Female authority on the frontier of Christendom: rulership, patronage, diplomacy, and identity in the Latin east, 1200-1310.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores how elite women in the Latin East exerted authority. It contributes to the field of Crusader and Gender Studies as women in the thirteenth century Levant have not previously been researched in a single dedicated study and have received less scholarly attention than women in the previous century. This thesis asks four key research questions. First, how did women exert power? This is explored through a series of thematic chapters, about law, patronage, conflict, and identity, which have all been underrepresented in historiography. Second, was the thirteenth century a period of decline for female power in the Latin East? Third, were examples of powerful women in the Latin East ‘exceptional’ or part of a wider normalisation of female authority in the region? These questions are answered through the significant variety and number of sources available to evidence this thesis. Charter, narrative, artistic and architectural sources are utilised to demonstrate that female power was not in decline in the thirteenth century Latin East and that powerful women were not unique in this environment. Fourth, did the nature of the Levantine frontier shape the ways in which women could exert power? This thesis connects the evidenced frequency in which women held power to be connected to the nature of the frontier, in which stability was prioritised over the enforcement of gendered performances of authority and autonomy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".