An Herbal Triptych: Queer Intimacies and the Vegetal Middle Ages
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Medieval European and Islamic scientific and literary representations of plant life reveal queer intimacies with vegetation that suffuse pre-modern conceptions of embodiment, environment, and behavior. Taking the form of a medieval herbal, a book that describes and categorizes plant life based on its medicinal, toxic, or culinary properties, our essay is framed around three medieval plant curiosities: agnus castus , the mandrake, and the aphrodisiac. Through this herbal triptych we show the intimate co-creation of gender expressions and sexual behavior between medieval plants and people in asexual, transgender, and queer modes. By putting medieval conceptions of nature into conversation with current discourse in queer ecologies, our essay turns away from modern taxonomies to embrace premodern queer environs that help us rethink categories of gender, sexuality, and embodiment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".