Pages Covered with as Many Tears as Notes: Herbert of Bosham and the Glossed Manuscripts for Thomas Becket
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ACCORDING to Herbert of Bosham, when Henry II asked his chancellor Thomas Becket to become archbishop of Canterbury, Becket, drawing attention to his clothes, declared with irony, ‘How religious, how saintly a man you wish to appoint to such a holy see and above such a renowned and holy community of monks! I know most certainly that if by God's arrangement it happened thus, very quickly you would turn your heart and favour away from me, which is now great between us, and replace it with the most savage hatred.’ Writing with the benefit of hindsight, Herbert thus has Becket prophesy the dispute that would see him flee the country, returning only to be murdered in Canterbury cathedral in 1170, and speak well of the monks who would promote his cult. Yet Herbert also demonstrates, and attributes to Becket, an awareness of the power of visual appearances and a fondness for fine things. Herbert's interest in extravagantly decorated objects is also attested by the impressive glossed copies of the Psalter and the Pauline Epistles, which he designed and seems to have intended to dedicate to Becket. These volumes survive in four parts: the two sections of the Psalter are now Trinity College Cambridge MS B.5.4 and Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Auct. E Infra 6, and the two volumes of the Epistles are Trinity College Cambridge MSS B.5.6 and B.5.7. The four impressive manuscripts were probably once all the same size, measuring a little more than 470 x 325 mm (the size of the largest surviving volume, that in Oxford), but all have been trimmed and rebound. The manuscripts were lavishly decorated, though the Psalter volumes have had parts of the decoration excised. In addition, four quires have been lost from the second volume of the Psalter, and the bifolio that contained Psalm 1 is missing from the first volume. Both parts of the Psalter and the first volume of the Epistles contain prefaces commenting on the circumstances in which the manuscripts were produced, making them remarkably well-documented manuscripts for the second half of the twelfth century. Moreover, the wealth of material about Becket, including Herbert's own account of the saint's life, completed in the 1180s, provides further evidence for the context in which these volumes were executed.
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.330 | 0.170 |
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".