Flesh, Spirit, and the Glorified Body: Spenser’s Anthropomorphic Houses of Pride, Holiness, and Temperance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Whereas Spenser’s most extensive allegorical representation of the body, Alma’s Castle, has been recently said to portray “the natural body” in contrast to “the mystical body” associated with Caelia’s House of Holiness, Books I and II are profoundly interanimated. They share much the same conceptions of the body, soul, and human prospects, so that their heroes’ exploits are fully complementary and the development of The Faerie Queene is cumulative. Anatomical, medical, and theological discourses and concerns are synthesized in both Books I and II, so that Spenser’s representation of Lucifera’s and Caelia’s houses deals in part with the natural body, and his portrayal of Alma’s domain depends on sanctification and related Pauline doctrines of the flesh, spirit, and glorified body. Although prior Spenser criticism affords little comment on the relevance of Elizabethan beliefs in bodily glorification, that is the ultimate physical ideal for humankind in The Faerie Queene. Alma’s dominion not only constitutes a model for Temperance as it is to be pursued in life, but also Spenser’s most full and detailed prefiguration of the finally transfigured somatic state, when the body would supposedly become spiritualized to the maximum extent possible, while yet remaining physical. Likewise, we should avoid imputing to The Faerie Queene sharp oppositions between nature, physicality, and the body on the one hand, and grace, spirit, and soul on the other; or between Books I and II, or Holiness and Temperance.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".