Eighteenth-Century Secret History in Translation: The Case of <i>The Secret History of Queen Zarah and the Zarazians and Histoire secrette de La reine Zarah, et des Zaraziens</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1711, an anonymous author added a new preface and a new final part to two existing volumes of Histoire secrette de La reine Zarah, et des Zaraziens, a French translation of The Secret History of Queen Zarah and the Zarazians (1705). Previous scholarship on this well-known English text has neither addressed its French translations, nor analyzed these additions. This essay reads the additions as a response to changes in British domestic politics and to political relations between Britain and France during the final phase of the War of the Spanish Succession. It also uses the relationship between Queen Zarah and La reine Zarah as a lens through which to explore the relationship between secret history and translation more broadly. I argue that translation conceived of as a movement or exchange between conditions or states, rather than just as a linguistic phenomenon, is a defining feature of secret history. The connections between translation and secret history offer new perspectives on eighteenth-century approaches to genre, national and partisan identity, authorship, and attribution.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".