The <i>dit amoureux</i> An Essay on <i>The Kingis Quair</i> and <i>The Testament of Cresseid</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although less pervasive in Scotland than in England, and with major Scottish writing coming under a strong English influence, French maintained its presence and its seminal impact on literature in the Scots vernacular, in both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This is especially true for what is, arguably, the most important single genre in late medieval Scotland, high courtly narrative — what C. S. Lewis called the allegory of love. Late medieval Scottish poetry can benefit from renewed scrutiny in light of the analogous French tradition of the dit amoureux (tale of love).In this article, I hope to situate Scottish books in a larger intertextual context, one that is international and European. Instead of the microanalysis of Scots texts and their French sources, this essay is concerned primarily with the broader issues of genre, mode, structure, and style. The first two major tales of love in the grand manner in Scots are The Kingis Quair, attributed to James Stewart (King James I), and The Testament of Cresseid by Robert Henryson. These two poems relate to Chaucer, of course, but also to well-known works by Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, and, in Henryson’s case, Alain Chartier. They are admirable test cases demonstrating how greater attention to the French can help situate James’s and Henryson’s texts in their cultural milieu and also help account for their extraordinary complexity and maturity as works of art.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".