<i>Samson’s Cords: Imposing Oaths in Milton, Marvell, and Butler</i>. Alex Garganigo. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2018. Pp. ix+332.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The seventeenth century was undoubtedly the period during which people in Britain and Ireland were forced to swear oaths most frequently.The majority, of course, conformed, many probably with some reluctance, but the insistence of successive governments in demanding public displays of loyalty from its subjects generated considerable opposition so that "at one end of a continuum of oath-swearing practices stood the oath-refusing Quaker; at the other, the oath-abusing rake" (3).It is little wonder, then, as Alex Garganigo argues in his meticulous, informed, and rewarding study, that oaths loomed large in the imagination of the period's most significant writers.Samson's Cords is a study of the ways in which Samuel Butler, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton explored the implications of an oath-swearing culture, arguing that they all came to very different conclusions about the moral and theological efficacy of oaths, as well as the effects of imposing them.The introduction establishes the theoretical and methodological principles of the study.Following Austen, Garganigo employs a revised version of performance theory to explore how oaths exist in the world "as part of larger, public rituals," making "the commitments they entail more explicit and harder to break" (13).The question is how restricted and prescriptive the identity or identities oaths demanded would have to be to ensure the right level of loyalty.Articulated too loosely, oaths serve no meaningful function; expressed too narrowly, they will undoubtedly generate the opposition they are intended to stamp out.For Butler, oaths of loyalty to church and state were valuable, meaningful, and a trifling burden on the ordinary citizen.Hudibras satirizes the ex-
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.004 |
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".