Reading witches, reading women : late Tudor and early Stuart texts.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The introduction discusses the problematics involved in developing a feminist \ntheory of late Renaissance and early modem witchcraft. It includes an overview of \nboth Renaissance feminist theory and witchcraft studies, and posits that the witch is a \nhybrid, multivalent figure. Chapter one examines contemporary sources for \nportrayals of witches. The second chapter analyses the roles of witches, hags, and \nviragos in The Facrie Queene. Throughout the work their femininity is \nproblematised, its meaning displaced onto horrific figures or fragmented into "good" \nand "bad" women. Both inspire dis-ease. Lyly's Endimion introduces a witch in the \nThessalian tradition and women whose transgressions lie in daring to act and speak. \nChapter three expands the definition of witch to other unruly women, including the \nshrew and the power-wielding woman; it also proves that Dipsas' power is the \nstrongest in the play. Chapter four analyses the way in which the definition of \nwitcheraft can be imposed on a woman by exterior societal forces, with reference to \nThe Witch of Edmonton. Also discussed are the role of cursing and the \nproblematics of female sexuality. \nChapters five through eight discuss Shakespeare. Shakespeare's Joan of Arc is \nfragmented and reflects the varying views about her, and again shows how one \nwoman may be variously defined. With Joan's death, Margaret of Anjou becomes the \nvirile woman in the tetralogy. She and other women who share her verbal potency are \ncondemned not only by the men in the plays but also by critics who erroneously take \nthe negative view as definitive. Macbeth concerns itself with exploration of gender, \nandrogyny, power (occult and otherwise) and its betrayal. Chapter eight outlines how \nthe women in other Shakespearean plays do not achieve dramatic impact as witches \nbecause they are robbed of primary agency in the plays. \nChapter nine demonstrates how Middleton distances his Heccat and proves \nthat the real witches and villains lie in the structure of the patriarchy of The Witch. \nLyly combines cunning woman with Sibyl in Mother Bombie; wit defines wisdom. \nChapter eleven presents The Wise-Woman of Hogsdon, an anomaly in that the witchfigure \nand unruly characters of both sexes are not condemned and have happy \nresolutions. The conclusion summarises briefly and outlines areas of further study. \nAppendix A is a table; Appendix B outlines the role of cursing as gendered speech in \nShakespeare's first tetralogy.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.002 |
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".