Being Moved: Louis XIV’s Triumphant Tenderness and the Protestant Object

This essay examines the place of affect in Le Triomphe de la Religion, a text from 1687 that praises Louis XIV for the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the forced conversion of French Protestants. It explores the role of the material object in this text and contrasts it with seventeenth-century Protestant fears about the seductive power of Catholic objects. Drawing on the work of affect theory, it suggest how attention to the strange relation between emotion and the material object might better illuminate our sense of what it meant to be religiously different in absolutist France

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

La coexistence confessionelle à l’épreuve : Études sur les relations entre protestants et catholiques dans la France moderne, Études réunies par Didier Boisson et Yves Krumenacker, Chrétiens et Sociétés, Documents et Mémoires, n° 9, Édité par l’équipe Religions, Sociétés et Acculturation du Laboratoire de Recherche Historique Rhône-Alpes, 2009, 261 p.

This group of essays is an excellent presentation of current thinking on the question of religious coexistence in France between the sixteenth century and the Revolution. In much recent historical literature, coexistence appears as a corrective to older views of conflict-ridden confessional relations. People of rival faiths seem more tolerant of each other than the older historiography recognized. But in this volume, as Myriam Yardeni puts it in the Introduction, coexistence is not understood..

Les frontières du sacré

This article studies biconfessional communities and families, gender roles, confessional polemics, and conversion narratives, specially through the example of Poitou. The goal is to explain how two religious groups were constructing confessional difference and coexistence. The article offers a conceptualization of three ways confessional boundary was constructed. In the first, the two groups shared concerns and blured confessional identities ; in the second, they maintained their identities clear, but they reach agreements in order to each group could keep their place in the community ; in a third form, religious boundaries were strong and Protestants were pressured to convert