New Formalism and the Forms of Middle English Literary Texts
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Recent work in Middle English literature addresses the emerging relationship between formal analysis and book history. This article, emerging from the 2009 Conference on Editorial Problems in Toronto, seeks to clarify the way in which formalist approaches intersect with trends in English literary manuscript studies. How, we ask, can the lively field of book history take new direction through contact with the ‘new formalisms’ articulated in literary studies? More precisely, how does the form of the medieval book produce literary meaning in a distinctive and historicizable manner? We explore critical approaches to the formal features of medieval manuscripts, addressing medieval and modern theories of the book’s form, the relationship between written and oral forms of texts, the dialect of scribes, authorial composition of manuscripts, scribal corrections, the layout and illustration, and the binding of the codex. We suggest that close readings of manuscript form can shed light on aspects of texts obscured by the printing technology and formatting changes of modern editions. Furthermore, we point to new avenues for contextualizing the book within late medieval literary culture.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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