Bebel, Heinrich. Facetiae: Jokes and Funny Stories from the Sixteenth Century. Ed. and trans. Sebastian Coxon
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Facetiae, collections and anthologies of anecdotes, humorous and satirical tales, proverbs, sayings, and witty jokes, are treasure troves of literary, cultural, and social information.The first English-language edition of a collection of Facetiae by Heinrich Bebel (1472-1518), a major figure in German humanism, therefore is more than welcome.Bebel served as professor of poetry and rhetoric at the University of Tübingen beginning in 1496 and became poet laureate in 1501.Bebel authored three books of Facetiae in Latin, containing 107, 151, and 182 tales, respectively.As Coxon explains in his introduction, Books I and II were likely drafted in 1506 and 1507 and printed as part of his Opusula nova by Johannes Grüninger in Strasbourg in 1508, and again in 1509.Book III was included in the third printing under the title Opuscula nova et adolescentiae labores, issued by Matthias Schürer, also in Strasbourg, in 1512, and again with slight modifications in 1514, the last edition supervised by Bebel himself.Coxon uses this 1514 edition as the basis for his translation, listing notable variants at the end (227-29).Coxon notes that Book III was published as a separate entity in the editions of 1512 and 1514 and that we should not see all three books "as constituting a single uninterrupted body of material" (34).This is important as Book III has its own cluster of paratexts that set it apart from Books I-II; Coxon includes all of them in his translation.Coxon's substantive introduction gives a good overview of Bebel's life and his works.It also discusses the history of Bebel's Facetiae, the contents of the collection, literary models, the reception of the collection, and concludes with notes on the translation.He identifies the Liber facetiarum by the papal secretary Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1454), first printed around 1470, as the definitive textual model.In a German context, Bebel also could draw on collections by Heinrich Steinhöwel (1410/11-1479), Rutger Sycamber (1456-c.1517), and Augustin Tünger (1455-1507/10) (18)(19)(20)(21)(22).According to Coxon, a humanist agenda, promoting education and proficiency in Latin, is central to Bebel's Facetiae, frequently mocking bad
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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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.023 | 0.008 |
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".