Cosas y cartas: Scribal Production and Material Pathways in Jesuit Global Communication (1547–1573)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article analyzes some of the social mechanisms and material processes involved in Jesuit global communication in the first decades of the Society’s history. The exchange of administrative correspondence, news-sheets (quadrimestres), and edifying letters from the overseas missions was coordinated by the Society’s Roman secretary, Juan Alfonso de Polanco. Communication made significant material demands on both Rome and key transmission nodes on the Jesuit network. In 1560, a decentralized system of scribal production of news and letters was established. Particular pressure was placed on Lisbon, a crucial communications hub for exchanges between Jesuits in Europe and the overseas missions. The last part of the article examines the experience of the Jesuit procurator in Lisbon, charged with managing the exchange of documents between Europe and Jesuits in Asia, Africa, and Brazil. The case of Lisbon, though exceptional, reflects many of the everyday realities of Jesuit communication during the Society’s formative period. Several documents are published in an appendix.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".