Bibliographic record
Abstract
WITHIN the small corpus of bilingual and trilingual manuscripts compiled in England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Oxford, BodL, Digby 86 remains one of the most puzzling for modern sensibilities. John Frankis's 1985 study outlines the manuscript's juxtaposition of high and low styles, prose and poetry, its subject matter being both devotional and scurrilous, lyrical and scientifically technical, along with the pragmatically useful (a calendar for religious use) and the speculative (prognostications, charms, dream interpretation). Calling Digby 86's contents ‘eccentric’ and ‘extravagantly heterogeneous’, Frankis deduces that it was addressed to an audience who sought both religious instruction and entertainment, in a society that included both secular clergy and the laity, and which was ‘somewhat naïve and even coarse in taste, rustic rather than urban’. He argues that ‘Digby 86, more than any other manuscript of the period, gives us an insight into what one might loosely call the upper middle class of thirteenth-century rural England’. Frankis's broad overview of Digby 86 is persuasive, yet for me several questions persistently remain. How are we to read these widely different texts? What additional inferences can be made regarding the scribe/compiler's purpose in creating this book? What do the contents imply about the social and literary milieu of its audience? Are there distinctive linguistic features of scribal usage in French? Roughly half of the contents in the 207 folios of Digby 86 are in French, but only two works explicitly mention the use of French. These are Les Miracles de seint Nicholas by Wace (art. 54; fols. 150ra–161ra, datable to the mid-twelfth century) and Le Romaunz de temtacioun de secle by Guischart de Beauliu (art. 63; fols. 182v–186v, datable to the end of the twelfth century).
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.170 | 0.036 |
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".