“The Devils Sang Matins So Properly:” Francis Xavier’s Close Encounters with Demons in Daniello Bartoli’s Asia (1653)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Daniello Bartoli (1608–85) was commissioned to write the “official” history of the Society of Jesus a century after its foundation. Later called by Leopardi “the Dante of baroque prose,” Bartoli offered a powerful representation of the overseas policies of his order, as well as an appealing overview of the remote lands its members visited for the first time. The main character and hero of Bartoli’s treatise Asia (1653) is Francis Xavier (1506–52), the “Apostle of the Indies.” This paper focuses on Xavier’s “strange encounters” with the “Indian otherness,” recounted by Bartoli as a confrontation with the “spiritual otherness.” Our essay examines several episodes of supernatural events in which Bartoli indulged in a dramatic narrative. With his colorful language, did Bartoli want to encourage vocations to the order, fellow Jesuits to travel to Asia, to gain financial and political support, or all of them? These episodes will be analyzed from a historical point of view (how Bartoli used his sources) and in a pedagogic perspective (which message he wanted to spread and to which readership).
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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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".