The Middle English <i>Partonope of Blois</i>: Fragmentary Texts and Fragmentary Manuscripts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The romance of Partonope of Blois, which references the legend of Cupid and Psyche (only in reverse—it is the male lover who breaks the taboo) and the motif of the offended fée, which derives ultimately from Celtic sources, has a justifiable claim to be one of the most widely-read of English romances in the fifteenth century. It survives in two versions—one in couplets, the other stanzaic—in six manuscripts. Yet only one edition exists, dating from 1912, and only one, unsatisfactory, attempt to describe the manuscripts has been made, in 1976. All copies of the twelve-thousand-word text are incomplete to some extent, but this article describes five in detail: two where the texts themselves are fragmentary, that is where a third to a half of the copies are missing; and three where the text survives only in fragmentary material form. Two of these latter were apparently used as strengthening material in the boards and in the spine of later books, while the third, the only extant copy of the stanzaic version, is a much corrupted, and brief, retelling of the story in a miscellaneous volume, the chief content of which is Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. This article, which is supplemented by photographs, describes these five manuscripts afresh and attempts to answer the question of the physical characteristics of the volumes in which they circulated. The conclusion examines these survivals in the context of other fragmentary copies of romances.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".