'My Breasts Sear'd': The Self-Starved Female Body and A Woman Killed with Kindness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603), Anne Frankford responds to her husband’s punishment of her adultery by choosing to starve herself to death. Female self-starvation was associated in the medieval period with spiritual transcendence and saintliness, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries with domestic piety and wifely virtue, and by the end of the seventeenth century with medical pathology. This article recognizes the spiritual and material implications of Anne’s fasting; it also, however, associates her self-starvation with the monomastectomy attributed to Amazons who figure importantly in Heywood’s Gunaikeion and Exemplary Lives . Anne’s starvation, we argue, is a withdrawal of the power to nourish, and can be understood as a response to the social significance of food and eating as a form of control in the patriarchal economy of the early modern household. Further, the active agency and corporeality of Anne’s suffering replaces the passivity of her earlier representation in the play as a template for fallen female virtue.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".