Michelson, Emily. Catholic Spectacle and Rome’s Jews: Early Modern Conversion and Resistance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Every Saturday, the Catholic Church mandated that a substantial proportion of Rome's Jewish inhabitants attend sermons aimed ostensibly at their conversion.This is the subject of Emily Michelson's new monograph.Using manuscript sources from eleven Italian archives, Catholic Spectacle and Rome's Jews introduces interlocking and exciting conceptual innovations that merit historians' careful consideration.First and most important is Michelson's argument for the distinction between the "imagined" Jews in Catholic conversionary preachers' sermons and the real Jews who inhabited the early modern Eternal City.Conversionary preachers rarely referred to specific Jews from their own audience or time.Instead, preachers created a "fictive, polemicized" Judaism whose theology and place in sacred history were diametrically opposed to Roman Catholicism.This Judaic straw man served as a moralizing mirror and foil, contributing to the development of global early modern Catholicism's selfdefinition.Second, Michelson shows how Roman conversionary preaching had an international audience, giving it cultural and intellectual import far beyond Rome.Catholics from abroad attended conversionary sermons and read them in printed form, galvanizing Catholic identity against the Other.The French philosopher Michel de Montaigne himself reported witnessing the "admirable" former rabbi who was baptized as Andrea de Monte give a conversionary sermon in 1581 (135).As a global pilgrimage destination and later as a tourist attraction for Christians of all confessions on the Grand Tour, Rome and its brand of Catholicism thrived on the religious spectacle of conversionary preaching about imagined Jews.From the start, Michelson reminds readers that the scholarly activity of conversionary sermon composition and delivery was always embedded in a physical urban environment rife with religious conflict.Her "Introduction, with Pig" recounts a documented Catholic counter-demonstration in which a pig's head was placed in a casket to farce a rabbi's funeral.In an especially visceral manner, this episode shows how conversionary sermonizing fit into a broader civic milieu in which Jews "suffered largely because of the preconceptions of others" (16).Michelson follows this vignette with seven chapters focusing
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".