Aubin’s <i>The Noble Slaves</i>, Montagu’s Spanish Lady, and English Feminist Writing about Sexual Slavery in the Ottoman World
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article analyzes Penelope Aubin’s popular novel The Noble Slaves (1722) alongside Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters (1763), particularly her letter “To the Countesse of ——” (May 1718), which depicts the enslavement of a Spanish “Lady.” By contrasting these two authors, I show the difficulty that feminist thinkers had in forging an Enlightenment appreciation for the Islamic world and a critique of Islamic slave institutions at the same time. The ways in which Aubin and Montagu deploy pro- and anti-Islamic sentiments in combination with varying levels of attention to the psycho-sexual trauma of female enslavement in the Ottoman world is emblematic of larger trends in the period. An understanding of this dynamic can help us to think more clearly about how we have inherited these tensions in our own scholarly work on feminism, slavery, and the English encounter with the Ottoman world.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".