<i>Three Anglo-Norman Kings: The Lives of William the Conqueror and Sons by Benoît de Sainte-Maure</i>, trans. Ian Short. Mediaeval Sources in Translation, 57. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2018, viii, 228.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Respected professor of medieval French and foremost specialist in Anglo- Norman, Ian Short can cast his net wide and does so brilliantly with the volume under review. Eleven thousand lines cover here the period from 1027 (conception of William the Conqueror) to 1135 (death of Henry I)—all lively and dynamic in this translation, while much historical background is revealed in these vivid and impressively-written pages (in spite of Benoît’s often stilted style): treason and transgressions, murder and mayhem, betrayals, hypocrisy, depravity, ominous dream sequences, punishing sieges; but also on occasion magnificent festivities amidst peace and prosperity. Revolting descriptions grace the narrative as well: “[they drew their…] swords, their trusty blades of engraved steel, and dashing out their enemies’ brains, […gouged] out their entrails and intestines.” (102) At this point we encounter a lion and a fire- breathing dragon (102–103). Elsewhere a bear is slaughtered (131). On the other hand, Benoît does gush enthusiastically over Henry II’s mother, the “Empress” Matilda (N.B., there are six Matildas in the index): a “[…] widely celebrated figure, for it is my firm belief that there is nothing in the whole of my book that people would be happier to listen to, seeing that her impressive and highly regarded achievements are so much more extraordinary than those of any other person.” (172)
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".