The Troublesome Relic of a “Troublesome Priest”? Negotiating the Boundaries of Religion, History, and Popular Culture in Anglican Canterbury
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2016, an extraordinary holy relic arrived in England from Hungary: a fragment reputedly of the murdered medieval archbishop, Thomas Becket. The relic found a warm reception at Canterbury Cathedral—the foremost seat of Anglicanism and the scene of Becket’s martyrdom—five centuries after saint veneration had been banned by King Henry VIII. In the meantime, Becket had entered popular culture not as a saint but, rather, as a controversial historical figure. This article explores the different ways in which the Anglican church, the Catholic church, the British media, and the general public responded to Becket’s much publicized “homecoming.” Comparing the event to King Richard III’s reburial in 2015, it argues that the Becket relic—like the remains of Richard III—blurred, confused, and subverted conceptual boundaries between the sacred and the secular in contemporary Britain.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 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".