Bibliographic record
Abstract
Early moderns had a heightened sense of contagion, and acted aggressively to counter it.Contagion was material, spiritual, metaphorical, and imagined.Together with expanding scientific views of physical contagion that were alert to the vectors of old and new diseases, broader classical views of contagion were still, quite literally, in the air.Crusades within Europe and voyages off its shores multiplied the number of those perplexing "Others" who might be sources of racial contagion.Fissures in the ecclesiastical edifice were multiplying the perceived forms of heresy and hence the feared sources of religious contagion.Moral contagion had always been a concern, but now carried the extra weight of new categories of immorality: the poor, the weak, the loose-tongued, and all those like prostitutes who had hitherto been tolerated as the lesser evils that staved off untold greater ones.Honour, whether won by birth or effort, was the index of social health, but never safe from contagion.The dovetailing of humanist and religious ideologies placed an ever-higher premium on the idea of "purity" that was won at the high cost of individual or social effort through hard work, legislation, education or prescription, and was then ever to be defended against the many contagions that could erode it.Purity was the counterpoint to contagion, and expectations for the former arose in lockstep with fears of the latter.This essay collection emerged in an effort to capture some of these concerns, and its gestation was unusual.These are not simply the selected papers of a conference on the topic, but the commissioned papers that emerged from a consultation and seminar held at the University of Victoria in 2003.Participants crafted and drafted their contributions with the book in mind, and as a result there is less of the haphazard quality that sometimes characterizes conference volumes.The project aims to piece together "the early modern imaginary of contagion," with essays divided into three areas: Theory, Practice, and Projections.Five essays on "Theory" set out the key forms that contagion took for early moderns: Greek views of pneumatic transmission as these develop to the end of the Middle Ages with Arabic and kabbalistic elements; Neoplatonic and scholastic notions of the rays emitted by objects and how these shape emotions such as love; the emerging concept of seeds of contagion as framed by Fracastoro; and the new fears of witches as the agents of demonic contagion spreading disease and illness.Most of these essays are by literary scholars, and they probe the interstices of contagion by sight, emotion, air, and blood through texts that highlight the actions of each of these on the others.They demonstrate the intellectual hybridization that characterizes the
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".