Witchcraft and the Enlightenment: Reinterpreting the Witch in the Eighteenth Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
New Research Idea: Representing a point of intersection between the natural, the supernatural, law, fact, and fiction, witchcraft makes an excellent case for studying changes in the belief systems during the eighteenth century. Witchcraft remained a topic of intense discussion and heated debates long after it ceased being officially treated as a crime. The period is extraordinarily rich in literary material concerning witchcraft, from pamphlets, essays, news sheets and legal histories to pantomimes, poems, chapbooks, and at least one novel, yet these have so far received relatively sparse academic attention. In order to obtain a deeper knowledge and understanding of the development and the major and minor changes in the discourse on witchcraft during the 1700s, the proposed project analyses its manifestations in English and Scottish non-fiction and literary texts spanning the above-mentioned forms and genres. Exploring the mediation of texts/narratives/stories and examining the sociocultural considerations of “how and why stories are re-worked in different historical and cultural contexts” (Elliott: 149), the proposed project studies how the various texts enter into dialogues with each other and how they play into other concerns. In doing so it gives particular attention to shifts in the representations of the witch figure, its manifestations, function, and voice, and its interrelationship with gender politics. The proposed study builds upon and expands my previous research into the seventeenth century: “Scripting the Witch: Voice, Gender and Power in The Witch of Edmonton (Rowley, Dekker and Ford 1621) and Witchcraft (Baillie 1836)” (Master’s Thesis Nov 2016 UiT).
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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 | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.069 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".