Andrew Marvell’s "Bermudas," Paradisal Places, and the Protestant Critique of Sacred Space
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article I look at Andrew Marvell’s “Bermudas” (1653-54), a work that continues to puzzle us. The poem describes an idyllic paradisal landscape, identified with the tropical Bermudas but which the reader knows belongs only to a cartography of the imagination. In what sense are we supposed to believe in this patently fictional paradise, and what is the relationship between the Bermudas of Marvell’s fiction and the islands of history? Here I suggest that an answer to these questions lies in Protestant attitudes toward space and the sacred. The Reformation challenged the idea that particular spaces contained any intrinsic holiness—the shrines of Catholicism, the churches of the Laudian era, and the temples of the pagans were all cited as idolatrous confusions of the holy with special places. Reading “Bermudas” against the backdrop of such critiques allows for an alternative perspective on its elusive symbolism. In Marvell’s time, the Protestant criticism of sacred spaces extended to the sacralization of localities by the godly, who in some cases believed that places (such as colonies in the New World) were marked out by providential favor. I suggest that in “Bermudas” Marvell extends the critique of special places to the providentialism of the godly mariners in his poem.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it