‘To oppose to those deceived deceivers.’ On the nature of evil in the Jacobean play The Witch of Edmonton
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With the example of The Witch of Edmonton, a play written by T. Dekker, J. Ford, and W. Rowley in 1621, the article considers the perception of the nature of evil in early modern history. This religious domestic tragedy comprises two plotlines that, while sharing common motifs, receive contrasting resolutions and show, therefore, that the Devil’s triumph is always conditional of the individual’s complicity. Unlike the witch-themed pamphlets of the day, the dramatists portray unbearable living conditions suffered by certain social groups, patriarchy, and economic leverages as the true drivers of crime. The study aims to identify how the play succeeds in combining various answers to the question about the nature of evil. To do so, the author analyzes the variance of motifs, the ambivalence of the canine familiar, and equivocation as a literary device that actualizes the motif of deception. The article demonstrates the link between the problems of the play and Hobbes’ theory of social-political determination. It also dwells on the ideas that dictate the semantic structure of Jacobean demonology: man’s identification with the Devil, original sin, the corrupted nature of humanity, the perception of difference as strange and unfamiliar, and free will.
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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".