ALASTAIR MINNIS and IAN JOHNSON (eds), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 2, The Middle Ages. Pp. xvi + 865. Cambridge, New York, Oakleigh: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 100.00 (ISBN 0 521 30007 X).
Bibliographic record
Abstract
THIS tome comprises one volume of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, an ambitious project that seeks to provide an account of literary thought from its origins in antiquity through the twentieth century. Perhaps this task is more difficult in the present volume than in any of the others for, unlike classical Greece and Rome on the one hand, and Renaissance Europe on the other, the medieval West did not have anything like a sustained, continuous history of literature, much less of literary criticism and theory. This difficulty is compounded by the editors’ mandate to produce a volume spanning the entire period from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries (4); to their credit, Minnis and Johnson are mindful of the complications that necessarily arise from this constraint. They acknowledge that their accomplishment is a ‘compromise’ (3), reflecting not only the difficulties of producing a single volume with such broad chronological and geographic coverage, but also the added challenge posed by the Cambridge series’ directive to exclude any detailed consideration of ‘theology’ (4) from the volume – that is, to sharply curtail discussion of what was without doubt the central focus of literary criticism as it was practiced during the Middle Ages: namely, the ‘sacred page’ of scripture.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.036 | 0.022 |
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".