Masks, Marriage and the Byzantine Mandylion: Classical Inversions in the Tenth Century. Narratio de translatione Constantinopolim imaginis Edessenae
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the theatrical and matrimonial allusions in the tenthcentury hagiography of the Byzantine touch-relic of Christ: the Mandylion. The legend of the Mandylion was said to have been created when Christ washed his face and left a likeness of his face on the cloth with which he dried himself. It became immensely popular in the Byzantine and East Christian worlds, and it stood for God's protection of his new chosen people, for his imminence in the material world, and for a divine ratification of Christian figural art. This article argues that the Mandylion's arrival at Edessa and its reception in the king's chamber invests the face of Christ with powerful possibilities of real union with God. Those possibilities were expressed in terms educated Byzantines could have recognized, visceral inversions of the classical past and of the Christian present. Not only were the possibilities recognizable, but they also underscored the legitimacy of sole rule by Constantine VII through parallels to the first Christian king, Abgar of Edessa.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".