God's Co-Workers and Powerful Tools: A Study of the Sources of Alfred's Building Metaphor in his Old English Translation of Augustine's Soliloquies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
KING ALFRED's Old English translation of Augustine's Soliloquies is included in his undisputed works, along with his translations of the first fifty Psalms, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, and Gregory's Cura pastoralis. Among these four, the Soliloquies is perhaps the least thoroughly examined, despite the fact that Alfred makes substantial alterations to Augustine's text. Among these changes are several intriguing additions of a metaphorical nature, including the addition of a preface in which he develops a building metaphor which is at once detailed and memorable. In this paper I would like to discuss potential sources for the imagery in the Preface. The Old English Soliloquies survives complete in only one manuscript, British Library, Cotton Vitellius A.xv. The Soliloquies occupies fos 4a through 59b1 of the portion of the manuscript called the Southwick Codex, a collection which also includes the Old English Gospel of Nicodemus, the debate of Solomon and Saturn, and a sermon on Saint Quentin, and is dated to the second quarter of the twelfth century.2 An extract of Alfred's Soliloquies, consisting of a transcript of two sections of the prayer in Book I, is also extant in Cotton MS Tiberius A.iii, fos 50v–51v, important in spite of its fragmentary nature because of its mid-eleventh-century date, perhaps a century earlier than the complete version, and useful therefore in determining the accuracy of readings of this section of the Vitellius manuscript.3
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".