The Text in the Community: Essays on Medieval Works, Manuscripts, Authors, and Readers by Jill Mann, Maura Nolan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
8i6 Reviews Norse, and French. Small wonder, then, thatClara Strijbosch in her introduction describes him as 'versatile'. The fourteen papers thatfollow bear thisout. Glyn Burgess ofLiverpool considers animals mythical (griffins, dragons) and real (otters,melodious humpback whales) in Benedeit's Anglo-Norman poem on Brendan, dated toHenry I's reign. T. 0. Clancy ofGlasgow edits an eleventh-century Irish poem addressed to 'Brendan', the alias of a provincial kingwho travelled fromDonegal toSri Lanka and back, calling at Iona, Clonfert, Tours, theAlps, Rome, Naples, and Jerusalem. Though peripheral to the Brendan legend, thepoem isof great historical interest,and will be stillmore so ifking 'Brendan' from Ulster isever identified.Anna Fagnoni compares themes (guides, food supplies, nudity) in Lives of theDesert Fathers with those ofNavigatio Brendani, which was perhaps written atMetz, and survives in manuscripts of the tenthcentury onwards. Walter Haug investigates Sankt Brandans Reise, comprising texts inDutch and German derived from a lost original of about I I50, composed in theCologne Trier region. He focuses (pp. 93-96) on a scribe thatBrendan meets inmid-ocean, floatingon a leaf and measuring the seawith an inkpot.Haug explains this from the exemplum (firstattested about I26o) on how theTrinity can nomore be encompassed by thehuman mind than theocean can be contained within a cockleshell. P. C. Jacob sen surveys Navigatio Brendani's ornithology. Seamus Mac Mathuna of Coleraine analyses themanuscripts and texts of Irish Lives of Brendan. (Accounts there of man-eating mice as big as cats,whirlpools, a dead giantess over ioo feet long, lava hurling volcanoes, icebergswith tops 'near the firmament', seamonsters, and fragrant isles of fruitand berries suggest scenarios for aHollywood epic.) Martin McNamara ofDublin relates theNavigatio to Irish biblical apocrypha and liturgy;Aires Nasci mento discusses manuscripts of it fromSpain and Portugal. Giovanni Orlandi likens Brendan to Moses. Justas Brendan daubed his currachwith fat tomake it watertight, so also the ark ofMoses in the bulrushes was daubed with slime and pitch (p. 239). Herold Pettiau provides a solid account of Irishmonasticism as background to the legend. Clara Strijbosch places alarming encounters with theother inSankt Brandans Reise against trulynightmarish ones in the twelfth-centurypoem Herzog Ernst, where bird-headed men peck an Indian bride to death (p. 272). Carsten Wollin compares the narratives ofNavigatio Brendani, Benedeit's Anglo-Norman poem, andWalter ofChatillon's Latin version ofBenedeit. Karl Zaenker itemizes theearly printed nar ratives (with quaint woodcuts) of Brendan inGerman and Dutch. Michaela Zelzer of Vienna, who thinks Irish monks perhaps reached America (discovering fogs off Newfoundland and succulent fruitson themainland), notes Irish symptoms in the Navigatio's Latinity. The volume ends with a copious bibliography and an index. The Brendan Legend isan expertwork. Students ofmedieval Latin, French, Dutch, German, and Irish cannot fail toprofit from its investigations intoBrendan's strange Nachleben. Itwill remain useful formany years to come. UNIVERSITY OF NAVARRE, PAMPLONA ANDREW BREEZE The Text in theCommunity: Essays onMedieval Works, Manuscripts, Authors, and Readers. Ed. by JILLMANN and MAURA NOLAN. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 2oo6. xvi+ 296 pp. $37. ISBN 978-o-268-03496-2. This is a collection of eight essays which positions itself within the broad discipline of book history. In this context, the title calls tomind Stanley Fish's concept of in terpretative communities, although the community defined in the introduction does not provide amodel for reader response alone but isbroadly understood as thewider network of all those involved inboth theproduction and reception of texts. MLR, 102.3, 2007 817 As a text itself, the volume is embedded within the community of theUniversity ofNotre Dame. Based on a conference held in 200I tomark the inauguration of two Notre Dame Professors of English, Michael Lapidge and Jill Mann, the book opens with closely linked survey-style contributions fromeach. Lapidge discusses intertex tual borrowings and uses paratextual evidence, such as commentaries, to chart the influence of late antique biblical paraphrases on themedieval school curriculum, and through this on Latin and vernacular literary texts up to the fifteenthcentury.His central contention is thatmedieval literaturemust be understood in the context of the school curriculum, which leads theway for Mann to use intertextual analysis to illustrate the influence of school texts on theCanterbury Tales and Piers Plow man. The...
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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 | 0.009 | 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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".