Witches and Familiars. The discourse of witchcraft in Jacobean England
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the Middle Ages, witchcraft had been a matter of concern for most Europeans.However, English legislation was relatively tolerant compared to the rest of the continent.In fact, from the 16 th century onwards, there was a gradual shift from ecclesiastical to secular courts, which meant that it was usually Justices who supervised the whole examination process of presumed witches not members of the Church.But the arrival of James VI of Scotland at the English throne in 1603 meant a shift towards harsher policies concerning witches.The monarch had a wide knowledge about continental literature on the topic -he had even published his Daemonologie (1597) where he presented his arguments for the existence of witches-and was already familiar with witchcraft processes.New legislation was passed and the king would use all the means at his disposal to spread his ideas, which owed a lot to continental theory.But his influence was perceived not only in judicial aspects but also in the growing number of literature works which dealt with the subject.This paper aims at analysing how witchcraft processes were staged in the early Jacobean theatre, how not only pamphlets but also theatre plays had a part in what Clifford Geertz called "control mechanisms for the governing of behaviour."During the Elizabethan period, the theatre was an effective means of controlling the masses, of imposing the values the ruling class wanted to spread, and James I was fully aware of that and used it to his advantage.The Witch of Edmonton, written in 1621, echoes the well-known case of the conviction of Elizabeth Sawyer and presents its audience with a more detailed account than that of Henry Goodcole's pamphlet on the trial and eventual execution of the convicted witch.I shall also analyse how both pieces of writing were used to build up the dominant discourse on witchcraft, a discourse which was shaped by the power institutions.This paper will particularly focus on the description of Sawyer's dog and how it reflects the official position on the keeping of familiars, which under the 1604 Act had become an offence in the English jurisdiction.
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it