Noisy Soundscapes: Women's Institutions, Sound, and the Body in Early Modern Florence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines soundscapes in and around women’s residential institutions in sixteenth and seventeenth century Florence (1537-1670). Over these two centuries, an unprecedented number of girls and women entered or were entered into a variety of convents, charity homes, and reform houses. Religious and civic institutions expanded rapidly in both number and size, and adopted increasingly strict rules of enclosure. Racket, clatter, silence, and the quotidian sounds of sociability took on profound significance in these spaces. Using institutional manuals, criminal records, letters, and legislative records, this project uncovers the sounds that continually flowed in and out of Florence’s many enclosures from women, linking these communities to the larger city. While other studies have examined material practices of enclosure in the early modern period, immaterial practices of enclosure have been largely unstudied. Yet, the ephemeral senses fundamentally patterned how thousands of girls and women experienced institutionalization. This project offers new insight into the institutional shifts that marked the early modern period, showing how a sonic boundary increasingly characterized institutionalization. An early modern emphasis on the power and potency of sound found expression on multiple fronts. Medical, health, and spiritual literature discussed the impact of sound on the environment, body, and soul in detail. Tridentine period religious reforms increasingly advocated the importance of careful listening and sonic decorum. In Florence, the centralizing Medici Duchy and Grand Duchy crafted a corpus of sonic legislation that aimed to discipline space, sound, and sociability. Women’s institutions were pivot points around which these combined sonic cultures turned. Rather than focusing on one particular type of institution, this project examines a range of lay and monastic enclosures that housed diverse girls and women from across the socio-economic spectrum. Moreover, my analysis focuses on the sonic interactions that connected institutionalized girls and women to the various Florentines who lived, lingered, and laboured near their enclosures, challenging early modern discourses of "public" and "private". These groups include women sex workers, rowdy male youths, aggressive men, gamblers and game-players. This project positions institutionalized girls and women at the centre of the early modern Florentine soundscape, showing how the rapid expansion of women’s institutions fundamentally shaped urban socio-sonic experience.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".