The Physics of Holy Oats: Vernacular Knowledge, Qualities, and Remedy in Fifteenth-Century England
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent work in historical philosophy on the Aristotelian concept of qualities — that is, hot, cold, wet, and dry, the fundamental causal agents of the natural world — offers a moment to reconsider the connections between medicine, religion, and natural philosophy in late medieval England. Though hidden and obscure to most modern scholars, how qualities operated in contemporary remedies, such as those for horses suffering from founder, raises questions about the nature of vernacular knowledge of philosophical and theological concepts and their relation to lived everyday life. We not only find connections between grace and physics, but that knowledge of the physics of qualities brings considerable nuance to why men and women used holy words, objects, and actions as ingredients in cures. Standing alongside the extensive scholarship on magic and the supernatural, this article illustrates how understandings of qualities were central to the contestations over rationality and vernacularity in fifteenth-century culture.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it