Intersecting instabilities: culture and nature at medieval beginnings, <i>c</i>.400–900
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Europeans’ relations with their natural surroundings were recalibrated during a long, slow breakdown of one dominant culture, the classical Mediterranean, and piecemeal emergence of another, more distinctly European one. The half-millennium from around 400 to 900 ce can be labelled ‘late antiquity’ or called the ‘early Middle Ages’; the names of historical periods depend on where the observer stands and what she looks at. Grasping the processes of early medieval environmental change starts from the breakdown of Roman hegemony in the west. A synergy between cultural and natural variables so affected Mediterranean and northern Europe alike, that notably the archaeological and material evidence marks sharp breaks in relations between people and the land on both sides of the Alps. A simultaneous loss of literate interest in material life effaces historical view of how contemporaries understood this. Then just as some new patterns seem to emerge, historians become able to see more clearly, thanks to a cultural revival, the so-called ‘Carolingian renaissance’, that had little directly to do with environmental relations. The late eighth and ninth century reopened literate access to this world. Even with self-conscious reference to what some thought classical models, powerful and ordinary people were together organizing agroecosystems and landscapes unlike those of the now-vanished classical Mediterranean or its barbarian neighbours.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".