“No chronicle records his fellow”: Reading <i>Perkin Warbeck</i> in the Early Seventeenth Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article argues that John Ford’s play Perkin Warbeck should be read in the context of “new” Jacobean readings of the historiography of Henry VII’s reign. After tracing the origins and dissemination of Warbeck’s scaffold confession of imposture, and exposing the sixteenth-century chroniclers’ reliance on mind-reading, clairvoyance, fallacious reasoning, and shrill invective, the article reveals the revaluation of this received “memory” of the 1490s by influential seventeenth-century historians. I argue that Ford’s elimination of the confession and his strategy of staging realpolitik as a kind of non sequitur response to the audience’s persistent questions regarding the “truth” of Perkin’s identity return the story to the indeterminacy it had for its contemporaries. Cet article montre que la pièce de théâtre de John Ford, Perkin Warbeck, doit être comprise dans le contexte des nouvelles lectures jacobéennes de l’historiographie du règne d’Henri VII. On y retrace les origines et la circulation des confessions d’imposture de Warbeck, pour ensuite exposer combien les chroniqueurs du XVIe siècle se sont fiés à la télépathie, à la voyance, aux faux raisonnements et au bruit des invectives. L'article met en lumière la réévaluation de ces mémoires des années 1490 par d’importants historiens du XVIIe siècle. On y montre ainsi que Ford ramène cette affaire à l'état d'indétermination qu'elle avait sans doute pour ses contemporains, en éliminant la catégorie de la confession religieuse et en mettant en avant la stratégie de « realpolitik », qui menait à ne pas répondre aux questions persistantes de l’Assemblée au sujet de l'identité réelle de Perkin.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".