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Record W4412122198 · doi:10.33137/rr.v48i1-2.45703

Alternative Relics? The Sensory Powers of the Criminal Corpse

2025· article· en· W4412122198 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Una McIlvenna

Bibliographic record

VenueRenaissance and Reformation · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicHistory of Medicine Studies
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSensory systemAestheticsArtCriminologyHistoryPsychologyNeuroscience

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Across early modern and nineteenth-century Europe it was widely believed that the corpses of executed criminals had thaumaturgical powers that could miraculously cure a range of illnesses if they were touched or ingested. This article looks at how touch was the key sense involved in how the magical powers of the corpses of the condemned could transfer to the living. It argues that these beliefs were linked to a much older belief in relics, which also require physical proximity in order to function effectively. It explores the different traditions around the use of these body parts across Europe, arguing that variations in practices were centred on differing methods of execution in different regions rather than on varying religious beliefs.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.834
Threshold uncertainty score0.313

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.026
GPT teacher head0.249
Teacher spread0.222 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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