Bibliographic record
Abstract
There have been few more polarizing figures in early modern religious history than Jacob Boehme (b. c. 1575–d. 1624). He has been regarded as a divinely illuminated genius by his most devoted disciples yet also reviled in equal measure by his fiercest critics as an incomprehensible, ignorant heretic. According to the reckoning of his first biographer, Boehme was the author of thirty works, many of which are extremely long and difficult. These were all written in German, although several have Latin titles. Whether by choice or circumstance, some writings remained unfinished. Remarkably, very little has been lost with the exception of some minor treatises. In addition, much of Boehme’s extensive correspondence survives. A Lutheran by birth, by formative religious instruction and steadfastly at his death, Boehme’s major theological concerns were with the nature of creation and how it came into being, the origin and presence of evil, and the attainment of salvation through a process of inward spiritual regeneration and rebirth. Nonetheless, influenced initially by the teachings of Paracelsus and the Spiritual Reformers Caspar Schwenckfeld and Valentin Weigel, as well as by popular alchemical and astrological texts, and then, following the clandestine circulation of his first incomplete book “Aurora” in manuscript, a widening social network of friends, learned correspondents, and noble patrons, Boehme began developing certain heretical views. These included his understanding of the Trinity, which he was accused of denying through the introduction of a fourth figure, Sophia (symbolizing the Noble Virgin of Divine Wisdom); his explanations for the fall of Lucifer and the rebel angels (constituting a first fall preceding the second fall of humanity from paradise); Adam’s prelapsarian androgynous nature; the existence of seven qualities (dry, sweet, bitter, fire, love, sound, and corpus); and the three principles that corresponded to the dark world, light world, and our temporal visible world. Moreover, having settled and established himself as a shoemaker at Görlitz in Upper Lusatia, and writing against a backdrop of vibrant scientific, astronomical, and medical enquiry; damaging regional political struggles, religious polemic, apocalyptic speculation; and the earliest phase of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), Boehme interposed himself—ignorantly and presumptuously according to his better-educated critics—in important doctrinal debates over the nature of free will and the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper by expounding an irenic, anticlerical message. This culminated in his announcement of an impending Great Reformation, a new age of love, patience, peace, and joy.
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 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 | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.306 | 0.166 |
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".