The season of winter in art and literature from Roman North Africa to medieval France
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The role of winter in the daily lives of Romans in North Africa was investigated, using evidence provided by the mosaic of Neptune and the Seasons at La Chebba and the calendar mosaic at El Jem as well as Columella's agricultural manual, ' De re rustica.' Selected works of art and poetry from the Carolingian period and from twelfth-century France were examined in order to determine whether the experience of winter during these later periods differed from that of the Romans. Illustrations of the winter months in the Vienna Calendar of 818/830 and in Wandalbert von Prum's Martyrology of St. Goar were studied along with several Carolingian poems including Wandalbert's 'De duodecim mensium. ' The medieval period was represented in art by a cycle of the labours of the months sculpted onto the west facade of Chartres cathedral. Several Christian Latin poems were examined in order to investigate their relationship to the theme of winter in the illustrated calendars on church facades. The Christian poems were compared with secular poetry from the 'Carmina Burana.' Winter activities commonly represented in the art of all three periods were feasting, eating and drinking, and hunting boars or killing pigs. The effect of the cold winter weather is consistently represented by a warmly-dressed personification of the season. The symbolism of winter is connected with the recurring annual cycle of the months and seasons, indicating the passage of time. In literature, winter is described as a period of relative inactivity and relaxation. This is sometimes regarded positively and sometimes negatively.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".