‘The fruits of my pen’: Esther Inglis's Translation of Georgette de Montenay’s Emblemes ou Devises Chrestiennes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
: Chapter 4 considers the work of calligrapher and copyist Esther Inglis. Inglis created a manuscript gift book titled Cinquante Emblemes Chrestiens for Prince Charles (later Charles I) in 1624. The work is a handdrawn copy – with alterations – of Georgette de Montenay's Emblemes ou Devises Chrestiennes , and this chapter argues that Inglis's version should be considered as a work of translation. The chapter situates the work within the larger political and religious contexts of early modern emblem books and argues for its participation in the patronage and gift economies of the early seventeenth century. Finally, the chapter offers a reading of particular emblems to demonstrate how Inglis's alteration at the level of both word and image worked to articulate specific political allegiances and desires. Keywords : Charles I; emblem books; Esther Inglis; gift books; portraiture; translation [R]epetition, in those who write, is very badly received […] The painter has the right to repeat until water lilies become divine sparrows. – Hélène Cixous Esther Inglis's 1624 version of Georgette de Montenay's Emblemes ou Devises Chrestiennes is, on its surface, a work of repetition. Inglis's writing life was spent creating manuscript copies of existing print books – books like the Psalms , Ecclesiastes , and Proverbs – and dedicating them to prominent figures in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. These copies were unsolicited repetitions of familiar books that were readily available in print; they were a luxury and an excess, unnecessary and unbidden. Hélène Cixous's meditation in ‘The Last Painting’ on the grief and lack experienced by the writer ‘who must paint with brushes all sticky with words’ seems particularly apposite in thinking about Inglis's lifelong work of repetition. Somehow, in folio after folio of calligraphic repetition of ‘phrases already heard a thousand times’, Inglis approaches in writing what Cixous ascribes to the painter who ‘dares to stalk the secrets of light with the help of a single object, armed only with a few water lilies’.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.002 |
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".