Witchcraft and Sorcery in <i>Piers Plowman</i>
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article explores the theme and language play around witchcraft and sorcery in Piers Plowman. Langland's place in the late medieval English discourse on magic deserves to be recognized beyond Dame Studie's denunciation of sorcery at B.10.209–17. Though belief in magic was widespread throughout the medieval period, Langland is a skeptic who rejects any possibility of humans wielding real magic, even in collusion with demons. Witches and sorcerers like Mahomet, Sire Penetrans, and Favel are simple frauds and charlatans who rely upon props and manipulative skill over gullible marks. Langland also recognizes a type of sorcery that exists without magical power but is a label for esoteric and advanced intellectual study. Most intriguing, however, is Langland's manipulation of the false accusation of witchcraft against one's opponent. Jesus, the only genuine sorcerer in the text, is named as a witch as actual proof of his divine nature and omnipotence.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it