Bibliographic record
Abstract
In a judgment which has been much admired and widely endorsed C. S. Lewis wrote of John Skelton: ‘He has no real predecessors and no important disciples; he stands out of the streamy historical process, an unmistakable individual’ (Lewis 1954: 134). His writings are highly distinctive and individualistic, but most of what is known factually about Skelton as an individual comes from official records. These tell what universities he attended and what degrees he received, what positions he held in the Church and at court, what he was paid, where he lived for some of the time, what legal cases, both ecclesiastical and civil, he was involved in, when he died and where he was buried (Edwards 1949: 287–304). We know that some of his contemporaries admired him and that he quarrelled with others. We also know who owned some of the manuscripts in which some of his works were copied and who printed others (Kinsman and Yonge 1967: 1–80). There is a collection of fifteen amusing stories about him – the so-called Merie Tales of Master Skelton (1567) – but these, for the most part, were not current in his lifetime and have not been found to be entirely reliable, though they do indicate how he was perceived by some, and provide hints about his lifestyle (Dyce 1844: I, pp. lxxi–xci, nos. i–xv). In fact, the most valuable information about Skelton's attitudes, his likes and dislikes, his political preferences and how, generally, he reacted to the world in which he lived is provided by his writings themselves. So it is possible to trace the contours of Skelton's peripatetic, somewhat erratic and very controversial career with a fair degree of confidence (Edwards 1949; Gray 2012: 3–99; Nelson 1939; Pollet 1971; Scattergood 2004; Scattergood 2014). John Skelton is usually thought to have been born around 1460 or a little later, probably of a northern, possibly a Yorkshire, family (Pollet 1971: 6–9; Scattergood 2014: 53–4), though Greg Waite has argued, on the basis of some dialectal features of Skelton's language, that ‘both his origins and schooling’ may have been in ‘East Anglia or the Central to NE Midlands’ (Waite 2008: 128).
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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.005 |
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".