Senses and Capital Punishment: The Execution Preaching of Juan Gascó, 1787–1801
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Public executions in early modern Europe were shocking spectacles designed to impress the crowds who witnessed them. They were a manifestation of justice and the power of the state and had an exemplary purpose, so they were conceived as performances with a theatrical dimension that sought to stimulate the senses of the public. As far as the prisoners were concerned, they were expected to accept their collective fate and not to panic during the ritual of punishment, and thus to die a good death. They could only achieve this by trying to suspend their senses and thereby cushion the impact of the spectacle of which they were the protagonists. Comforters and priests were in charge of helping and preparing prisoners in the hours leading up to the execution. In seeking to understand this tension between stimulation and inhibition of the senses, this article analyzes an extraordinary unpublished source on public executions in Valencia at the end of the eighteenth century: the sermons and exhortations of the priest Juan Gascó, who assisted those condemned to death in the city between 1787 and 1801.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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.
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".