Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite resistance from historians and literary critics, two narratives continue to hold sway in many accounts of the Protestant state’s rise in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. The first, associated with recusant and high Tory nostalgia for a hierarchical Middle Ages, sees the Reformation as the moment when “a rich and comforting consciousness of communal identity” passed away and something more like modern pluralism began to emerge. The second, associated with equally influential Whig narratives of liberation and progress, reverses that story and sees the Reformation in more salutary terms, as the moment when the individual first broke free from the church and became a significant actor on the world stage. This study tells a different story. It looks at the way several writers, including Skelton, Tyndale, Spenser, and Milton, responded to one of their period’s most pressing issues—sectarianism—by positing an “aesthetic community” that binds citizens together not with external laws and institutions, but with a deeper, more internal form of authority that reconciles liberty with community. For these writers, the broad cultural changes brought about by the Reformation, changes that centered on tensions that emerged throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries between the institutional authorities of the church and state, on the one hand, and the individual conscience, on the other, required the deployment of new forms of authority that could unite an increasingly divided populace. Chapters consider Skelton’s invocation of his divinely inspired authority as a poet as a way to defend the Catholic consensus fidelium; Tyndale’s fantasy of a spontaneous, affective consensus that would unite the commonwealth in love; Spenser’s moderate vision of a “provisional” consensus that would acknowledge the fictional nature of all common norms; and Milton’s aesthetics of liberty, which aims to reconcile his countervailing desires for liberty and belonging. The result is not only a prehistory of eighteenth-century aesthetics, particularly as it relates to what Terry Eagleton has called “a dream of reconciliation – of individuals woven into intimate unity with no detriment to their specificity,” but also an account of some of England’s earliest responses to the quintessentially modern problem of pluralism.
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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 | 0.013 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.061 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".