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Record W3010871803 · doi:10.7202/1068573ar

Learned Credulity in Gianfrancesco Pico’s Strix

2020· article· en· W3010871803 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Walter Stephens

Bibliographic record

VenueRenaissance and Reformation · 2020
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicRenaissance and Early Modern Studies
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsDemonologyWitchHumanismHarmEcstasyPhilosophyLiteraturePsychoanalysisArtPsychologyTheologySocial psychology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

In 1522–23, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola was involved in trials that executed ten accused witches. Soon after the trials, he published Strix, sive de ludificatione daemonum, a meticulous defence of witch-hunting. A humanistic dialogue as heavily dependent on classical literature and philosophy as on Scholastic demonology, Strix is unusually candid about the logic of witch-hunting. A convicted witch among its four interlocutors makes Strix unique among witch-hunting defenses. Moreover, it devotes less attention to maleficia or magical harm than to seemingly peripheral questions about sacraments and the corporeality of demons. It attempts to demonstrate that witches’ interactions with demons happen in reality, not in their imagination, thereby vindicating the truth of Christian demonology and explaining the current surfeit of evils. Strix explicitly reverses Gianfrancesco’s earlier stance on witchcraft in De imaginatione (1501) and supplements the defence of biblical truth he undertook in Examen vanitatis doctrinae gentium (1520).

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.004
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.010
Threshold uncertainty score0.037

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.004
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0100.025
Scholarly communication0.0060.004
Open science0.0010.005
Research integrity0.0020.007
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0080.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.062
GPT teacher head0.252
Teacher spread0.190 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2020
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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