Bibliographic record
Abstract
THE question of Milton's authorship of De doctrina christiana has occupied the attention of Milton scholars for more than a decade now. The initial challenge to Milton's authorship came from William Hunter at a session of the International Milton Symposium in Vancouver, 1991. After Hunter's argument appeared in print, Christopher Hill and Maurice Kelley vigorously contested Hunter's claims. Despite the immense authority of his opponents and their deeply informed rebuttals, the seeds of doubt planted by Hunter have flourished in subsequent Milton scholarship. When citing De doctrina christiana to support or amplify an argument about Milton's writings, politic critics now include heavily annotated qualifications and disclaimers, taking care to thank Professor Hunter for inspiring a fresh inspection of the treatise in question. The continuing hesitation among Milton scholars owes not so much to Hunter's persistence, however, not after the trenchant replies with which his challenge has been met, as it does to the efforts of a self-begot committee of experts, mostly British, led by Thomas Corns and Gordon Campbell. Six years after Hunter's original challenge, this committee produced a bulky, equivocal report that brought quantitative analysis to bear on the question of provenance and concluded by denying the reliability of De doctrina christiana as a guide to Milton's beliefs and endorsing skepticism as to the authorship of the treatise. Because the membership of this committee includes key organizers of recent international Milton symposia, as well as other institutionalized occasions devoted to Milton studies, those who do not value the challenge to Milton's authorship and find the committee's conclusions dubious, have found it heavy going. Three of the report's eight conclusions are critical to the case against use of the treatise in elucidating Milton's other works: iv) The manuscript [of De doctrina christiana ] has two principal strata, an ur- text and a transformation of that text effected by a process of revision which primarily consisted of the accretion of material by Milton. v) Some parts of the manuscript show more evidence of Miltonic composition than others; some parts may be wholly of Miltonic origin; others show stylometric characteristics unlike Milton's; much of the manuscript probably constitutes a Miltonic appropriation and transformation that finds precedent in Milton's practice in the production of the Artis logicae ….
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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 | 0.007 | 0.032 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".