Lamsechi, Guita, and Beatrice Trînca, eds. Spiritual Vegetation: Vegetal Nature in Religious Contexts Across Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The essays in this book explore plant imagery and its connection with the divine in literature and art.Looking at the medieval and modern eras, the volume lends its weight to a growing repertoire of scholarship investigating human understanding of plant life in the past.The chapters, written in English and German, are arranged in loose consecutive order and stem from an interdisciplinary workshop at the Freie Universität Berlin.Scholars of the environmental humanities will appreciate the fresh material presented here.No general bibliography or image list is provided, unfortunately, and consultation of online images helps clarify occasional references to colour in the text.Roughly half the contributors focus on vegetation in works by German-speaking artists and authors active in Northern Europe, while remaining essays amplify the field of enquiry, both temporally and spatially, to a wider Europe, Eastern Christendom, and beyond.Several scholars highlight the resounding impact that ancient Greek and Roman literature had on European interpretations of vegetation, and readers come to recognize how thoroughly the language of plants was integrated into Western society.How weighty and significant the world's flora was in the reflection of its human counterparts.Starkly contrasting prevailing utilitarian understanding of trees and plant matter, this book looks to the past to trace the vital role of the verdant earth in the human psyche.The editors draw attention to the Book of Nature in the introduction, emphasizing that medieval and early modern Christians saw God's presence documented in both word and form, to be read in the Bible and in God's creation of the natural world.With its focus on the tree, the first chapter presents two literary and iconographic topoi: the hermit, who physically seeks spiritual elevation in its branches, and the preacher, who climbs it as an imaginative exercise.These trees, Naïs Virenque explains, were images of mnemotechnical organization for a participating audience.Alice Laforêt examines the European willow tree, thought to heal wounds, cure warts and ulcers, purify the air, and provide effective contraception.Its botanical characteristics, however, made it an ambiguous symbol associated with both sterility and fertility.Examining
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.003 |
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".