Jaunts, Jottings, and Jetsam in Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
A pageant of curiosities and dynamic images inhabits the margins of manuscripts, sometimes ornamenting, sometimes competing, sometimes commenting on the text they surround. They are a commonplace of codicological study, even more so since the publication of Lilian Randall's Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts in 1966 and of Michael Camille's Image on the Edge in 1992, which has done much to bring us to understand and interpret this panoply in ink and paint. The images these writers treat, of course, are late, and it is the more rich and entertaining margins that command the attention, such as the copulating figures in the top margin of a book of hours (New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, M. 754, f. 65v), or the Christ-like figure showing forth his buttocks to a spear-wielding, monkey-like creature mounted on an ostrich in the Rutland Psalter (London, British Library, Additional 62,925, ff. 66v-67r). The margins of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts seem, by comparison, rather barren fields. There are certainly some notable exceptions, such as the illustrations in the Bury St Edmunds Psalter (Rome, Vatican Library, MS Reg. lat. 12), or perhaps those in the Exeter Book (Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3501, ff. 78r, 87v, 123r). But in truth, such examples are few in number and rather sober occasions in any case, lacking the spirited, immensely entertaining, and often surprising creations that fill the margins of later manuscripts. But if the Anglo-Saxons possessed vastly different conceptions of space, margins, and response to text than later generations, we nevertheless often find in their manuscripts a quiet, typically hidden or overlooked world of text and image entered into manuscripts by Anglo-Saxon and later users of these codices.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 it