Hokama, Rhema. Devotional Experience and Erotic Knowledge in the Literary Culture of the English Reformation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Rhema Hokama's sharp, timely, and insightful book Devotional Experience and Erotic Knowledge constitutes a significant scholarly intervention in studies of early modern literature and religion in England.Although it offers a number of compelling treatments of individual texts and of devotional traditions, there are two key conceptual contributions I hope to highlight in this short review.First, Devotional Experience makes the case that early seventeenthcentury poetic treatments of the embodied experience of belief draw heavily on specifically Reformed theories of the senses and of the role of the body in worship.In contrast to much recent literary scholarship that characterizes what Hokama refers to as "experiential belief " as a product of Roman Catholicism, Hokama argues that Reformed Protestantism in fact provides its own rich vocabulary for understanding the significance of bodily experience in acts of public and private worship.The source of this richness lies in the capacity of Jacobean Reformed religious culture to contain a wide variety of perspectives on devotional thought and practice.This multifariousness serves in addition as an important foundational point for the second contribution.Hokama integrates current work by historians such as Alec Ryrie and especially Alexandra Walsham in order to show that assessments of the pre-1640 religious and political landscape of the Church of England presently favoured by many literary critics-in which High Church Royalists and puritan anti-Royalists are fully coherent and politically and intellectually exclusive blocs-are outmoded and anachronistic.The private, introspective, and sensory-dependent forms of worship favoured by writers such as William Perkins and the collective, ceremonial worship that served as the centrepiece of the institutional church drew from, responded to, and influenced one another in ways that helped to create in Jacobean and early Caroline Reformed English Protestantism a deeply textured intellectual, spiritual, and sensory devotional culture.This notion of the fundamental complementarity of authorized and proto-Nonconformist approaches to devotion creates for Hokama the opportunity to
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".