E.A. JONES and ALEXANDRA WALSHAM (eds). Syon Abbey and its Books: Reading, Writing and Religion, c. 1400-1700.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Syon Abbey was founded in 1415 as part of Henry V's dynastic-legitimacy drive and it survived, remarkably, into the twenty-first century, old age and unreplenished numbers requiring the dispersal of the last few nuns in 2011. This community has long enjoyed a double claim on the attention of historians of literary culture. First, for bequeathing us one of the largest and most thorough library catalogues surviving from pre-Reformation England. (This is the registrum of the brothers’ library: like other houses of the Bridgettine order, Syon was originally a double monastery, comprising separate enclosed communities of men and women, with separate libraries.) Second, for preserving intact the library collection amassed during the community's long period of post-Reformation exile (spent mostly in Lisbon, where the community was increasingly, and after 1695 exclusively, a female one). Now housed at the University of Exeter, this collection stands as one of our major resources for research into the mental world of the early modern English monasteries-in-exile; it also allows us, as Caroline Bowden says in her contribution to this volume, to reconstruct the Lisbon nuns’ activities ‘as buyers, recipients of donations, librarians, readers, annotators, performers of texts, listeners, donors, translators, compilers and editors, authors, patrons, dedicatees, subjects, repairers and copyists of the books in their collection’ (p. 180).
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.132 | 0.078 |
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".