A Rogationtide Sermon from Eleventh-Century Salisbury
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article edits, translates, and discusses a unique sermon for Rogationtide surviving only in London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius C. i, a pontifical written in several stages in Germany and England in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. The section of the manuscript containing this sermon was probably written at Salisbury in the final quarter of the eleventh century during the pontificate of Bishop Osmund of Salisbury (1078-99). To situate this sermon in relation to the broad tradition of Rogationtide preaching, this article surveys the main themes and conventions of early Rogationtide sermons from Avitus onward. The Salisbury sermon fits into this tradition well by referring explicitly to the act of processing behind the cross and by narrating the two most popular foundation legends for Rogationtide, namely the biblical story of the Ninevite fast and the true story of Mamertus of Vienne’s invention of the feast in the 470s. The Salisbury sermon presents an unusually violent and exaggerated account of the chaos that resulted from the Vienne earthquake which prompted Bishop Mamertus to establish Rogationtide, and it is apparently unique in claiming that these disasters occurred not only in Gaul but also in Italy. Some details in the sermon’s account of the earthquake suggest that its author was relying on a discussion of Rogationtide found in some manuscripts of the liturgical commentary known as the Liber quare. Also unique to this sermon is its discussion of Mary Magdalene and the thief on the cross as biblical types of the ideal penitent, two themes found in no other extant Rogationtide sermon.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".