Medieval Manuscripts & Early Print Works at Memorial University Libraries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Of the many thousands of works in the General Rare Book Collection of the Queen Elizabeth II Library and the rare collections of the Centre for Newfoundland Studies, fewer than one-hundred represent the period from 1450 to 1600. This catalogue focuses on twenty-six volumes from the Library’s holdings that were written or printed during the Renaissance period. The selected volumes point geographically to centres of book production at the time, both in the long-established manuscript world and in the rapidly-expanding print world. The catalogue includes works created in areas known today as the Netherlands, France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and England. The early print works demonstrate stylistic traits that were new developments at the time, including title pages, page numbering and roman and italic fonts. They also point to new developments in the book trade, namely to a growing market for literatures written in the vernacular. Whether in manuscript form or in print, the texts highlighted in this catalogue expose some of the major concerns of the late-medieval and Renaissance mind: the demand for devotional literature, a continued interest in works of the Middle Ages, an interest in Classical works, astrology, law, medicine and travel literature. The books also provide—in the form of bookplates, ownership inscriptions, armorial stamps, library stamps, annotations, wormholes and scribbles— tantalising glimpses of the journeys they have taken over hundreds of years from the various European stationer’s shops and print shops that produced them to their current home, an ocean away.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.179 | 0.075 |
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".