Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this book, I have shown some of the ways in which the penitential and sacramental theology of the later Middle Ages was not resistant to emerging capitalist forms and principles but rather contributed to their emergence, and I have argued that we can identify in medieval theology a distinctly capitalist spirit. This spirit is expressed precisely in those aspects of the “age of faith” that have usually been read as inimical to the market and to the rationalizing, secularizing forces of modernity. Belief in the incarnated Christ is a kind of monetary belief, even as the Redemption is an economic exchange that cannot be reduced to mere metaphor; likewise, the faith and trust on which financial credit relies are aspects of a non-rational, essentially religious belief in the trustworthiness of creditor and debtor alike. The sacramental theology of marriage, encapsulated in the marriage debt, seeks to govern desire in the domestic economy by producing self-governing subjects, subjects who, as Weber and Foucault would remind us, are the prerequisites of capitalism. The penitential practices required to measure vices and virtues, practices taught and modelled by penitential handbooks and by Piers Plowman , suggest the kind of rational, methodical conduct of life that Weber identified with Protestant ascesis, although Langland’s emphasis falls on the paradox of sin as a debt that must be paid but that cannot be paid. Langland’s attempt to imagine a Franciscan form of life in the general economy leads to his affirmation of common use; the final images of Christian communal life in the poem are images of a Pentecostal bureaucracy of labourers who manage the gifts and resources lent by God. In Piers Plowman , Langland makes the case for a monetized, bureaucratized social structure precisely in his desire to eschew covetous materialism. All of these texts exemplify the ways in which theological ideas can shape economic structures and realities; more specifically, they suggest ways in which capitalism as an economy of debt shares conceptual ground with the penitential economy of debt.
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.365 | 0.173 |
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".