The Good Women of Peterhouse: Patriarchal Community, Femininity and University Reform
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article reads a Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Company stained glass window in light of Victorian reforms extending university education to women. Designed by Edward Burne-Jones and installed in the Senior Combination Room of Peterhouse College in 1870, the window boasts six stained glass panels that together illustrate twelve characters from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women. I argue that the beautiful, passive, idealized women the panels represent constitute a discursive response to the social and cultural anxieties raised by the emerging figure of the girl-under-graduate, who was widely understood to threaten the patriarchal structure of the academy. Comparing Chaucer’s poem to Burne-Jones’ design, I contend that both poet and artist defined ideal femininity as an expression of masculine mastery, and a ‘good woman’ as compliant to male authority in love and life. I then frame the ‘goodness’ of the window’s figures within the contemporary discourses levelled against female undergraduate students. Taking surviving archival evidence into account, I interpret the decision to include the window’s visual illustration and material incarnation of fragile femininity within the cloistered, homosocial space of the Combination Room as a defensive one, intended to bolster a masculine community that feared itself besieged by power-hungry women.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".