The Problematical (yet Valuable) Correspondence of a Hunted Heretic: The Case of the Dutch Anabaptist and Spiritualist David Joris (c. 1501–1556)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1536 the Dutch Anabaptist David Joris (c. 1501–56) was proclaimed an Anabaptist messiah in the aftermath of Anabaptist Münster. When his and his followers’ apocalyptical expectations failed to materialize in late 1538, Joris fled Delft for Antwerp, then in 1544 he fled again to Basel, where he dissimulated successfully until his death. He also moved away from external fulfillment of prophecy to a fully internalized religiosity. Joris maintained contact with a widely diverse following through his missives, over 1,200 of which have survived in three printed editions from the early seventeenth century and at least one manuscript collection. This article conducts a close reading of a small sample of Joris’s late correspondence and some of his more famous missives to help explain why his letters appealed to readers, despite, or because of, their author’s intentionally obscure “spiritualistic” writing style. They offered a sense of belonging to a spiritual elite who could comprehend the meaning of creation and life. They also reveal much about Joris’s supporters as well as the significant shifts in Joris’s thinking.
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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 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".