SAMUEL FANOUS and HENRIETTA LEYSER (eds), Christina of Markyate: A Twelfth-Century Holy Woman
Bibliographic record
Abstract
CHRISTINA OF MARKYATE, A TWELFTH-CENTURY HOLY WOMAN, makes an important contribution to our understanding of options available to an English woman who felt called to serve God in the early years following the Conquest. As Henrietta Leyser points out in the introduction to this rich collection of essays, during Christina's lifetime (c.1096–c.1160) ‘opportunities for women to lead the religious life increased dramatically’; between 1130 and 1165 more than eighty-five new communities for women were founded. Indeed, it was in this century that Gilbert of Sempringham, initially at the request of seven women, was to found an order; and, not long after, three sisters wishing to become anchoresses asked their confessor to provide them with a guide or rule. The resulting Ancrene Wisse, or Ancrene Riwle, circulated in English, French, and Latin up to the Dissolution. Less well known until the edition of C. H. Talbot in 1959 (rpt. 1987) is the Vita of Christina by an anonymous monk of St Albans, and even then, as Douglas Gray observes in his consideration of the work's literary background, historians of spirituality have given it more attention than students of literature. In attempting to situate the Vita in terms of genre, Gray demonstrates how the work crosses literary boundaries. Especially intriguing in this regard is his discussion of the ‘dramatic nature of Christina's experience and visions’, suggesting links with drama of the period. Neil Cartlidge, using the episode of the ‘mysterious vanishing pilgrim’, expands on the idea of dramatic performance in the Vita. He shows how drama, a ‘means of connecting symbols with reality’, provides a way of conveying simultaneously the actuality of events and ‘the significances that they disguise’, and he points out that, in insisting on the literal re-enactment of biblical events, Christina's Vita foreshadows the later medieval mystical tradition of imagined presence, culminating in figures such as Margery Kempe and her participation in the Nativity or Crucifixion.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.048 | 0.010 |
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".