Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction to Part II Urban minstrelsy in England has been little studied. From the eighteenth century, writers have treated minstrelsy as a minor aspect of the history of individual towns: colourful and illustrative, but ultimately of little importance. Urban history at first relied on the researches of individual scholars, not usually professional historians, who delved into a mass of civic records and, where minstrelsy was concerned, pulled out such ‘plums’ as would be immediately interesting to the reader. This strategy was not unuseful, and in some cases did indicate a comprehensive picture of ceremonial and entertainment. Thomas Sharp's work on Coventry is especially important (and Sharp actually focused on civic drama, ceremonial and their attendant minstrelsy), and there are other examples. The serious and only recently recognised difficulty, for us, was that these historians did not explain what they had omitted from their published transcriptions. This left the reader in the dark as to the extent and precise nature of the surviving records, and additionally gave the impression that the transcriptions were complete. This situation is largely changed by the Records of Early English Drama (REED) project, which has published the records of drama and minstrelsy in many towns, secular households and religious houses, with volumes still in preparation. For all urban entertainment two types of record are particularly important: those of the civic authorities, and those of the religious and trade guilds. These two types partly overlap, since in many places the trade guilds effectively made up the civic government; but they are also complementary, because the guilds took direct financial and practical responsibility for a large proportion of civic ceremonial and entertainment. The immediate result of the REED project, even with more material to be presented, is that we have a much fuller and more accurate view of entertainments, including minstrelsy, in the towns and villages of late medieval England. In the chapters that follow I have usually been able to refer to REED volumes, and have cited the earlier sources only where REED material is unavailable.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.291 | 0.051 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".