Confronting a <i>Gens Ferox</i>: Jews in the Poetry and Prose of Venantius Fortunatus
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
A sixth-century Italian émigré to Merovingian Francia, Venantius Fortunatus produced a diverse and voluminous corpus of both poetry and prose. Of his numerous compositions, few have been the subject of as much sustained scholarly attention as his poetic narrative of the mass conversion of the Jews of Clermont in 576. Modern scholars have probed and analyzed this poem for evidence of the historical conditions that prompted the conversion, as well as compared and contrasted Fortunatus’s verse account with the later prose narrative written by the poet’s primary source for the events of 576, Bishop Gregory of Tours. Surprisingly, in light of this sustained scholarly interest, scant attention has been devoted to how the poem’s depiction of contemporary Jews relates to the poet’s treatment of this religious minority elsewhere in his extensive corpus. A comparative examination of these references reveals that while the Jews were not a major preoccupation for Fortunatus, he sustained across a number of verse and hagiographical works a depiction of Jews as a community unrelentingly and actively hostile toward Christians, and whose profound anger could only be assuaged through Divine Grace, frequently as mediated through episcopal agents. While Fortunatus’s depiction of Jews drew on stock themes in the adversus Iudaeos tradition, and was by no means incongruous with similar depictions by his Gallo-Christian contemporaries, his skepticism of the ability of even holy men to penetrate Jewish obstinacy and fury through preaching alone was very much his own, and consequently offers a unique example of how an elite Christian believer sought to explain the continuing presence of a religious minority defiantly opposed to full integration in an ostensibly Christian society.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| 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 it