The Life of Mother Marie-Joseph De L’enfant Jesus, Or, How a Little English Girl from Wells Became a Big French Politician
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1703 seven-year-old Esther Wheelwright was kidnapped from her home by the Wabanaki during an attack on the town of Wells, Maine. Ultimately sold to a French missionary and taken to Quebec, she converted to Catholicism, entered the Ursuline convent, and rose to become their first and last English-born Mother Superior. Her biographers have seen Esther Wheelwright/Mother Esther de L’Enfant Jesus as a passive instrument of religion and politics and have rendered her nothing more than an antiquarian curiosity. This study instead explores how her ability to cross many borders— national, religious, and linguistic—enabled Mother Esther to become both an influential religious leader and a skilled diplomat. By exploring the political dimensions of her life, this essay also reconciles the often competing demands of biography, which can work to diminish women’s lives, and women’s history, which seeks to put women’s experiences at the center of historical analysis. Ann M. Little is an Assistant Professor of History at Colorado State University. She has recently completed a book manuscript, Abraham in Arms: Gender and Power on the New England Frontier, 1620-1760. This essay is a preliminary exploration of a second book, a biographical study of Mother Esther de L‘Enfant Jesus.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".