Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article considers some physical aspects of the medieval pageant wagons used for the York Cycle. Many modern reconstructions have assumed that the pageants played side-on, but this view rests on assumptions derived from modern theatre, medieval two-dimensional art, or the demands of the open campus locations where many modern performances have taken place. Comparative European evidence (drawings of early ommegang wagons, and surviving Spanish pageant wagons) suggests pageants designed as three-dimensional pieces of street architecture, transpicuous wherever possible, and aligned toward the front or the rear. The narrowness of York's streets and practical experiments in 1988 and 1992 at some of the most popular medieval performance places strongly support this model; side-on performance in these places makes it impossible for much of the audience to see the pageants and would sometimes involve placing the property of the stationholder backstage, from where no view would be possible. Medieval pageants were probably higher than most of those used today, with wagon decks five to six feet from ground level and any upper storeys at least eight feet above the lower ones. Large pageants like the Mercers' Doomsday need a total functional height of over twenty feet, excluding spires, pinnacles, etc.; and even this looks modest beside some drawings of ommegang wagons. The larger wagons used a good deal of machinery; study of one type of machine, the functional lift, suggests that it needed grooved pillars, pulleys and a drum winch. Such a machine could be more safely and effectively mounted on an end-facing wagon than a side-facing one. The York wagons were technologically and artistically ambitious, and our modern efforts have yet to match their inventiveness or their flamboyant magnificence.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".