The <i>Querelle des Femmes,</i> the Overbury Scandal, and the Politics of the Swetnam Controversy in Early Modern England
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Offering a fresh reading of the texts of the so-called ‘Swetnam controversy’ of 1615–1617, this chapter explores both the history of the querelle des femmes and the historical moment in the early seventeenth century that produced an explosion of querelle texts. The first respondent to answer Joseph Swetnam, Rachel Speght, echoes earlier defences representing the female voice as a model of resistance to monarchical abuse. Mingling serious religio-political critique with a playfulness that anticipates Ester Sowernam and Constantia Munda, Speght never refers explicitly to the Overbury affair but taps into the backlash against its misogynist scapegoating of women. The chapter argues that Sowernam and Munda share Speght’s religious and political allegiances, offering a searing anti-court critique in their turn. The Swetnam controversy texts exploit the gendered discourses surrounding contemporary court scandal to offer thinly veiled criticism of the monarch, building on a tradition of real and imagined women speaking truth to power.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".