Bibliographic record
Abstract
This is an important and long-awaited title; the first collection of essays to introduce the author of one of the most popular prose works in the English language, The Pilgrim's Progress.But it is also shorter than most of the already concise companions in the present series.The reason is clear throughout.Bunyan was no John Milton; he "never quite reached the status of Puritan bard" (7).Bunyan's companion has been preceded by more than a hundred Cambridge companions to individual authors already in print.Milton's companion was, in contrast, among the first to be published and, now in its second edition, is understandably nearly twice as long.Milton's reputation still enjoys "a far more celebrated and enduring place in the canon than Bunyan's" (29).But there is more to Bunyan than The Pilgrim's Progress: he was also the author of one of the finest spiritual autobiographies in the language, one of the earliest novels, a political allegory of historical interest, and a primer for children, in addition to some 53 other works recognized in the Bunyan canon.The editor makes a strong case for Bunyan's status as a major author.Instead of favouring Bunyan's most famous allegory, Duncan-Page allocates only a single chapter to it: The Pilgrim's Progress is placed on equal footing with Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, The Holy War, and A Book for Boys and Girls, which are all, for better or worse, presented as major works deserving of their own chapters.This could not have been an easy decision.The benefit is that the contents reflect the full range of Bunyan's achievement, drawing serious attention to lesser known works, and his best known is prevented from eclipsing the others.The problem is that none of these works, with the possible exception of Grace Abounding, is equal to The Pilgrim's Progress in most readers' minds.Stuart Kim makes a compelling argument for the relative importance of Mr. Badman, and Michael Davies provides a useful context for appreciating Grace Abounding, but all David Walker can do with The Holy War is survey the politics contemporary with the allegory and glance at superior analogues; he begins helpfully with a summary of the story, since presumably few readers
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.122 | 0.028 |
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".