What do the religious beliefs of the Harleys of Brampton Bryan, Herefordshire, tell us about the nature of early Stuart puritanism?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The thesis uses the Harleys as a case study to determine what their own personal beliefs can tell us about the nature of puritanism in the early Stuart period. Two key personal documents are examined in order to establish that the Harleys’ ‘brand’ of puritanism was built upon several fundamental pillars: a belief in the doctrine of predestination, that is the belief that the world was divided into the ‘elect’ who were assured of salvation and the ‘reprobate’ who doomed to damnation; the preference for a preaching ministry; the observance of regular private days of fasting and humiliation; a fierce iconoclasm and a mistrust of the power of the episcopacy; all of which were underscored by the belief that the word of God, as found in Scripture, was the only arbiter of religious orthodoxy. The thesis goes on to explore how these beliefs compare to those held by puritan ministers whom were known personally to the Harleys, through a discussion of the ministers’ published sermons and other works. Finally, the thesis examines the public life of Sir Robert Harley as a Member of Parliament and the private life of the Harleys in their corner of northern Herefordshire, in order to show that both aspects of their life were heavily influenced by their particular religious beliefs. The thesis concludes that, while early Stuart puritanism was fluid and individual, and that there can be no ‘one size fits all’ definition, there were certain shared beliefs, the finer details of which were open to debate and discussion among the puritans themselves.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".