Williams, David. The Communion of the Book: Milton and the Humanist Revolution in Reading
Bibliographic record
Abstract
DavidWilliams's massive final book in his four-volume history of media change addresses key shifts in print culture, literacy, reading habits, and ideologies of reading in early modern Europe.As a Media Studies specialist (and Miltonist), Williams traces the various contributors to humanism and Protestantism, arguing that they collectively paved the way for a Europe rewired by textuality, the new nation-making sacrament.Examining in turn the work and influence of Desiderius Erasmus, John Foxe, John Lilburne, Edmund Ludlow, and others, Williams argues for these figures' various effects on John Milton's works, especially Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes.But Williams focuses not so much on Milton as on a fundamental shift in the European mind, towards a communion of textuality, a sacrament of the word, that he sees generating "a new and revolutionary culture of religious choice and doctrinal freedom" ( 440).This study of the legal, exegetical, hagiographical, and linguistic turning of the word into a new Eucharistic art is impressively vast in scope.It ranges from early Babylonian histories to Arabic paper-making technologies; from the spiritual metaphors of vellum to Laud's use of the Star Chamber; from correspondence between Calvin and Zwingli over the real presence to fourteenth-century Italian historiographers; from ancient Greek drama's use of the chorus to errata in Milton's editions.Relentlessly thorough in its sources and scholarship, Williams's work can only impress with its sheer scale and drive.Of course, as a meta-print-culture history juxtaposed with literary criticism, The Communion of the Book takes certain risks, most notably (and of necessity) relying quite heavily on the more focused scholarship of others (John King on Foxe; Stephen Dobranski on Milton's editions; and so on).Any one of Williams's chapters could be a book-length study (Erasmus, humanism, printing, and sola scriptura; Foxe and new Protestant hagiographies).Williams's care and attention to these sources and his own broad reading is impressive, but inevitably, he frequently has to lean on others' findings.Perhaps equally unsurprising, The Communion of the Book is also sometimes reiterative.Foxe's influence on Milton's Paradise Regained (perhaps the most original insight here for literary scholars) features in multiple chapters,
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.004 |
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".