The formation of a pious soul: theology and personhood in Christian Scriver's (1629-1693) Gottholds zufälliger andachten (1667)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Roger Smith has noted that theology has been overlooked within studies looking at early modern contructions of personhood. This thesis looks at the Lutheran pastor Christian Scriver’s (1629-1693) Gottholds zufälliger Andachten (1667), a popular seventeenth-century devotional, in order to investigate the way in which the author utilized his understanding of theology in order to help the people under his spiritual care refashion a sense of both self and identity within the turbulent decades following the Thirty Years’ War. This study challenges current historiographies which either marginalize the place of theology within early modern discussions of personhood and identity, or which treat theology’s contribution as being nothing more than a fostering of a radical affective-interiority. It also complicates the received historiographical caricature of Scriver as an uncritical proponent of Arndtian spirituality. Scriver’s zufälliger Andachten illustrate a rich social and interpersonal conception of what it means to be human, built upon the foundations of a Lutheran theological anthropology. Combined with Scriver’s adaptation of medieval exemplarism, and set within Luther’s reformation of the medieval practice of devotional reading, Scriver’s Andachten offer a useful glimpse into the way in which early modern devotional writings contributed to the creation of confessional identities through a process of what Lance Lazar has called “devotional modeling.” At the same time, I argue for a more thorough engagement with theology among historians as a formative part of early modern cultural discourse.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".