Whitney Dirks, <i>Monstrosity, Bodies, and Knowledge in Early Modern England: Curiosity to See and Behold</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Combining a microhistorical case study of the conjoined twins, Aquila and Priscilla Herring born in 1680 in Somerset (England), with a discussion of around 350 early modern sources (1450–1800) concerning anomalous bodies, Whitney Dirks argues for the persistence of curiosity about and pleasure derived from monstrosity in early modern England. Drawing on such diverse sources as cheap print, diaries, excerpts from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society to 1800, and legal documents, Dirks shows that interest in the monstrous, both prurient and scientific, comprised all classes and professions. This study also makes the case for the mainstream appeal of an emerging literary mode, ‘monstrous print’, cheaply printed ephemera sensationalising human and nonhuman physical anomalies. To manage these disparate materials, Dirks borrows the musical form of the ‘étude’ as a narrative device: each chapter is preceded by an abstract and a focused discussion, an étude, of one aspect of the Herring twins’ story. The subsequent chapter then elaborates on the cultural and historical contexts. For example, the second étude introduces the publication history of three pamphlets and references in several books detailing the Herring girls’ birth and anatomy. The succeeding chapter entitled ‘Monstrous Print’ examines the proliferation of popular literature about monsters of which the Herring story is a part, discusses the evidence for the readership of such material, and summarises the various meanings and explanations historically attached to physical anomalies. In each chapter, therefore, the reader is treated to the minutia of an exemplum alongside its broader cultural and historical context. This format risks repetition with abstract, étude and introductory paragraphs in the chapter making the same points, but the highly readable prose drives the reader’s curiosity promised in the preface (p. 15).
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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 | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.012 |
| 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".