Obscene Activity: Rethinking Agency and Desire in Early Medieval England
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Exeter Book, a tenth-century collection of Old English poetry, contains ninety-odd riddles describing human interactions with objects, abstract concepts, and the natural world. Significant recent criticism has focused on how these riddles attribute agency, movement, or power to the nonhuman entities they describe, thus apparently decentering the human in accordance with twenty-first-century posthuman ethics. Yet this article, focusing on the obscene riddles of the collection, argues that although these poems do indeed attribute agency to nonhuman actors, this attribution does not always elevate these nonhuman actors so much as devalue “agency” as we understand it today. After exploring the pitfalls of reading for agency in Riddle 12 (Ox), I turn to an alternative method of attributing intention used in six of the collection’s other obscene riddles: “willa.” This concept, best translated here as “desire,” is a quality that works—like agency or animacy today—to draw and redraw the lines of the human in these double entendre poems. Using the work of Mel Y. Chen and Eunjung Kim, this article argues that by contextualizing agency and its historical equivalents in our analysis, we are better able to track violent power dynamics at work in early medieval English texts.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 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 it