Review: <i>The Emperor and the Elephant: Christians and Muslims in the Age of Charlemagne</i>, by Sam Ottewill-Soulsby
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Book Review| May 01 2024 Review: The Emperor and the Elephant: Christians and Muslims in the Age of Charlemagne, by Sam Ottewill-Soulsby Sam Ottewill-Soulsby, The Emperor and the Elephant: Christians and Muslims in the Age of Charlemagne. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023. 392 pp. ISBN: 9780691227962 (hardcover), ISBN: 9780691229386 (ebook). $39.95. Sara Ann Knutson Sara Ann Knutson University of British Columbia Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Studies in Late Antiquity (2024) 8 (2): 290–294. https://doi.org/10.1525/sla.2024.8.2.290 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Sara Ann Knutson; Review: The Emperor and the Elephant: Christians and Muslims in the Age of Charlemagne, by Sam Ottewill-Soulsby. Studies in Late Antiquity 1 May 2024; 8 (2): 290–294. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/sla.2024.8.2.290 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentStudies in Late Antiquity Search Charlemagne remains a compelling entry point for accessing the medieval, pre-Crusades context of Christian-Muslim relations. In the twentieth century, multiple Euro-Western scholars drew comparisons between the Carolingian emperor and significant Muslim figures, such as the Prophet Mohammad or the 'Abbāsid caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd, as foils curated to represent medieval Latin Christendom and the Islamic world. In The Emperor and the Elephant, Sam Ottewill-Soulsby joins this substantial body of scholarship to examine the diplomatic history of the Carolingian Empire and its relationship to Muslim polities based on three case studies: the 'Abbāsid Caliphate, the Umayyad Emirate in al-Andalus, and the Mediterranean context of North Africa and Italy. Ottewill-Soulsby's main purpose and arguments are historiographical: to refute Francis Buckler's "alliance system" argument in Harunu'l-Rashid and Charles the Great (1931), which simplistically categorizes the Carolingians and 'Abbāsids as allies versus the Byzantines and Umayyads of al-Andalus, and to assert the value of... You do not currently have access to this content.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.040 | 0.025 |
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".