De Doctrina Christiana and Milton’s Canonical Works: Revisiting the Authorship Question
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the discovery of De Doctrina Christiana almost 150 years after John Milton’s death, the Latin manuscript has commonly been attributed to the English writer—but not without controversy. For many scholars, the most recent phase of the debate seemed to end with the 2007 publication of Milton and the Manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana, which used stylometry to argue confidently for Milton’s authorship. This article is presented in dissent. Prompted by disjunctures in style and substance between the treatise and Milton’s canonical works, we revisit the authorship question. Using the complete text from the manuscript, a broader selection of candidates, and newer stylometric methods, we show some limitations of the earlier approach. Finally, drawing upon a neglected tradition of scholarship, we suggest that Jeremias Felbinger is a more plausible candidate for authorship, and we evaluate his candidacy through multiple stylometric tests.
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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 | 0.017 | 0.127 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.011 | 0.021 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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.
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".