Minding the Fire : Human-Fire Coagency in Margaret Cavendish’s Matrimonial Trouble and Seventeenth-Century Recipes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter begins with the example of The Lady Grace Castleton's Booke of Receipts (Folger MS V.a.600), a recipe collection from the late seventeenth century, which uses six words to describe a low fire: ‘soft’, ‘easy’, ‘gentle’, ‘slow’, ‘small’, and ‘sober’. The chapter then turns to a consideration of this wonderfully evocative language alongside other moments that denote attention to fire within a new searchable recipe corpus in LUNA, the Folger digital manuscript repository. It ends with a meditation upon the vigilance needed to maintain the right amount of heat for certain recipes and the implications for our understanding of the role of kitchen work in the development of human psychology. Keywords: fire and hearth, recipes, coagency, Margaret Cavendish, Lady Castleton, ecofeminism In her analysis of the creation of a fire barrier in Alberta, Canada to help curtail the spread of pine beetle kill, which could contribute to uncontrollable forest fires in the province, ecofeminist Donna Haraway writes that ‘Fire in the North American West has a complicated multispecies history; fire is an essential element for ongoing as well as an agent of double death, the killing of ongoingness’. On the other side of the globe, in the early months of 2020, ‘defensive burning’ as practiced by Aboriginal people in Australia was receiving international recognition for its effectiveness in curtailing the damage done by wildfires and for the resulting reduction in greenhouse emissions. Haraway's analysis looks largely at the present time of a particular geographic region and ends with a projection into a fictional future; the Aboriginal practices draw on centuries-old knowledge about how to use fire as a ‘tool’ in ‘protecting the land’. Here I would like to consider how the wildfires of our current moment and the ways they have made some of us aware of this ‘complicated multispecies history’, such as described above, signifies a return to another time and place.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".