Bent out of Shape: The Projection of Male Anxiety onto Busks and Stays in Early Modern Europe
Bibliographic record
Abstract
An interesting pattern emerges in the Early Modern Era of women taking control of their lives and bodies through the use of material culture, and men being terrified of this fact. Women often lacked agency in a world with ever-changing perceptions of not only femininity, but also of the female form. Clothing was then one of the few ways that these women who lacked power could control their body and their spheres. To those living in the Early Modern Era, clothing held far more meaning than it does in the modern day. The exchange of clothing among women was founded on and fundamental to the connections between them. It was transferred from “masters and mistresses to servants, from aunts to nieces, from sisters and brothers to younger siblings” in a “routine rotation” that was the life of a garment. Men and women alike understood the innate power of clothing in the Early Modern period and its ability to “transnature” the body it was on. Clothing had the power to “mold and shape” women into anything. Because of its transformative nature, for many women clothing was one of the few places where they could exert their control: through purchasing power, shaping their public presentation and—for lower class women—even manufacturing or selling. Busks and stays are one item which was targeted by masculinity in the early modern period because of their connection to both women and sexuality more specifically.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".