Bibliographic record
Abstract
Throughout the medieval world, women’s bodily statuses could have religio-legal consequences, and for that reason female midwives were sometimes called in as expert witnesses in Islamic legal proceedings to examine and testify about women’s bodies. Midwives in such roles appear, at first glance, to be the eyes and instruments of male authorities. Drawing on fatwas from North Africa and Islamic Spain, however, this article argues that the role of midwives was sometimes more complex. Each of the three cases presented here addresses a different concern about a woman’s body. In the first, a question arises as to whether a widow is pregnant. In the second, whether an orphan girl is sufficiently physically developed to marry. In the third, the question is whether and when a kidnapped and assaulted girl lost her virginity. In each case, the midwives repeatedly changed their testimonies. This was not a symptom of either dysfunction or unreliability; rather; it was a product of the midwives’ roles as agents of women in precarious positions, women whose calculations about what constituted their best interests were constantly shifting. The testimonies of midwives in these cases served less as a patriarchal means of weaponizing women’s own bodies against them, and more as tools for converting women’s personal distresses and hopes into actionable legal petitions. The midwives worked to secure the religio-legal status that would confer the greatest benefit on the women in need, and that would provide a framework for the community to meet those needs. Thus, it behooves historians to view these midwives not merely as instruments of prosecutorial and censorious men, but rather as advocates for women.
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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 | 0.015 | 0.042 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.018 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.019 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.037 | 0.008 |
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".