Disorienting Orientalism: Finding Saracens in Strange Places in Late Medieval English Manuscripts
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the hybrid Viking-Saracen figure found in several late medieval English works. Drawing on manuscript illumination from works such as John Lydgate's Lives of Saints Edmund and Fremund, alongside a range of medieval romances such as King Horn, Guy of Warwick, “The Man of Law's Tale,” and Gower's “Tale of Constance,” this work explores the traditional literary and artistic connection between the Northern pagans of England's past, and the Eastern Muslim enemies of late medieval Europe. By the end of the fourteenth century, when English was becoming dominant as a language and “Englishness” was gaining in importance, writers such as Chaucer and Gower began to find the traditional parallels between Anglo-Saxon pagans and Saracen Muslims problematic, and questioned why their ancestors converted to Christianity while the Eastern Muslims did not. Throughout the essay, religion, rather than race, emerges as of primary importance for these writers. Such analysis counters the work of recent scholars reading these texts as exemplary of “orientalist” attitudes in the Middle Ages.
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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) | 0.001 | 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