Transvestite, Harlot, and Kingly Saints: Portraying Gender Ideals in Middle Byzantine and Anglo-Saxon Hagiography
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of my study is to explore and analyze some didactic elements concerning gender ideals that are found in hagiographies in early medieval Christianity. By studying lives from two traditions that are widely separated in terms of region, Byzantine saints from the East and Anglo-Saxon saints from the West of the Medieval world, I have been able to distinguish elements that are specific to the particular society and reinforced through these stories. Focusing on the portrayal of gender ideals, I have been able tosuggest how the authors have contrived to present, and encourage, specific notions of socially appropriatebehaviors and attitudes. My study, dispelling a popular assumption that saints are mainly celibate martyrs,includes transvestite nuns, repentant harlots, military men, and pious kings. In each case, however, it shows that their veneration, and the creation of the written tradition supporting their cult, is clearly influenced by the desire to provide examples of gendered behavior that the church perceives as appropriate for the society.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".