“Grab ’em by the Relics”: The Elision of Consent and Selling Salvation with Female Virgin Martyrs Post-Sanctification
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article draws attention to the discursive ways in which the meaning of relics is made and remade in medieval texts by considering the issue of consent in the lives and afterlives of female martyrs as similarly narrative and subject to problematic mediation by the medieval Church. If relics and reliquaries signify primarily through written discourse, should we read a saint’s posthumous consent as similarly discursive, brought into being by the body’s very possession by the Church and the attribution of miracles through oral and written discourse? Does the process of sanctification assume consent a priori? Does the often fragmentary or diluted nature of a saint’s relics seemingly elide the necessity of consent? This article considers how the post-sanctification treatment of female saints’ relics reinforces the patriarchal structures of the medieval Church. Relying on an assumption that consent, once given, cannot be withdrawn, the Church’s rituals surrounding relics in the Middle Ages replay the torture and violation script after the virgin martyr’s death, ignoring the women’s resistance to those violations inflicted on them in life. These rituals also served to enrich the medieval Church at the expense of women’s consent.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".