Representing the Negative: Positing the Lesbian Void in Medieval English Anchoritism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The medieval vocation of included women who dedicated their whole lives to contemplative prayer by dwelling in small cells attached to churches. Ostensibly this provided complete solitude, yet in truth, the women lived in a liminal world of mediated solitude. The Rules for recluses all provided for the existence of at least one female servant who was also partially enclosed. The day-to-day contact with the outside world, the purchase of necessities, and the general upkeep of the household fell to them. Moreover, the anchoritic cell provided something that the majority of medieval households did not have - a private space. This space was specifically female, specifically female-controlled, and specifically eroticized. I suggest that in the early Middle Ages, the anchoritic cell provided the necessary space and conditions necessary to create a void, in which the anchoress could explore woman-woman erotic possibilities. This void was supported not only by the cell's configuration, but also through the religious Rule for anchoresses as well as by medieval theological concepts about lesbian acts. Thus, the two women - anchoress and maid - could create an interior society, presumably one in which class rules were somewhat suspended, and perhaps sexual rules as well.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".