‘Graced both with my pen and pencell’: Prophecy and Politics in Jane Seager's Divine Prophecies of the Ten Sibills
Bibliographic record
Abstract
: Chapter 3 discusses the translation by Jane Seager of ten sibylline prophecies into both English and a shorthand system of writing invented by Timothy Bright called ‘characterie’. This chapter argues that Seager's elaborately decorated manuscript gift book was likely intended for presentation to Elizabeth I and that in it Seager presented for the Queen's gaze an authorial persona legitimized in part through their shared virginity. Seager also makes clear her political affiliations with militant reformists and her aspirations for the Queen's religious foreign policy through both the book's content – its translatorial choices – and its material presence as a highly decorated and symbolic object of exchange. Keywords : Elizabeth I; gift books; illuminated manuscripts; Protestant; sibylline prophecies; shorthand In 1589 Jane Seager dedicated an elaborately wrought manuscript to Queen Elizabeth I. The Divine Prophecies of the Ten Sibills is a presentation manuscript bound in red velvet with painted glass panels on both the front and back covers. The manuscript, written in calligraphy and bordered with delicate gold rule, contains ten verse translations of sibylline prophecies, a dedicatory epistle to the Queen, and a concluding poem composed by Seager. Seager translated the sibylline prophecies into English verse, each poem consisting of ten iambic pentameter lines, and into Timothy Bright's newly invented system of ‘characterie’, each poem consisting of five lines of characterie (Fig. 3.1). This manuscript, which was possibly given to the Queen as a New Year's gift in 1589/90, not only reflects Seager's facility in a variety of artistic media, it indicates her desire to participate in what Jessica Malay calls a ‘tradition of politicized gift-giving’, in which the manuscript is at once a beautifully crafted bid for favour or courtly patronage, and representative of Seager's (and her family’s) religious and political positions. I concentrate in this chapter on the material presence of the manuscript and the political suggestiveness of the translations contained within it. Seager's book was clearly conceptualized as a gift offering, an exquisite object that could highlight its producer's varied talents.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".