Love at a Crux – The New Persian Romance in a Global Middle Ages. Cameron Cross (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2023). 370 pages. ISBN 978-1-4875-4727-1.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cameron Cross's monograph onVis-o Ramin is a highly ambitious and original study into a well-known but not extensively studied Persian romance written by Fakhr al-Din Gorgani in 1054 CE.Cross's study opens with an insightful and rich prologue ("Prologue -In Which Love has Many a Tale"), which serves as an introduction to the story of Vis-o Ramin and Cross's proposed mode of engagement.Following the prologue, Cross presents an in-depth discussion of the many dimensions and context of Vis-o Ramin in five consecutive chapters, three of which are specifically connected to the story's main protagonists: Vis ("Ethics -An Affair of Conscience," chapter 2), Mobad ("Politics -The Prisoner of his Skin," chapter 3), and Ramin ("Affect -The Limits of Lyric," chapter 4).These three core chapters are framed by chapter 1, "Phantasy -The Rise of the Romance," and chapter 5, "History -The Death of Romantic Love," followed by a concluding chapter entitled "Epilogue -In Which Many a Tale has Love."This sophisticated structure forms the esthetic frame for a balanced and extremely rich excursion into the (Persian) romance, eloquently written and brimming with fresh views.This study is exceptional in that it foregrounds the genre of the romance in an all-embracing and holistic manner.In the prologue, the foundations are laid for Cross's innovative approach to the story.Here, on the basis of several notions broadly related to connected history, as explored in recent scholarship, Cross presents a new framework for the study of Vis-o Ramin and texts potentially related to this work.Cross convincingly demonstrates how new dimensions of Vis-o Ramin, and the Persian romance by extension, can come to light when viewed and understood through the lens of connectivity and hybridity in place of, or in addition to, the more narrow and exclusive Iranian Studies approach largely prevalent in existing studies.Following a succinct description of the contents of Vis-o Ramin (a full summary is offered in one of three very useful appendices) and perceptive note on some of the more salient aspects of the work, such as the use of "doubles," Cross sets out his refreshing, if very broad, approach to (literary) history with a view to meticulously map the different layers and functions of the romance as exemplified by Vis-o Ramin.Thus, Love at a Crux offers an in-depth literary analysis of the text of Vis-o Ramin alongside a meta view of the romance and its impact and development in the context of Persian text production and beyond.In the prologue of Love at a Crux, Vis-o Ramin is described as a work "on the crossroads of literary history" and a building block of "networks of interrelated texts" informed by Hellenistic learning, Abrahamic monotheism, and the Ancient Novel.Cross introduces the term "Helleno-Abrahamic complex" to frame his inquiry into the interconnectedness of a
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
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".