Franco-Saxon Manuscript Illumination and Networks of Production in Ninth-Century Francia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The so-called Franco-Saxon style is a category of Carolingian manuscript art that flourished particularly in the third quarter of the ninth century and is mainly associated with the monasteries of Saint-Amand, Saint-Vaast, and Saint-Bertin in north-eastern Francia. Although several famous illuminated manuscripts of the later Carolingian period are decorated in the Franco-Saxon style, it has been underserved in Carolingian art history. The most thorough survey, published in 2009, maintained the theoretical paradigm and categorisation of scholars of the first half of the twentieth century. This paradigm conceptualised the style as a uniformly developing, narrowly localised “school”, and restricted the corpus of manuscripts to examples from only three main centres, and only high-grade biblical or liturgical manuscripts comparable to the most famous examples of the style. This thesis contributes to a more holistic conceptualisation of the Franco-Saxon style. It re-assesses the ambiguous and subjective criteria of the established definition of the style by close analysis of what is demonstrably characteristic about the execution of Franco-Saxon features. Moreover, it moves away from the restrictions of the earlier paradigm, instead applying current approaches that more fully account for the surviving evidence. Motivated by the growing recognition of the role of, potentially itinerant, specialist artists and scribes in the Carolingian period, a network-informed approach is used. This allows for the identification of manuscripts that seemingly resulted from complex and interconnected production processes. Several such 'networked productions' of relevance to the Franco-Saxon style are discussed, some of which not previously properly acknowledged as Franco-Saxon. The manuscripts identified in this thesis as deserving of recognition as Franco-Saxon manuscripts help shed new light on the breadth and reach that the Franco-Saxon style attained — sometimes even outside the north-eastern Frankish area.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".