Gough, Melinda J. Dancing Queen: Marie de Médicis’ Ballets at the Court of Henri IV
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This interesting book analyzes and "reads" the political and dynastic role of Marie de Médicis (1575-1642), queen of France from 1600 to 1610, through four ballets that the queen set up in Paris between 1602 and 1609.The volume also contains three appendices, in which the verses of Ballet of the Sixteen Virtues performed in 1602, Ballet of Diana and her Nymphs, and Ballet de Madame (both performed in 1609) are translated from French into English for the first time.The book uses largely unknown primary sources for a truly interdisciplinary approach and allows us to understand how Marie, through an "innovative verbal and visual imagery" (4), an "adaptation of protocols, gestures and interactions of royal bodies" (4), and an accurate choice in "inviting international ambassadors" (4), was able to rebuild an image of the French monarchy fit to reunify the country after the difficult years of the wars of religion that ended with the Edict of Nantes (1598).Marie married Henri IV in 1600, following the annulment of his marriage to Marguerite de Valois who had not provided him with an heir to the throne.Marie had to cope not only with the king's mistresses, among them, in particular Henriette d'Entragues and the young Charlotte de Montmorency, but also with his illegitimate sons who could raise hereditary difficulties if there were not a legitimate heir to the Bourbon house.The birth in 1601 of the future Louis XIII not only gave France a legitimate dauphin but also strengthened Marie's political position.According to the Salic law, Marie herself had no dynastic rights, but that did not prevent her from being recognized as an active political subject who defended the rights and the honour of the rightful king, Henri, and the legitimate dauphin, Louis.Marie brought to France, among other things, technologies of court spectacle that were already in use at the Medici court, and she skilfully used them in the ballets described in the book.In the 1602 Ballet of the Sixteen Virtues, Marie was depicted as Astraea, the pagan goddess who secured peace, plenty, and political stability.In the Ballet of Diana and her Nymphs, performed in January 1609, Marie addressed the king's philandering by presenting herself
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.005 |
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".