Constructing the Female Subject in Anglo-Norman, Middle English and Medieval Irish Romance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Constructing the Female Subject in Anglo-Norman, Middle English and Medieval Irish Romance Giselle Gos Doctor of Philosophy Centre for Medieval Studies University of Toronto 2012 Abstract Female subjectivity remains a theoretical question in medieval romance, a genre in which the feminine and the female have often been found to exist primarily as foils for the production of masculinity and male identity, the Other against which the masculine hero is defined. Woman’s agency and subjectivity are observed by critics most often in moments of transgression, subversion and resistance: as objects exchanged between men and signs of masculine prestige, female characters carve out their subjectivity, agency and identity in spite of, rather than with the support of, the ideological formations of romance. The following study makes a case for the existence of a female subject in medieval romance, analogous to the oft-examined male subject, a subject in both senses of the term: subjected to the dominant ideology, the subject is also enabled in its agency and authority by that ideology. I combine a feminist poststructuralist approach to discourse analysis with a comparative methodology, juxtaposing related romance texts in Anglo-Norman, Middle English and Medieval Irish under the premise that stress-points in ideological structures must be renegotiated when stories are revised and recast for new audiences. The principal texts considered are Roman de Horn, King Horn, Horn Childe and the Maiden Rimnild; Gamair’s Haveloc episode, Lai d’Haveloc, Havelok the Dane; Gui de Warewic, Guy of Warwick, The Irish Lives of Guy of Warwick and Bevis of Hampton; The Adventures of Art, Son of Conn, Mongán’s Love for Dubh Lacha. Through close attention to textual change over time, a profound shift can be seen in the emergence of female characters which cease to be symbols, signs and objects but through a variety of discourses and narrative strategies are established as subjects in their own right.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".