A Critical Juncture: “Later” Latin Literature, the Newest Late Antiquity, and the Period of the Western Classic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With the appearance in 2020 of a long-awaited second “late antique” instalment of the Handbuch der lateinischen Literatur der Antike (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1989– ) and a new, collaborative Cambridge History of Later Latin Literature now at an advanced stage of preparation, there is an opportunity to re-evaluate the possibilities of scholarship in this field. What relation does such “literary” research bear to current, globalizing styles in late antique and first-millennial historical and cultural studies? What is likely to be the impact on it of current trends in the study of classical reception and intertextuality? This essay attempts a preliminary framing of the issues with reference to a largely discredited but still powerful model of the western literary classic, while arguing for hermeneutical continuity between the breakthrough work of Peter Brown’s half-century-old World of Late Antiquity (1971) and the critical-historical role of later ancient (Latin) literary studies.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".