Fixing Affections: Nicholas and John Ferrar and the Books of Little Gidding
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The importance of the collage Bible Harmonies produced by the members of the religious community at Little Gidding has been articulated in terms of the creativity and intricacy of handiwork the books showcase in relation to the community’s unique devotional practices. My purpose here, in concert with this more recent work, is to consider the particularly affecting relationship between sensual experience and holiness embedded in the pages of these books. However, instead of looking solely at the material components of the books as artisanal objects, I want to extend the discussion of the harmonies’ incarnational materiality to include the curious narrative that lies at the heart of what we know about the books’ making. Our principal source of information about how the harmonies were compiled is the never-completed biography of the community’s leader Nicholas Ferrar. The biography was assembled by his brother John, probably in the 1650s, and certainly after Nicholas’ death in 1637. This strange account of Nicholas’ life and of the community established at Little Gidding is often cited in studies of the harmonies but is rarely considered as an intricate act of figuration in its own right, deserving a place in the compendium of the community’s creative output. [P.B.]
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it