On England’s Green and Pleasant Land: Matthew Paris’s Map of Britain as a Reflection of the Levant
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the mid-thirteenth century, the noted English Benedictine chronicler Matthew Paris produced a substantial corpus of regional maps. Especially famous is Paris’s Map of Britain, particularly the version preserved in British Library Cotton Claudius d. vi, known for its mimetic accuracy, artistic presentation, and striking level of detail. Another of Paris’s maps, however, a map of the eastern Mediterranean preserved on Oxford Corpus Christi MS 2*, though little studied, shares many of the features which made the Map of Britain so remarkable. Internal evidence strongly suggests that the Oxford Map and the Claudius Map of Britain derive from a common project which depicted England and the Holy Land as mirror images – a project which would have had profound meaning in the contemporary political context, serving to express horror at Jerusalem’s fall in 1244, articulate support for a new English-led crusade, and comment critically on King Henry III’s performative piety. The subsequent abandonment of the project is equally informative since it demonstrates that medieval maps, far from being formulaic expressions of set religious doctrine, could express political opinions so intensely topical that they could become outdated before they were even complete.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".