Peter W. M. Blayney: The Stationers' Company and the Printers of London, 1501-1557
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PETER W. M. BLAYNEY The Stationers' Company and the Printers of London, 1501-1557. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 1,300 pp. Monumental: the word that springs most immediately to the tips of a reviewer's fingers upon contemplating the 1,300 pages of Peter Blayney's The Stationers' Company and the Printers of London, 1501-1557. It is certainly an impressively heavy piece of scholarship; the reviewer and the reviews editor had quite a time working out how to get it from Britain to Canada (or, for that matter, across the room). But the word is perhaps the wrong one. A monumental structure has a metonymic relationship to its object: a monument is something grand that commemorates something even grander. This is not quite what Blayney offers here. As he explains in his preface, his intention on starting the project was corrective rather than comprehensive. Finding that Cyprian Blagden's The Stationers' Company: A History, 1403-1959 dismisses nearly two centuries (1357-1553) in just over twelve pages (21-33) in which there is scarcely a paragraph free of factual errors, assumptions, or both (xxi), he set out to provide scholars of the early-modern book with a better history by rereading and reinterpreting every early source he could find. No other scholar could have done this with Blayney's meticulous care or formidable expertise. If the attention to detail and correction of unfounded assumptions comes at the expense of grand narratives, which it sometimes does, this seems a small price to pay for work of reference that will serve so many so well. Blayney's study is, in short, an extraordinary feat of scholarship. He successfully marshals virtually every mention of any printer, Stationer, or other person active in the book trade (xix) whom he has found for the period 1501 to 1557 and builds a host of compelling new arguments about the history of that trade. The first chapter will be particularly edifying for members of the Early Book Society, whose interests lie at the intersection of manuscript and print cultures. In this chapter, he gives the first authoritative account of the rise of the occupation of stationer in medieval England, the founding of the Stationers' Company in 1403, and the impact of the advent of printing on the established book trade. It may seem strange that this story needs to be told, but it does. Blayney publishes critical, missing facts--about the moment when and the reasons why Richard Pynson and Wynkyn de Worde joined the Stationers' Company, for example. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.004 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".