Images of Women in the Sermons of Guillaume Pepin (c.1465-1533)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The stereotype of the misogynistic medieval churchman persists in almost all scholarly assessments of gender attitudes and beliefs in the premodern period. Such sweeping generalizations do little to help us understand attitudes in one particular time and place, or changes over time; studies of individuals allow a more nuanced and richer understanding of male beliefs about women. Sermons in the late Middle Ages exhibit the full range of attitudes about women. In the sermons of Guillaume Pépin (c. 1465-1533), we find the preaching of a man who did not categorize women as the personification of Good or Evil, but talked at length about women and their problems in daily life with sympathy and compassion. The figures he evokes in his sermons are quite often strong, independent-minded women. Comparison with sermons in the mid-sixteenth century shows that many later preachers conform more closely to the stereotype, with the amount of attention given to women in sermons decreasing dramatically and negative descriptions predominating. Language is used much differently, and the resulting images of women are one-dimensional, with the female sex portrayed as subordinate, weak, and silly. These changes can be attributed to a number of factors, including the simplified sermon structure of the post Reformation period, the Reformation and misconceptions about the priesthood of all believers, the attempt to impose Catholic orthodoxy, and an increasing emphasis on the "natural order" of things.
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.
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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".