Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1686, Jeanne Catherine Thomasset visited her daughter, Jeanne, who was living with a wetnurse in Laconnex, near Geneva. During the visit, Jeanne Catherine gave candy to her daughter and to the son of Abraham Clerc. Both children died, and Clerc accused Thomasset of poisoning them. Legal proceedings were initiated, Thomasset was arrested, and the ensuing investigation left behind a rich dossier. Sara Beam has expertly translated and contextualized the case documents for classroom use or the curious reader. For instance, her introduction situates the case as a local event and within broad patterns of religious conflict, gender history and early modern legal procedures. She explains the value of court records as sources for understanding everyday experience, while emphasizing the interpretive difficulties and limitations of such sources. Beam provides important background to enable readers to grasp the dynamics in play in the case. Thomasset was one of four daughters in a minor noble family and unmarried when she became pregnant. Like many children, Jeanne was placed with a wetnurse and Jeanne Catherine visited her occasionally. Clerc laid his accusation against Jeanne Catherine in Geneva, which was a small city affording its denizens little privacy. Geneva was also a very Protestant city, and the fact that Jeanne Catherine had her daughter out of wedlock did her no favours when she came under suspicion. Although women were expected to marry and have children, a significant percentage did not. For some women who had children outside of marriage, infanticide, either intentional or otherwise, followed. Jeanne Catherine’s case was unusual in that she was not poor, her family enjoyed some social status, and her daughter was about two (rather than newborn) when she died. After Clerc lodged his complaint, Genevan officials gathered evidence, including interviewing witnesses, ordering autopsies and torturing Jeanne Catherine in an effort to gain a confession.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 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".