Bibliographic record
Abstract
The modern reader of Utopia , challenged by the provocations of More’s traveller’s tale, may find a degree of reassurance in the apparent failure of some among More’s contemporaries to get the point. In 1518 the Alsatian humanist Beatus Rhenanus, who at that time was seeing the third edition of Utopia through Johann Froben’s press in Basel, wrote to the imperial councillor Willibald Pirckheimer, reporting how he had praised the book to a group of respected men. One of these had responded with the observation that ‘More deserved no more credit than a paid scribe, who simply writes down what other people say after the fashion of a pen-pusher … Everything in the book, he said, came from the mouth of Hythloday; all More did was write it down’ ( CU 258–9). It is as well to be cautious here: maybe this dim individual, whose opinion was warmly supported by the others present, is just another literary invention. Certainly, his literal-mindedness seems to glance back at More’s own prefatory letter to Peter Giles which had been part of the book since the first edition, printed at Louvain some two years earlier. There More plays on the same theme: ‘I confess, my dear Peter, that having all these materials to hand left hardly anything at all for me to do.’ His job was just to write down what he heard ( CU 31). The author, in other words, is simply a passive conduit for the adventures described by the enigmatic figure of Raphael Hythlodaeus. It can be no great surprise to learn that Beatus’s group of wooden-minded literalists are theologians, representatives of that institutional scholasticism which forms a frequent target of Erasmus’s satire. One revealing illustration of such a mentality, no doubt spiced up by Erasmus, occurs in a letter he wrote to More in 1520, describing his clash with the Louvain theologian Nicolaas Baechem.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 0.004 |
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".