Morality Tale or Attempt at Reportage? Yet Another Look at Peter von Dusburg’s Description of the Prussian Pagan Religion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The story by the Teutonic Order chronicler Peter von Dusburg about the Prussian pagan priest Criwe and his sanctuary Romowe has for centuries provoked historiographical arguments about the nature of the Baltic pagan religion and the interpretation of Medieval chronicle sources relating to the Balts. This article focuses on an interpretation of Dusburg’s text, without attempting to decide on the reality of ancient pagan religious practice. Through a ‘close reading’ approach to actual words and the contexts of sentences that are often extracted and used out of context, the article argues against either dismissing the passage as an invented moral exemplum or accepting it literally. A speculative explanation for Dusburg’s portrayal of the pagan priest Criwe as a pope is presented for consideration. Moreover, through a reminder of the often-neglected context of the Criwe passage in book III of the chronicle, this article suggests an overarching aim for Dusburg’s portrayal of the Old Prussians, which is not as the ‘avatar of evil’ often proposed in historiography, but rather as simple peoples who should be left to the Teutonic Order and not to the Franciscans favoured at that time by Grand Duke Gediminas of Lithuania. To aid readers, the article contains the whole Latin passage (rather than the extracts often quoted), and an English translation by Rasa Mažeika.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 | 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) | 0.003 | 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".