HABITS OF SEDUCTION: ACCOUNTS OF PORTUGUESE NUNS IN BRITISH OFFICERS' PENINSULAR WAR MEMOIRS
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT In their published memoirs of the Peninsular War, a surprising number of British officers mentioned visits to Portuguese convents and openly confessed to having flirted with the sisters – occasionally to the point of outright seduction – and abandoned them when the regiment moved on. This seems like a very negative self-fashioning to modern readers, but can best be understood in the context of the political and cultural climate in which these memoirs were produced. This article argues that officers' descriptions of convent visiting and their professions of sympathy for cloistered women revealed the influence of gothic, erotic, romantic, and travel literature on military life writing. Their depiction of nuns differed from nuns’ portrayal by common soldiers due to its infusion with masculine ideals of chivalry and sensibility. Elite memoirists saw no need to justify their abandonment of nuns because they viewed it in light of other literary accounts of soldiers who broke nuns’ hearts. At the same time, they contrasted themselves with the barbarism of the French, believing themselves to be far more compassionate and tolerant of Catholic strictures. Officers’ portrayals of Portuguese sisters can thus also be seen as an expression of Britons’ sense of their relationship with Portugal in the war.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| 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".