The content and the ideological construction of the early pontifical manuscripts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article addresses the earliest manuscripts of the ‘pontifical’ genre which are to be found in the Latin West from the ninth century. Pontificals contain the liturgical ceremonies peculiar to a bishop. Here are examined two distinct and particularly expressive manuscripts from France: eleventh-century London British Library Add. MS 15222 and ninth-century Paris Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal MS 227. Traditionally, liturgical studies has focused on the practical utility of these kinds of books, but the two examples here expand our understanding of what they might be designed to do. Each explains and explores its ritual texts, contextualises and justifies them and offers alternatives. Most dramatically, they link their rituals to the practices of the wider Church, particularly to Rome. Papal practice is transmitted and imitated in actively creative, not passively obedient, ways. This methodology is suggested as an essential element of the earlier pontifical manuscripts, that they allow readers to perceive liturgical usages in the broadest possible context. This is wholly in keeping with the priorities of liturgical scholarship from the Carolingian era, when these books first appear.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".