The Epiphany Liturgy at Pistoia as an Expression of Episcopal Authority
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The plainchant repertory preserved in the twelfth-century choir books of the cathedral of San Zeno in Pistoia reflects both the regional importance of the institution during the central medieval period and its robust musical culture. Among the many items of interest to scholars, the High Mass for Epiphany in particular stands out for its extensive and idiosyncratic accretions. This liturgy merits close study for what it can tell us about chant transmission, trope composition, and other phenomena, but I will focus in this essay on its potential for use as an expression of episcopal authority in the cultural milieu of medieval Tuscany. Examining the Epiphany liturgy at San Zeno through the lens of the Investiture Controversy and the early communal period in Italy, I will characterize the High Mass as an expression of episcopal authority and as a symbol of independence from imperial and communal control. Drawing on a variety of methodological models, I argue that the bishop and the cathedral chapter used the theological themes associated with Epiphany in concert with the spectacle of such an important High Mass as performed in medieval Tuscany to craft a hermeneutic program that emphasized the dual authority—spiritual and temporal—of the bishop and set him in opposition to the Holy Roman emperor using an allegory of Christ and Herod.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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 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".