The Student as Broker: Friedrich Wilhelm Roloff and the Translation of Early Modern Biblical Scholarship
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Translation supplied early modern students with a first output for their academic career, while introducing them to the workings of the printing trade. This article shows that through translation students could also become information brokers in the Republic of Letters. I focus on Friedrich Wilhelm Roloff (1714–1741) in Berlin, who translated a single chapter from the Histoire critique de Manichée et de manichéisme (1734) by the Huguenot theologian Isaac de Beausobre (1659–1738). Highlighting the paratexts of Roloff’s publication, I argue that print enabled students to play the role of mediators in theological disputes. Translating Beausobre’s chapter into the material format of a printed dissertation, Roloff dedicated his book to Siegmund Jakob Baumgarten (1706–1757), commemorating Baumgarten’s appointment as professor at Halle. As the translation and its collaborative production formed part of a larger network of Wolffianism, my article reveals that Roloff was made into a broker by accident.
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 | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".