Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the following, “prophecy” will be understood as the claim to deliver a divine message or give access to truth from a supernatural source. In the Renaissance, the potential for divinely sanctioned prophecy was well established in scriptural texts, although whether or not any particular prophecy enjoyed divine sanction was often controversial. Despite being the subject of frequent controversy, prophecy was a phenomenon of wide influence involving political, religious, and intellectual leaders, members of the unlearned and laboring classes, and all levels of society in between. Rather than a unified phenomenon, however, “prophecy” can refer to both the preaching of various visionaries and the circulation of prophetic texts, which were only tenuously connected or connected in unexpected ways. At somewhat further remove are the interpretation of prophetic and apocalyptic passages of scripture and learned and theological discourse about the proper role and hazards of visionaries, prophetic writings, and apocalyptic speculation. Renaissance prophecy differed from both prognostication and apocalypticism, although it often shared elements of each. Prophecy had deep ties to other discourses, but not necessarily to those generally viewed as esoteric or occultist. Renaissance prophecy was inextricable from astrology (see the separate Oxford Bibliographies article Astrology, Alchemy, Magic), but had relatively weak ties to the esoteric arts of magic or alchemy (apart from the notable exceptions of Rupescissa and Paracelsus), as well as dream interpretation, lot-casting, or other forms of popular prognostication. As the texts and visionaries of prior generations continued to circulate or were rediscovered decades or centuries later, and because recycling of motifs was common and the time of original composition is often unknown, periodization remains problematic. It is rarely possible to separate Renaissance prophecy neatly from its medieval antecedents or from more recent counterparts, and there remains an urgent need for research on connections across periods. Much basic work remains to be done in identifying prophetic works, their attestations in manuscript or print, their textual history and cultural context, and relations between them. In short: what is highly salient for one scholar may be of little use to another, while potentially critical sources remain undiscovered.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.059 | 0.023 |
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".