SAMANTHA J. RAYNER. Images of Kingship in Chaucer and his Ricardian Contemporaries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
At the conclusion of Images of Kingship in Chaucer and his Ricardian Contemporaries, Samantha Rayner observes that Ricardian poets (Gower, Langland, the Gawain-Poet and Chaucer) reacted to the challenges of the reign of Richard II by turning away from the king and emphasising instead the importance of self-governance in individuals who were not merely English subjects, but also subjects to the most important ruler of all; that is, God. The conclusion is one which extends the idea of kingship beyond the realm of the political and historical, a necessary move when one considers, as the author acknowledges, that the Ricardian poets were not all uniformly and overtly focused on kings, or indeed on their own king. The ‘kingship of the inner self’ (p. 162) that emerges on the last page of the book offers a thread of coherence for the study, but the individual chapters are sometimes at odds with this final gesture at an overarching argument. Indeed, in the introduction to Images of Kingship, Rayner argues that in concentrating on the individual in society, the Ricardian poets also reveal their attitudes about good and bad kings. In this opening formulation, in other words, the theme of self-rule points to the theme of political rule, reversing the direction implied by the book's conclusion. Yet despite a rather soft focus in the structure of the argument, this study is not without its merits. It is a virtue of the book, for example, that each chapter is at pains to recount in detail the moments in each poem that deal with kingship or its related themes. Readers unfamiliar with the writers or texts explored by Rayner certainly stand to profit from the thematically organised, clearly written summaries contained in each chapter. There are not many surprises in the analyses, but there is a thoroughness which must be acknowledged.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
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".