Power Couples: The Substance and Representation of Royal Power in England, 1272-1377
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation analyzes royal power in medieval England through the lens of ‘power couples’: married pairs of kings and queens who worked both together and as individuals to preserve and expand the power of the crown. It utilizes narrative sources, such as chronicles and letters, which have often been ignored in favor of bureaucratic evidence such as government documents. Moreover, narrative sources provide an opportunity for a more in-depth analysis of the norms and expectations medieval people had for their rulers. By first examining how kings and queens built up their power and then investigating how they maintained it in the face of events which threatened royal authority, this dissertation takes a comparative angle to understand the continuities and changes of royal power dependent upon gender and time. Ultimately, it argues that both kings and queens used aspects of reputational power and actual power to maintain and expand their authority, and that their positions were almost always sufficiently robust to withstand forces seeking to undermine or overthrow them. Chapter One serves as the foundation for the rest of the dissertation by explaining the different methods kings and queens used to gain and express their power. Chapter Two examines the threats rulers faced from continued instances of political dissent and revolt. Chapter Three analyzes how the complexities of war affected royal power, and how kings and queens were able to harness victory and spin defeat to their advantage. Finally, Chapter Four discusses the effects of ageing and moments of transition on how much kings and queens were able to access power. Taken together, these moments of disruption illustrate how rulers, working individually or together as ‘power couples’, were able to maintain the authority of the crown.
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 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".