The 'Opicius' Poems (British Library, Cotton Vespasian B.iv) and the Humanist Anti-Literature in Early Tudor England
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Following the format of a catalogue manuscript description, this study analyses the design and contents of a manuscript presented to king Henry VII of England about 1492-93. Featuring an epic account of the 1492 English invasion of France and a pastoral dialogue praising the domestic peace imposed by the Tudor regime, the five poems are the work of a little-known Italian writer “Johannes Opicius, “ in a stylishly written and decorated copy. Like other contemporary presentations, especially the works of the early Tudor laureate Bernard Andre”, the verse is as classicizing as the design is Italianate and humanist, innovative features for English literary culture. Like other cognate products, however, Opicius’ performance lacks properties usually associated with literature. The work was not for reading nor for recirculation, owing its inspiration solely to a wish to gratify the monarch. The presentation was chiefly a matter of performing the magnificence of the king.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".