Bibliographic record
Abstract
The dozen essays in this well-edited volume provide a well-balanced and geographically extensive introduction to the current state of scholarship on the relation between town and country in late medieval and early modern Europe.As that relation is not altogether obvious, however, the essays also summarize a historiography in search of definition: was the connection between town and country principally economic and demographic, or was it cultural and political?The essays indicate connections on each of these axes.The problem of developing a generalizable history of the relation between town and country between 1300 and 1800, therefore, lies not in failing to identify its principal dimensions, but in failing to develop coherent narratives of events that logically lie within them.For while the cultural, economic, and political aspects of that relation were interrelated, they were nevertheless sufficiently independent of each other to support independent chronologies in their own right.A few examples drawn from the essays illustrate the problem.In most of post-medieval Europe, towns were juridically distinguished from the countryside by laws and customs regulating the ownership of real property, the personal status of the inhabitants, and the institutions of local government.The content and the source of these jurisdictional distinctions varied from region to region, as did their medieval and early modern histories.In eastern and in much of central Europe, many urban "freedoms" of this type were eroded by the extension of seigniorial jurisdiction after 1450; in northwest Europe and in parts of Spain and Germany, they were extended to the countryside.This aspect of the relation between town and country, which is clearly connected to the history of personal freedom, is first and foremost a legal history, and is thus usefully studied through chronologies of legal documents and legal categories, which, while varying enormously from place to place, deal with a common set of issues.A related aspect is the varying geometry of local monopolistic rights to carry on specific trades, including the all-important trade of trading itself.The economic efficiencies resulting from concentrating transactions at a single point meant that such activities were initially located in towns.Much of the documentation bearing on the relation between town and country thus concerns disputes over the extent and ownership of such rights.Small towns competed for the right to hold local markets; burghers struggled to keep the exclusive rights of trading and handicrafts for themselves; seigneurs wanted to extend the right to trade and manufacture to rural subjects whose earnings they could tax.The state, where one existed, mediated between these competing demands by granting rights to the highest bidder.The economic logic of such confrontations is obvious and universal.The way it played out historically, however, varied greatly.As with the essentially legal history of personal status, the detailed history of the geometry of market and monopolistic privileges is most coherently written as an independent narrative.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.044 | 0.009 |
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".