Caleb Wing and the Ninth Miniature: An Investigation into a Copied Manuscript Leaf and the Bibliophile Community in 19th Century England
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Buried within the famous Isabella Breviary, on the recto of page 37, there is a depiction of the circumcision of Christ. The miniature depicts Joseph and Mary on their knees, watching the circumcision of Christ being performed by a priest and another unrecognizable religious figure. Saying that this page is unknown to art historical scholarship is an understatement—the circumcision illumination in the breviary has never been referenced in scholarly writing. Yet buried in an art collector’s house in the small city of Kingston Ontario, there is a beautifully detailed copy of the basically unknown circumcision leaf from the Isabella Breviary. The copy underwent chemical testing and it was revealed that the leaf was created in the 19th century. How did a copy of this unknown leaf end up in a small Canadian city? Who created this copy, and why? This presentation will explore the history, iconography and provenance of the Kingston Leaf. Although the Kingston Leaf is an almost direct copy of the original leaf in the Isabella Breviary, the small differences between the two pages provide clues that I believe connect the Kingston Leaf to the famous manuscript copier, Caleb Wing. But more importantly, the provenance reveals a community of 19th century English bibliophiles and art dealers, who were thinking about and evaluating medieval art. Their trades and deals surrounding the Kingston Leaf, and the Isabella Breviary, provide insight into the Gothic revival, and the Victorian romanticism of medieval art.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 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".