The Reformation of the Decalogue: Religious Identity and the Ten Commandments in England, c. 1485–1625
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Foundational elements of a culture make for daunting but valuable subjects of study.In The Reformation of the Decalogue, part of the Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History, Jonathan Willis walks readers through a comprehensive examination of how the Ten Commandments were incorporated into England's religious, political, and social life during the long sixteenth century.Far from being a straightforward tracing of precepts and their practice, Willis's work shows that the Decalogue was debated not only between Catholics and reformers, but far more widely.His book shows different factions eager to promote particular readings of the proper relationship between ecclesiastical and secular authority, define the higher priorities of moral reformation, and shape the lived experience of Sabbaths and sermons across the country.Necessarily, Willis draws deeply from theological materials, while also employing literary, pedagogical, judicial, philosophical, political, and architectural sources to illustrate how deeply the commandments were integrated into early modern English life.From the start, Willis lays out the many challenges that complicate his study, beginning with a notable dichotomy between the Decalogue's recognized place in Christian culture and the relative paucity of historiography about the Ten Commandments' role in the English reformation.Willis attributes this oversight to a sense that the subject has been deemed equally elementary as elemental, so that it hides in plain sight.That sense, he asserts, seriously hampers our understanding of the English Reformation which changed the Decalogue in wording and numbering and, in turn, saw the divine guidance used to shape essential concepts of a moral society.England's Reformation, in short, was framed by these few and highly charged precepts that were open to endless reinterpretation.Willis acknowledges the profound difficulties of teasing out the Decalogue's direct influence on so many topics-from keeping the Sabbath to punishing adulterers-and has filtered his sources to include only what he saw as directly relevant references to the commandments, mostly in printed works such as texts for catechumens, pastoral texts, or polemical
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".