<i>Pleasure in the Middle Ages</i>, ed. Naama Cohen-Hanegbi and Piroska Nagy. International Medieval Research, 24. Turnhout: Brepols, 2018, xxiii, 383 pp., 10 b/w ill.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The term ‘pleasure’ has many different meanings, and can be understood both in physical, emotional terms and in religious, or philosophical contexts. Pleasure pertains both to the body and to the spirit, so it turns out to be a very malleable concept which cannot be easily examined in a cultural-historical framework. The contributors to the present volume, however, who originally presented their studies orally at the 2013 International Medieval Congress at Leeds, pursue, as the two editors formulate it themselves, very diverse approaches, depending on their individual research discipline. However, pleasure is regularly associated with emotions, whether from a historical, theological, philosophical, art-historical (only one study), or literary (practically left out) perspective. Of course, this opens another Pandora’s box since ‘emotions’ represent a vast range of aspects in human life that are commonly not easy to identify or to determine in a critical fashion. Cohen-Hanegbi (Tel Aviv University) and Nagy (Université du Quebec à Montréal) offer the approximate definition of pleasure as being “an affect sustained by the interaction between physical and sensory knowledge, between cultural and social mores, and between religious thought and ethics” (xix). It might be difficult to grasp what they really mean by this, especially because they consider such features as “pleasured bodies, didactic pleasures, and pleasure in God” (ibid.), which again leaves us groping for straws. However, we are assured at the end of the introduction that all contributors, despite vast differences in their methodologies and materials, “attempt to define and analyze pleasures, joys, enjoyments, and delights through the language and mindset of the source material” (xxii).
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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 | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".