Words Matter: A Linguistic Analysis of Cluniac Views on the Use and Abuse of Violent Force
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The goal of this project is to isolate Cluniac attitudes towards violence and the use of martial force in the tenth through twelfth centuries, first by determining in what situations Cluniac authors deemed the shedding of human blood was permissible, and second by tracking the evolution of these attitudes from the abbey's foundation to the height of its influence. Given Cluny's role in European society, there is a rich and longstanding body of scholarship which examines Cluny's support or rejection of force as a means of conflict resolution. This study demonstrates a consistency over time in Cluniac attitudes on the motivations and limitations of violence which governed warfare in Europe, leading eventually to the codification in Cluniac texts of acceptable uses of force, and establishing a clear pathway to salvation for the warrior caste whose lives and fortunes revolved around being effective in the execution of warfare. This thesis employed a combination of corpus linguistics and word embedding as its primary methodology. The usage frequency of a list of twenty-four Latin roots relating to concepts of warfare, violence, use of force, justice, and power was determined in order to identify and quantify the use of martial language in Cluniac texts of a variety of genres (legal texts, hagiography, history, sermons, and poetry). The opportunities for greater understanding of historical texts are almost limitless as scholars explore ways to use these exciting new interpretive methods. The patterns of target root occurrence strongly imply a distinctly Cluniac culture in the manner in which Cluniac authors thought about violence which does not appear to be fully in line with existing scholarship. Cluny's message was not about eye-for-an-eye equivalency, or Christ's vengeance on wrongdoers, but the salvation of all mankind. This result makes sense, both spiritually and pragmatically, as it was only fair that those Christian knights and rulers who fought and protected others--so long as they followed the rules for the just and justifiable use of force--should not be excluded from the Kingdom of Heaven. The results provide a way to draw back the curtain of public speech to reveal the thought patterns behind it and to quantify our subjective understanding of these texts. In seeking to understand the mentalities and motivations of the producers of the historical record, whether a sermon intended to give warriors hope for salvation or a public address to discuss the response to a global pandemic, word choice,
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".