John Gower Illustrated: The Archer Images, Astronomical Science, and Poetic Identity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Three manuscript copies of John Gower's Vox Clamantis contain large frontispiece images of a fashionable archer shooting at a suspended globe, headed by the short poem “Ad mundum mitto mea iacula, dumque sagitto.” The text-image ensemble aligns with Gower's ethical and rhetorical imperatives and was likely designed to idealize his posture as a social satirist and sum up the ambitions of his life's work. This essay adds another dimension to understanding this memorial image, reading the archer through a technical figure of mathematical astronomy. Seeing in the illustration a silhouette of an elementary chord diagram, the essay argues that Gower's archer imagery presents an allusive visual emblem, positioning himself in an elevated sphere with broader implications for the integration of medieval poetic and scientific disciplines. Representational strategies common to the arts show their dependence on conceptual models, graphical interfaces, and technical objects commensurate to the described world.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".