Blood, bones, and gold: rewriting relics in Medieval French verse saints’ lives 1150-1300
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines relics in a selection of hagiography composed c. 1150-1300 in Anglo-Norman and continental French verse. As the first full-length study devoted to relics in French hagiography, it demonstrates this corpus’s importance for the study of medieval relic encounters. Drawing on a selection of modern critical approaches to materiality, particularly Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory, the thesis examines both relics and hagiography in terms of heterogeneous networks that weave connections between entities of all kinds, in which all entities, not only human subjects, have the capacity for agency. It argues that relics are a useful means of exploring nonhuman agency in the Middle Ages, as they forge connections and trouble distinctions between texts, people, things, and the divine. It also argues that focusing on relics offers new understandings of how hagiography is built on networks that range beyond texts and human subjects to encompass bodies, things, spaces, and temporalities. \n \n \nThe thesis considers texts alongside visual and material elements such as manuscripts, architecture, and reliquaries. Each chapter is a case study of a particular saint’s networks that explores different aspects of relic and hagiographic networks. Chapter One argues that Eloi of Noyon’s collection of relics communicates his sainthood through forging broad networks connecting him with sacred bodies, places, and things. Chapter Two argues that Audrey of Ely and Edward the Confessor’s incorrupt relics make visible networks forged through less tangible connections such as vision, desire, and knowledge. Chapter Three argues that Thomas Becket’s blood relics (and their representations in text, image, and artefacts) forge extended networks of sacred spaces and renegotiate bodily boundaries. Chapter Four argues that despite the Virgin Mary’s absence of corporeal relics, her contact relics and other substitutes repeatedly make her present on earth through a network of bodies, artefacts, and texts. \n
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".