“Voices on China in Early Nineteenth-Century Italian Culture (1800-1850)”, in Global Perspectives in Modern Italian Culture. Knowledge and Representation of the World in Italy from the Sixteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century, edited by Guido Abbattista (Abingdon, Oxon, New York, NY: Routledge, 2021), forthcoming 13 August 2021 (see Routledge website
Bibliographic record
Abstract
From the last quarter of the eighteenth century onwards, the testimonies of and studies on China grew in number in Europe and gave rise to a rich repertoire of historical, travel, memoir, scholarly and diplomatic literature of increasing importance. This surge in information on, communication with and representation of the Chinese world within European opinion continued to intensify at the beginning of the nineteenth century, revealing mainly critical attitudes towards China. This was in contrast with the way, in the seventeenth century and into the middle of the eighteenth, China had been the object of admiration and even of idealization in Europe. How did Italy, from the second half of the eighteenth century, participate in this great European debate over China? The existing literature investigated some eighteenth-century figures but without reconstructing in any comprehensive way the sources and channels through which Italian culture developed an image of China, in a dialogue with European culture. This essay analyses the way in which Italian culture participated in this European debate, focusing on authors and works from the beginning of the nineteenth century, little considered so far for the reconstruction of this chapter in the history of Italian culture. Early nineteenth-century Italian culture expressed a lively interest in China with various publishing initiatives of a different nature and character. This essay takes into consideration some of these publications, notably those by Giulio Ferrario, Cesare Cantù, Davide Bertolotti, Giuseppe La Farina, Giandomenico Romagnosi and Onorato Martucci. They allow us to follow the evolution of the vision of China proposed to the Italian reader in the period prior to the appearance of Carlo Cattaneo’s and Giuseppe Ferrari’s important writings on China, respectively in 1861 in 1865. This contribution is intended to show not just the lively interest towards Chinese history and civilization in Italian culture, in relationship with the most advanced European knowledge on the subject, but also the persistence of the Enlightenment legacy and its contribution to the development of a true global perspective
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".