Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation presents a new perspective on the function of objects in late-medieval\ndevotional practice through a study of the so-called Soissons group of thirteenth-century French Gothic ivories. These ivory diptychs were sophisticated tools constructed to guide\nthe user through various spiritual exercises that led to prayer. The hitherto unexplained\nincrease in the availability of ivory in mid-thirteenth-century France is accounted for by\nan alteration in the trade routes that brought elephant tusks from the Swahili coast of\nAfrica to northern Europe: a newly-opened passage through the Straits of Gibraltar\nallowed a small amount of luxury goods to be shipped together with bulk materials\nnecessary to the northern textile industries. The increasing supply required a revision of\nthe structure of the thirteenth-century craft of ivory. The Soissons group, the first ivory\ndiptychs fashioned during this time of growth in ivory markets, is subdivided into two\nsections. An itinerant master who traveled throughout the Picard region between 1235\nand 1270 crafted the first group. Concurrently, three separate Parisian artists\nproduced the second group based on a Picard model. This dissertation redates all the\nivories substantially earlier than previously thought, conclusions which were attained\nthrough stylistic analysis. The dense Passion iconography shaped the diptychs’ function\nin private devotion. The narrative encouraged the viewer to practice a number of spiritual\nexercises—reading, memorization and compunction—analogous to the three reasons for\nallowing images in the Christian Church, the triplex ratio. The Passion diptych format\nintroduced with these objects was immensely popular throughout the thirteenth and\nfourteenth centuries and its conservation over time underscored its effectiveness. The\nsmall differences in iconography and composition among the seven Soissons diptychs,\nhowever, were subtle modifications to adjust to different audiences and to hone the\nobjects’ efficacy as tools for prayer.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
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".