Bibliographic record
Abstract
The sixth-century Rule of Saint Benedict places a premium on silence and proscribes speaking at various times, including during meals. In keeping with the spirit of this mandate, the monks of Cluny, an extremely wealthy and powerful monastery in southern Burgundy, placed a premium on silence from a very early date. The earliest descriptions of a sign language used at Cluny are recorded in two of the monastery's customaries, compiled during the last quarter of the eleventh century. A host of signals are described, but, tellingly, these lists begin with those for food. There were practical reasons for this, namely mandated silence in the refectory, but it also might evidence the relish with which monks enjoyed their food. Indeed, the translation offered here suggests that the monks ate very well. Because the signals translated here are almost exclusively substantives, it would be nearly impossible to communicate any but the most rudimentary thoughts. That entire conversations were possible by means of gestures is suggested by contemporary criticisms of monks chattering away with hand signals. For our purposes, this would confirm the likely suspicion that the medieval monk enjoyed an even greater variety of foods than indicated here.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".