RICHARD MOLL, Before Malory: Reading Arthur in Later Medieval England. Pp. x + 368. Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 2003. 40.00 (ISBN 0 8020 3722 4)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
THE subject of Richard Moll's book is the interface and interaction between romance and chronicle narratives of Arthur's reign in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England. Its starting-point is that the framing chronicle narrative of Arthur's reign, drawn ultimately from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britannie, was at least as familiar to English readers at this time as the romance accounts, though since the nineteenth century the romances have attracted far more scholarly and popular attention than the chronicles. Before Malory re-examines selected texts, both romances and chronicles, which locate themselves in the Arthurian chronicle frame. Some of these texts are familiar (the alliterative Morte Arthure, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Awntyrs off Arthure), some less well-known (Robert Mannyng and John Hardyng's chronicles), and some have been all but ignored by modern literary scholars (Sir Thomas Gray's Scalacronica, the patchwork of chronicles in London, College of Arms, MS Arundel 58). In examining each of these, Moll manages to tease out a common thread that runs through them all: an awareness of a real distinction between the Arthurian material in the chronicles, and that in the romances. Throughout, Moll illustrates how, even as the authors and compilers of these works are continually tempted to incorporate romance material into the chronicle narrative, they strive to maintain a distinction between literary fiction and what is felt to be historical fact.
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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.026 | 0.006 |
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".