his History of King Richard the Third have proven pre-eminent; but many have found solace and strength in his Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation , his De Tristitia Christi and his prayers; and his polemical works, especially the Dialogue Concerning Heresies , have strong defenders. Many of More’s ‘literary’ works belong to his humanist period, which lasted through the second decade of the sixteenth century or a few years later. These include almost all his English poems, most of his Latin epigrams, Utopia , several long Latin letter-essays and the Latin and English versions of the History .
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.005 |
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".