Pizan, Christine de. Book of the Body Politic. Ed. and trans. Angus J. Kennedy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The field of women and gender studies in general, and of the prolific Christine de Pizan in particular, is continuously growing.Thus, I would assume this annotated translation of her Le Livre du corps de Policie in Toronto's The Other Voice series is a very welcome addition that many scholars, teachers, and students have been waiting for.Even though this is perhaps not one of Christine de Pizan's most widely read works, it has a given place in the history of literature.Like several of her works, the Book of the Body Politic is a remarkable text, being the first, and still among the few, in the "mirrors for a prince" tradition written by a woman.Angus J. Kennedy's edition contains a framing introduction followed by the full translation of Book of the Body Politic, based on Kennedy's own French edition published with Champion in 1998.The content of the introduction is divided into several sections covering the background information that both a first-year student and the more familiar reader of Christine de Pizan might need to take on her treatise.Kennedy underlines her uniqueness and significance to literary history and provides biographical information on the Italian-born Christine, who moved to Paris as a young child and came to view France as her home.Often considered the first woman author in European contexts, she was indeed earning her living off her pen, being left as the single provider for her family after the death of both her father and her husband.Her education and direct connection to the ruling families in France were, of course, crucial to her.The historical contextualization of the text is certainly valuable, since Christine de Pizan wrote the book for a potential future ruler, namely, the dauphin Louis de Guyenne, son of Charles VI, and in an eventful time of France's history.While this section of the introduction is slightly brief, the information is well weighed and presented in a clear and pedagogical manner.Indeed, this counts for Kennedy's overall approach in this edition, whether in his explanation of the surviving manuscripts or his approach to Christine de Pizan's prose as a translator.Kennedy declares how previous "translators have understandably made it almost a principle to divide up Christine's often convoluted syntax into shorter sentences that will ease the task of the modern well as a complement to her better-known works, and help readers gauge the breadth of her literary, philosophical, and didactical skills.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.023 | 0.013 |
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".