Families of Flesh, Families of Spirit: Familial Conversions and Kinship in Medieval Hagiography (400–1200)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation analyzes the representation and discourse on familial conversions in Latin saints’ Lives written between the fifth and the twelfth centuries in western Europe. Its aim is to broaden our understanding of medieval kinship, by revisiting the significance of the biological family in medieval hagiography, and by exploring a notion of kinship created through spiritual bonds rather than filiation and marriage. The first two chapters are surveys, which highlight broad trends across a wide chronological frame while also offering close readings of each text. Both chapters begin by interrogating the saints’ origins and their entrance in the religious life. The saints’ early days might be characterized by renunciation and conflict or integration and collaboration with their birth kin. The two overview chapters then move on to the relationship between members of the same birth kin who entered the religious life. The vitae often mention the existence of these relatives who share a religious vocation, but do not always develop the relationship between them. Relatives are but one piece in the saints’ larger spiritual network. Different types of relationships (siblings, parent-children, husband-wife) are moreover explored, each of them emphasizing different themes, from equality and love to hierarchy and authority. Gender clearly shapes the portrayal of the saints and their natal kin, as the Lives of female saints and male saints present distinct characteristics. The third chapter is devoted to the cycle of Maubeuge, a group of hagiographies dedicated to seventh-century saints from the same natal kin in what would now be northern France and Belgium. Over the centuries, additional saints were attached to the original nucleus through alleged familial ties. Rather than retelling the story of a sacred bloodline, the cycle of Maubeuge stresses the importance of education for the transmission of institutional memory and practices. My last chapter focuses on the Life of Stephen of Obazine, composed in the second half of the twelfth century in the Limousin region. It explores the centrality of the language of the spiritual family in the text as a means to preserve the community’s distinct identity and to reimagine gender.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".