Rollo-Koster, Joëlle. The Great Western Schism, 1378–1417: Performing Legitimacy, Performing Unity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Jolle Rollo-Koster's new study fills a gap in English-language literature on the Great Western Schism by drawing together both recent and well-known scholarship into an intriguing cultural framework.This is a big book, covering a fifty-year period in which important events occurred at high speed in locations across Europe and contextualizing those events with a narrative that stretches back to the early fourteenth century.Analyzing three papal obediences, two ecclesiastical councils, two subtractions, and the many ways that their participants enacted legitimizing and unifying messages, the author has produced an extremely detailed study based on extensively footnoted research.In an effort to expand the focus from an institutional narrative, this new book examines the period as a social drama, using the double papal election of 1378 as a starting rupture and the opening of the Council of Constance in 1414 as the closing resolution.Within that framework of Schism as social drama, the study explores how participants adopted actions that enhanced their legitimacy as popes and rulers and signalled the illegitimacy of their rivals.Using ideas drawn from the history of the senses, language analysis, and cultural anthropology, Rollo-Koster seeks to "gauge the impact the Schism had on contemporaries" (4).The first five (of seven) chapters set the historical scene and establish the study's cultural-historical framework.The author engages extensively with the period's historiography, which is one of the book's undisputed strengths.Rollo-Koster explains how cultural theory reveals the Schism to be an extended liminal moment, and how responses to it are linked to use of space, spectacle, and embodied sensorial messages.While this discussion of the Middle Ages and the Schism is detailed and thoughtful, statements about the period after Pope Martin V's election are surprisingly simplistic.The second and third chapters explore a series of events and primary sources that reveal individual responses to the Schism's conflicts.Administrative and liturgical innovations-specifically bullae, new Marian feasts, and the Golden Rose-characterize performances of legitimacy.These are important ways of thinking about responses to conflict that reveal Rollo-Koster's deep interest in cultural history and align
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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".