The regulation and protection of minstrels
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It has been a common view that itinerant minstrels were at the lowest level of society, reviled as immoral and criminal, cast out by the Church and severely circumscribed by the secular and civic authorities. Writers on minstrelsy in Germany, England and France have held this view, citing examples from various places throughout the late Middle Ages to show minstrels committing crimes, supporting immorality, and being excluded and punished by ecclesiastical and secular authority. As John Southworth expressed it,1 It is not just that the [social] status of the minstrel was low; for very many of his contemporaries, he was altogether beyond the pale of social acceptance. … Not only was he excluded … from the normal web of ties and responsibilities that constituted medieval society, but even his membership of the universal church, the fellowship of baptised Christians, was at one time in serious dispute. This is a view that I have accepted in the past, but is it really justified? Does enough evidence exist to demonstrate the case for itinerant minstrels being abhorred as ‘beyond the pale’? On further reflection, perhaps not. The Church was certainly suspicious of those who performed music that resulted in sensual enjoyment and might encourage illicit sexual behaviour and other immorality. It is hardly surprising that the Church as an institution should play safe by taking a conservative view, recognising the potential dangers to the Christian soul and acting accordingly. Civic authorities, too, were wary of an itinerant trade that could cause disturbance of various kinds, such as loud noises at night, drunken brawls in ale houses, and enjoyable distraction while pickpockets and other thieves were at work. But there is also much to be said on the other side. As noted in Chapter 5, individual clerics were more practical in their approach to minstrelsy, enjoying the entertainment of minstrels on appropriate occasions and extending to them the hospitality that was part of the Church's charitable obligation. The heads of secular households took the same course; and towns saw no harm in minstrelsy per se , only a need to exercise crime prevention and administer punishment when necessary.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 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".