Unlikely followers of fashion? Dressing the poor in late medieval Bruges
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Surprisingly little is known about the way the poor strata of urban society in the late medieval period used dress to express social identities. Systematic empirical data have not been available, and sources tend to illustrate the opinion of the elites about poverty. Through the analysis of cloth distribution by charitable institutions and, above all, of a unique set of inventories for fifteenth-century Bruges, it becomes clear that dress was not only an important element in the material culture and the construction of social identity of the poor, but that instead of being a passive player depending on charity and alternative commercial circuits, the poor used dress to conform to fashion cycles set by the wealthier groups in urban society. In late medieval Bruges, they were wearing the same typology of dress, the same colours and the same fabrics, displaying in this way a willingness to participate and invest in fashion cycles. In assessing both urban economies and social dialogue, scholars should therefore not focus on elite demand alone.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".