The Company She Keeps: Poetry on Female Martyr Saints in Early Modern Icelandic Manuscripts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Iceland’s national and local archives preserve hundreds of paper manuscripts containing poetry on female martyr saints composed and circulated in early modern Iceland, which to date have received little scholarly attention – especially when considering the amount of scholarship produced on hagiographic texts (prose and poetry) in medieval manuscript sources. These poems, the majority of which were composed well after the Protestant Reformation (officially 1550 in Iceland), focus on the stories of Christian women who were subject to violent torture, and were willing to die before sacrificing their faith in God and, in most cases, their virginity. They reached the height of their popularity during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but continued to be transmitted in written and oral form well into twentieth century. This article examines the place of virgin martyr saints in their manuscripts, of which a comprehensive list is provided. Special attention is given to the groupings of poetic legends of female martyrs in manuscripts. Also considered are a selection of illustrative examples of manuscripts containing two or more poems about female martyrs, which were known to have been produced for and/or owned – and in some cases, copied – by 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".