Confessors of arms: heralds and their texts in late medieval chivalric culture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores the multifaceted world of English, French, and Burgundian heralds from c. 1350 to 1550 and demonstrates that the study of heraldic texts can provide insightful new perspectives on chivalric culture and literature. By combining manuscript studies with literary analysis and cultural history, I establish a nuanced view of heralds’ practical and ideological roles within late medieval noble communities. In this discussion, I give special consideration to newly uncovered evidence of English heralds’ composition of fanciful tournament letters as well as to heralds’ recurrent claim that they were the very wellsprings of chivalry, without whom honourable deeds of arms were seldom done. I then apply these findings to reveal the cognitive dissonance necessary to many of the claims that heralds and other medieval writers made for chivalry, namely that it was a coherent, moral, and incorruptible set of values which justified the nobility’s power and rank. In reality, heralds’ strained efforts to systematize knightly ideals and codes of conduct in their corporate texts betray the extent to which the imperatives of chivalry were inherently contradictory and self-serving. The paradoxes of chivalric culture are neatly encapsulated within the heraldic oath itself, each surviving version of which centers on the same untenable promise to serve both a particular lord and the nobility at large on equal terms. Heraldic oaths equally enjoined heralds to act with the confidentiality of ‘confessors of arms’ and shed light on how the nobility came to appropriate the religious model of private confession to circumvent the obligations of honour and chivalry which ostensibly justified its pre-eminence. This discussion of chivalry’s ideological underpinnings then gives fruit to a new reading of the politics of privacy in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, evidencing how the insights provided by heraldic texts can illuminate the dynamics latent in broader chivalric literature, even in texts where heralds themselves are elided.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".