Narrating Trauma? Captured Cross Relics in Chronicles and<i>Chansons de Geste</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay examines how medieval Christian writers narrate a Cross relic’s capture in battle by Muslims. It seeks to delineate the distinctive ways in which four texts from various genres craft a sense that this event should be perceived by Christians as a substantial collective loss that reshapes communities and individuals. It then concludes by assessing how these varied representations intersect with modern trauma theory in order to answer two questions: (1) Do Western medieval texts represent experiences of relic capture, which might be termed a form of devotional dispossession, in ways that communicate a sense of what is today labelled trauma?; and (2) If so, what might such representations mean for both medieval and trauma studies? Ultimately, the essay argues that these texts intersect with contemporary models of collective trauma and its narration and, in so doing, can contribute both to trauma studies’ rethinking of what trauma narratives look like and to medievalists’ understandings of the affective import of relic capture and the role of crusading texts in the construction of such affect.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 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".