Two Possible Sources for Chaucer's Description of the Pardoner
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
AULUS GELLIUS (b.c. ce125),1 in Book 3 of the Attic Nights, relates the following observation made by Sallust in The War with Catiline: ‘Avarice implies a desire for money, which no wise man covets; steeped as it were with noxious poisons, it renders the most manly body and soul effeminate …’2 The relevance of this observation to Chaucer's description of the Pardoner is apparent. At least since W. C. Curry's analysis, critics have associated the word ‘mare’ in the narrator's speculation, ‘I trowe he were a geldyng or a mare’ (I.691), with the possibility of effeminacy.3 Jill Mann observed a connection between the label ‘mare’ and the description of homosexual men as effeminate in a poem by Walter de Chatillôn.4 Monica McAlpine opines, in an article that has become the standard point of reference on the subject, that ‘ “Mare” must be a term commonly used in Chaucer's day to designate a male person who, though not necessarily sterile or impotent, exhibits physical traits suggestive of femaleness.’5 While McAlpine argues for the Pardoner's homosexuality, she acknowledges that effeminacy need not imply homosexuality and critics have continued to debate the implications of the description.6 Richard Firth Green, for instance, has argued that effeminacy is a sign not of impotence or homosexuality but rather of womanizing.7
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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 | 0.000 | 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 it