Cohen, Thomas V. Roman Tales: A Reader’s Guide to the Art of Microhistory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Thomas V. Cohen's Roman Tales meticulously analyzes episodes in the fluid urban cityscape of early modern Rome to reflect upon the socio-political structures that animated early modern Italy.Cohen's work also provides a muchneeded point of reflection upon how we go about writing about and teaching students how to "do" history.In chapter 1, Cohen lays out his theoretical aims, which is nothing less than reinvigorating microhistory as a historical method.Summoning the usual roster of seminal microhistorians, Cohen explains that microhistory plumbs past anomalies to reveal the quotidian and its limits.A practice though not a discipline, good microhistory links "small things to larger trends and structures, " freely drawing upon an eclectic array of disciplines to decode historical minutiae in their manifold plurality, at once rendering the past both "more familiar and more strange" (200).For Cohen, microhistorical methods have the added benefit of allowing room for writerly stylings and requiring reader engagement.In the sixteenth century, the Roman Tribunal, the Papal States' highest criminal court, recorded trials verbatim, thus its records lend themselves to granular analysis.Cohen helpfully concludes the chapter with useful pedagogical recommendations: students can begin to learn to "do microhistory" by generating timelines and lists of dramatis personae.Chapter 2 recounts a dinner party and stone fight to unpack Jewish-Christian relations in early modern Rome.Considering events in frameworks temporal, social, institutional, and legal, Cohen reflects on Rome's "bicephalous" government and the Jewish ghetto's porosity, reading the stone fight through an ultimately anthropological prism as a mode of gift-giving: an exchange which widened the necessarily narrow channels of Jewish-Christian interaction.In chapter 3, the conjurings of four women and a priest reveal that folk devotional practices persisted in spite of Catholic Reformation crackdowns."Afterthoughts, " a section which concludes each chapter, reflects upon "high" and "low" magic and the episode's gendered contexts.The tale ends inconclusively, but this is par for the course: "microhistory is parsimonious with neat ends" (59).
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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 | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.010 |
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".