Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores the Romantic representation of femininity in relation to elements of the Western esoteric tradition. In particular, it discusses the presence of Gnostic themes and gender imagery and the ways in which Romantic writers incorporated these concepts into their works as a means of articulating discourses that could challenge mainstream trends. I propose that Romantic writers engaged with an image of the feminine that elevated the female within the epistemological hierarchies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and whose precedents lie in the traditions of Gnosticism and other esoteric schools of thought. This feminine image resurfaced within dissenting movements like the Moravians, Behmenists and Swedenborgians, who emphasised the feminine aspects of God and creation. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these movements, and the ideas they espoused, became intertwined with apocalyptic concepts which entailed the spiritual renewal and the betterment of humanity, and in which the feminine was a central component and catalyst. These concepts acquired greater socio-political significance during and post-Revolution and, within this socio-political climate, Romantic writers challenged the binary constructions of gender and epistemological hierarchies. This thesis demonstrates the ways in which Romantic writers—S.T. Coleridge, William Blake, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the transitional figure, Elizabeth Barrett Browning— incorporated alternative religious representations of gender into their writings in ways that subverted established discourse, depicting the feminine as a source of spiritual wisdom and creative transcendence, a mode of representation that mirrors such figures as the Gnostic Sophia.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".