“The Devil Made Me Do It.” Popular Spirituality in a Rural Québec Parish, 1736–1901
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines popular tales involving the Devil in the rural Québec parish of St-Joseph-de-Beauce, 70 kilometers southeast of Québec City. A microhistorical examination of the interaction between popular beliefs and clerical discourse in the parish over an extended period of time offers valuable insights into the functional details of the relationship between parishioners and curés that might otherwise be missed, misinterpreted, or even invisible at the diocesan level. Popular stories about Satan in Beauce County reveal how Catholicism intersected with popular belief systems in rural Québec. On the one hand, people’s fear of the Devil reinforced the clerical message that their spiritual needs took precedence over the inclinations of their bodies. But people also produced their own versions of the clergy’s construction of the Devil, and added content which often differed from the clerical version of Satan. Understanding the popular views of the Devil sheds more light on the ways that orthodox Catholic belief became blended with popular customs and tales, as well as how ordinary Catholics responded to the Church’s messages from the pulpit and in the confessional (or why they did not).
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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 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".