The Scourge and the Cross: Ascetic Mentalities of the Later Middle Ages
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Harsh asceticism, including ritual self-mortification, remains one of the most troubling and least understood aspects of monastic life in the Later Middle Ages. The nuns whose austere lives are celebrated in spiritual biographies and autobiographies in the Order of Preachers were long dismissed by traditional scholars as hysterics or inferior mimics of true mysticism. Some recent feminist studies either gloss over asceticism or portray its practitioners as traumatized victims of patriarchal oppression. Traditionalists and progressives seem to agree: extreme asceticism is best understood as pathetic or even pathological behavior. David Tinsley seeks to temper this view by exploring late-medieval asceticism on its own terms. Building on the work of Caroline Walker Bynum, Peter Dinzelbacher, and Jeffrey Hamburger, Tinsley analyzes the ascetic mentalities of Dominican convent culture in the 14th century, including the sources the nuns read, the famous ascetics they venerated, and their most common rituals and practices. The key question is how these nuns could see self-imposed suffering as so crucial to shaping the questing soul's journey to God.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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