Bestiality and Gluttony in Theory and Practice in the Comedies of Giovan Battista Della Porta
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Giovan Battista Della Porta (1535–1615), Neapolitan nobleman, scholar/scientist, and writer famed for books on natural magic and physiognomy, expressed quite explicit views on bestiality—that is, on human beings having sex with animals. Della Porta populated his plays with characters who allude to their desire both to have sex with animals and to assume animal shapes in order to satisfy their yearnings; the gulone (the glutton), an archetypal character that was a cultural relic from Roman comedy, is a case in point. According to Della Porta, eating habits are indicative of other habits that can be expressed in a person’s physical appearance; his fascination with monstrous bodies and their concomitant bizarre sexual desires betrays a tendency to understand human beings as akin to animals, and indicates the porosity, as he saw it, of boundaries between these two worlds. Le noble napolitain Giovan Battista Della Porta (1535–1615), chercheur, scientifique et écrivain, connu pour ses ouvrages sur la magie naturelle et la physiognomonie, s’est exprimé de façon explicite au sujet de la bestialité, c’est-à-dire au sujet d’humains ayant des rapports sexuels avec des animaux. Les pièces de théâtre de Della Porta sont habitées par de nombreux personnages qui font allusion à la fois à leur désir d’avoir des contacts sexuels avec des animaux, et de prendre une forme animale pour assouvir ces désirs. Le gulone (le glouton) en est un cas, tout en étant un personnage archétypal issu de la comédie romaine. D’après Della Porta, le comportement à table pouvait indiquer la présence d’autres habitudes, parfois visibles dans l’aspect physique d’une personne. Sa fascination pour les corps monstrueux et leurs désirs sexuels étranges trahit sa tendance à considérer les humains comme apparentés aux animaux, et met en lumière la perméabilité telle qu’il la concevait de la limite entre ces deux règnes.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.051 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".