Reformers on Stage: Popular Drama and Religious Propaganda in the Low Countries of Charles V, 1515-1556
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Waite's book is a welcome contribution to early modern studies: the first thematic and doctrinal study in English of the role of civic drama in promoting religious and social reform in the Netherlands, between the Burgundian era of the late middle ages and the wars of independence with Spain in the second half of the sixteenth century.The plays examined in Reformers on Stage were commissioned and performed in cities throughout Flanders and Holland by members of the chambers of rhetoric."Chambers" refers to both social organisations and performance events.The "chambers" were civic societies, whose literate all-male personnel were drawn from a fairly wide range of labouring, merchant, artisanal, and professional urban occupations."Chambers" were also public playing spaces, indoors in halls, or outdoors on fixed scaffolds or pageant wagons.When these stages were erected for inter-city drama competitions, or for royal or civic celebrations, they could be splendidly elaborate, as seen in a contemporary drawing, reproduced in this book, of the flamboyant, multi-level, neo-classical stage constructed for the famous Ghent competition in 1539.The illustration brings to mind the kind of lavish stage designs associated with court theatre in early seventeenthcentury England and continental Europe.The rhetoricians' plays were performed in the vernacular before audiences of men and some women from virtually all social classes.They varied considerably in style and genre, ranging from the farcical and scatological to the bookish and homiletic.Individual plays sometimes mixed these modes, so that bawdy dialogue, rough anticlerical satire, and didactic speeches appeared together in works dedicated to instilling moral virtues and advocating spiritual benefits from particular forms of worship.The drama's star attractions were the spelen van zinne: "plays of the senses," or, alternatively, "plays of the mind."The double meaning in zinne identifies the combined aesthetic and intellectual popularity of these plays.The spelen resembled Tudor morality plays in having allegorical figures represent human virtues, vices, and behavioural types.But in their creation of hybrid theatrical forms and their dedication to social commentary, the spelen's dramatic horizons were considerably more far-reaching.The anonymous Allegorical Play of a Sick City (ca.1535) provides an example.Its central female character, Amsterdam, has fallen ill because of repressive measures taken against hard-working reform-minded citizens.Amsterdam has been infected by Tyranny, and he and his sidekicks Hypocrisy and Finances gloat about their success to Scriptural Preacher.Their sectarian debates allude to a political conflict between the city's magistrates and civil militia.The latter supported the rhetoricians and their plays, which satirised the clergy and civic magistrates.A figure named Community threatens the wealthy So Many in apocalyptic tones.So Many is also accused of hoarding grain and causing recent food shortages.When he complains to Hypocrisy about this treatment, Hypocrisy wryly
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".