Two Possible Gilbertine Fragments at the University of Manitoba
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article concentrates on the fragments used to bind a copy of Vitruvius’s De Architectura printed in Strasburg in 1550 and now held at the University of Manitoba. It begins by exploring the possibility, on textual grounds, that these fragments were made for use by the Gilbertine order. Very few manuscripts connected to this order have been identified, and few seem likely to have survived the dissolution of the monasteries in England. Whereas the Reformation meant that many service books lost their liturgical value, many of these books were dismembered so that their raw materials could be used to bind other books in England and on the continent. John Bale reports that whole shiploads of books were being sent from England to the continent for this purpose in the decade before the University of Manitoba’s copy of De Architectura was printed in Strasburg. Whether or not these fragments are Gilbertine in origin, they remind us that the bindings of other books, including continental books, might be the best place to look for manuscripts that originated with this order. The University of Manitoba’s binding fragments not only demonstrate the challenges and opportunities presented by the widespread cultural practice of using manuscript leaves to bind printed books but also provide insight into other cultural practices. This article ends by comparing the fragments used to bind De Architectura with other fragments now held at the University of Manitoba. These include binding fragments as well leaves owned by St John’s College (Manitoba) that were formed from the twentieth-century dismemberment of books. Taken together, these objects represent the range of fragments held by North American institutions. They therefore provide a broader context in which to contemplate the changing cultural value of medieval fragments from Reformation Europe through to contemporary North America.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.024 | 0.002 |
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".