‘Hyt am I’: Voicing Selves in the <i>Book of the Duchess</i> , the <i>Roman de la rose</i> , and the <i>Fonteinne Amoureuse</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In his account of the story of Ceyx and Alcyone, the narrator of the Book of the Duchess describes how Juno sends a messenger to the god of sleep. In the versions of this story with which Chaucer was familiar, the messenger is identified as the goddess Iris, but in Chaucer's telling he becomes male and is given no name. The messenger finds the slumbering bodies of the god and his company lying in the dark cave in which they live, and he rouses them by blowing his horn and crying, ‘Awaketh!’ ( BD 183). Morpheus, displeased, opens one eye to ask, ‘Who clepeth ther?’ (185). Before going on to relate Juno's orders, the messenger responds with three simple words of self-identification: ‘Hyt am I’, quod this messager. (186) In this brief scene of recognition, the messenger's voice, or his presence before Morpheus as an embodied voice, is enough to transmit unproblematically some sense of his identity, even as Chaucer deliberately suppresses the proper name that might help his readers anchor their understanding of who this figure might be. The scene encapsulates, I believe, one of the central concerns of the Book of the Duchess : What is the relationship between a thing spoken and the one who speaks it? Represented in a ‘book’ – the ‘book’ of the Duchess – this concern expands to embrace something yet more fundamental to the work itself: What is the relationship between a thing written and the one who writes it? The sense that linguistic self-referentiality might be enough to guarantee the link between voice and self (and the troubling and necessary implication that it might not be) finds an echo in the narrator's only attempt at self-identification: ‘I, that made this book’ (96). In a work in which Chaucer explores his position in relation to a known extra-textual figure, John of Gaunt, the question of how one should speak for oneself becomes particularly urgent, even if the answer remains oddly elusive.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".