Geography is Better than Divinity: The Bible and Medieval Geographical Thought
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the role of the Christian Bible in forging a distinctly medieval geographical consciousness. Though the sacred text had little explicit to say about basic issues of cosmography or even about the location of places beyond the bounds of the Holy Land, the fact that God's act of creation marked not just the beginning of time but also of space, meant that many of the exegetical assumptions and techniques honed to shed light upon the unfolding of Providence from the perspective of people mired in temporality could just as readily be applied to comprehending space; clearly, particular evidence for the direction of God's plan was written across the face of the earth as much as it was in past events. But as a corollary, the Bible could also be seen as providing a series of unassailable deductive premises that made the whole world readily knowable and even known. The result is that through the Middle Ages a discourse about space developed that was at once confident and resilient, echoes of which continued to reverberate in the thinking of some of the major geographical figures of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".