Second nature : custom, calendars, and Tudor literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation studies the representation of calendars and the idea of custom in Tudor English literature. Social historians have demonstrated that the early modern English calendar was anything but stable, and that the nature of days and their observances was often hotly disputed. This is a study of how authors of literature reflected and produced calendar consciousness in the face of changing systems of time reckoning. I focus upon texts which explore alternative models of social time: Thomas More's Utopia, Edmund Spenser's Shepheardes Calender and Faerie Queene, William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and a cluster of texts published in 1603. These works share the recognition that calendars are at least as much the product of custom as they are of nature, and are therefore potentially open to social adaptation and political appropriation. The idea of custom as "second nature" is both an object of study in the dissertation and provides its general methodology and theoretical orientation. In early modern usage, "custom" could refer to much of what we might call both "ideology" and "culture." In its most general sense, however, custom simply referred to individual habit and social praxis, and was one means by which particular activities could be politically legitimated. My goal is to demonstrate what many early modern authors recognized: that a calendar is both a product of custom and a framework within which social behaviour is produced. When confronted with other systems of temporal organization, authors were encouraged to reflect upon their own, and to consider the possibilities in alternative social orders.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".