Prose Brut to 1332 <i>Prose Brut to 1332</i> . Edited by H <scp>eather</scp> P <scp>agan</scp> . (Anglo-Norman Texts, 69). Manchester: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 2011. xiv + 280 pp.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Heather Pagan's edition of the Anglo-Norman prose Brut chronicle to 1332 is a welcome addition to prose Brut scholarship. The prose Brut recounts the history of England from its mythical foundation to contemporary rulers. The Oldest Version, written in Anglo-Norman, ends with the death of King Henry III in 1272. The history was continued at later points to the reigns of Edward I and his successors. The prose Brut was quickly translated from French into English and was the most popular secular text circulating in later medieval England. Pagan's edition is part of a recent surge of scholarly interest in the chronicle, after a long period of critical neglect. The edition presents a prose Brut text ending in 1332 found in a group of three closely related manuscripts that share many of the same contents, most notably the verse version of Des Grantz Geanz and Robert of Avesbury's Latin chronicle. They belong to a larger category of Anglo-Norman prose Brut manuscripts known as the Short Version (to be distinguished from the Long Version). Little work has been done on the Short Version and it ‘does not form a homogeneous group of texts’ (p. 3). Pagan sensibly selects London, British Library, MS Harley 200 (late fourteenth-century) as the base text for her very well-presented edition, as it is ‘the earliest and the source of the other two’ (p. 10). Variant readings are listed after the edited text. The volume assumes a fair degree of familiarity with Anglo-Norman. Discussions of morphology and orthography appear in the Introduction, and, in lieu of a translation, a selective glossary includes ‘words considered to be rare, or used in an atypical manner’ (p. 242). Newcomers to the prose Brut will benefit from the concise introductory overview of the development of the Anglo-Norman chronicle, complemented by discussions of sources and authorship (and by explanatory notes towards the end of the volume). Pagan draws throughout on Lister M. Matheson's pioneering study The Prose Brut: The Development of a Middle English Chronicle (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998). However, she rarely engages with Julia Marvin's The Oldest Anglo-Norman Prose Brut Chronicle: An Edition and Translation (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), especially Marvin's edition and translation of the Oldest Version, which Pagan, following Matheson, refers to as the ‘Common Text’ (pp. 2, 3, etc.). Such engagement would have helped readers determine how Pagan's conclusions compare with, and how her work can be seen to build on, Marvin's, especially since both editors cover much of the same ground, and since their findings are not always consistent (for example, their counts of Anglo-Norman prose Brut and Short Version manuscripts differ). There are a few minor errors (five, not two, Short Version manuscripts lack the linking passage between Des Grantz Geanz and the prose Brut; see Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts, ed. by Ruth J. Dean (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1999), p. 26), but these do not detract from the value of Pagan's edition, which will certainly facilitate future scholarship on the Anglo-Norman prose Brut, the Short Version in particular. It opens doors for fuller studies of the prose Brut to 1332 and for wider investigations of the revisions and continuations that shape Anglo-Norman prose Brut texts.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.234 | 0.089 |
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".