Corruptible Bodies and Contaminating Technologies: Jesuit Devotional Print and the 1656 Plague in Naples
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Few who contracted the bubonic epidemic in Naples in 1656 lived to tell the tale, but some that did attributed their recovery to an unprepossessing printed portrait of Jesuit saint Francis Xavier (Figure 1). For these survivors, the power of this portrait to arrest the flow of contagion was envisaged as bodies pressed and impressed on each other, conjoined in the act of healing much as they were believed to be in the transmission of deadly disease. Giovanni Battista de Angelis, for instance, testified that he, like many of his neighbours, bought a printed portrait of this saint from a street seller, and always carried it inside his shirt except at night when he placed it under his pillow.1 One day he found a huge ulcer in the area of his heart, and after seeing death approach him, he took the portrait of the saint and placed it on the affected area. Immediately he fell asleep and awoke one hour later to find the print and his shirt full of blood and festering while the ulcer had disappeared. The portrait became, like a relic or an icon, the carrier of the presence of the saint,2 but this presence was short-lived and not contained within the materiality of the print, which typically is ignored and even discarded after it has healed the body, usually by extracting corrupt bodily fluids. In fact, Giovanni de Angelis quickly turns his attention from the image of the saint to his own body, as he feels the corrupt liquids trapped inside, measures these in relation to visible body parts, and sees them outside of himself, expelled from his interior and subsumed into the printed body. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".