Book review of "Saints and the Audience in Middle English Biblical Drama" by Chester N. Scoville, University of Toronto Press
Bibliographic record
Abstract
[Extract] Our understanding of medieval drama has developed considerably in the last hundred years, and few would blithely dismiss such plays as simplistic fodder for the peasants. The artistic and theological sophistication has been acknowledged, but the academic interpretation has, at times, favoured the sinners over the saints, and has tended to see complexity and development of character in the subversive and interesting sinners. Chester Scoville sets out to argue, neatly and persuasively, that medieval drama incorporated rhetorical strategies to encourage the audience to respond positively to the good and negatively to the bad. In sum: 'This book argues that the techniques used by medieval playwrights to create characters were rhetorical in nature, that the central characters of the plays are the saints, the heroes and the virtuous; and that the function of these central characters was, as already discussed, to unite the community of the audience in its desire for holy living' (p. 7).
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.032 | 0.007 |
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".