Bibliographic record
Abstract
Fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century English bindings have never been of as much interest to binding scholars as have twelfth- and thirteenth-century English Romanesque stamped bindings or the stamped, tanned leather covers that were placed on books from 1450 forward. This is largely because, to quote Mirjam Foot, ‘in the first three quarters of the [twentieth] century, the history of bookbinding was virtually synonymous with the history of binding decoration’. Very few treasure or embroidered bindings from the Middle Ages survive, and stamped bindings (covers impressed with hot metal stamps or rules) are as ‘decorative’ as most medieval bindings get. Books of fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century England get short shrift because they are rarely stamped. They are often covered in plain, alum-tawed skin; and the only decorative flourishes they bear that might interest a student of ‘decoration’ appear on metal clasps, catch-plates and catch-pins, and the silk stitching of compound endbands which survive with even less frequency than old boards or covers. The prevailing view of late medieval English bookbinding is therefore still that of G. D. Hobson (in 1929): it ‘left hardly anything of any interest to the student of bindings’. The purpose of this chapter is to offer an alternative view. The period 1350–1500 has a great deal to offer students of books who are interested in their covers as well as their contents. Even the paucity of evidence noted by Hobson deserves further thought. Consider, for example, the impact of sixteenth-century changes to library furnishings.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.506 | 0.303 |
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".