KATHRYN KERBY-FULTON, MAIDIE HILMO and LINDA OLSON (eds). Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The title of this book is a gentle pun; the authors’ purpose is to display the rich scholarly opportunities of medieval manuscripts—opening up the books—and to open up the field of codicology to readers outside of the small community of manuscript specialists. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Maidie Hilmo and Linda Olson present a full articulation of codicology as a theory and a methodology for understanding medieval literature, explaining the multidisciplinary field that encompasses ‘literary history, art history, textual criticism, dialect study, reception study, and the physical and social history of the book’ in a dynamic presentation (p. xvi). They are especially focused on codicology as a pedagogical opportunity for teaching medieval literature; for undergraduate teachers like myself who have struggled to bring codicology into the classroom, this book is a gift. Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts presents a considerable amount of specialist information in simple terms without being condescending. The writing is spritely and accessible, with comfortable use of vernacular expressions that warm the academic voice. With the undergraduate reader in mind, the book takes time to explain the very basics; things like the use of the extra ‘e’ in Middle English dialects (which mystifies new scholars) are explained in a natural and clear fashion. The authors present a choice of texts that accommodate standard curricula (canonical texts like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Harley 2253) but they also push against common assumptions of medieval literate culture by including discussions of more marginal texts like the Findern Manuscript, with its high proportion of female participants. This challenges monolithic views of medieval English literature as being strictly male, clerical, aristocratic or even (in the case of multilingual manuscripts) purely English.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".