Par ma Destre: Oath-Making, Breaking, Subversion, and Transgression in Le Roman de Silence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Le Roman de Silence, a nearly 7,000 line long French medieval romance, has survived since the thirteenth century in a single copy. There is not a substantial amount of evidence as to the history of the physical text, yet through analysis and comparison of the manuscript and historical records, we do know some key details. In 1911, Silence was found at Wollaton Hall in Nottingham, England (Stevenson, Historical Manuscript Commission). Now, over one-hundred years later, it is held in folios 188 recto to 223 recto of MS. Mi.LM.6 at the University of Nottingham. Prior to its twentieth-century discovery, the Silence manuscript is considered to have been copied down for a noble lady, Beatrice de Gavre, as a gift for her wedding to Guy IX de Laval, ca. 1286. After the wedding it is believed to have remained in the château de Laval. Scholars can assume this manuscript moved to England as a result of plundering associated with the Hundred Years’ War when the town and castle were besieged by John Talbot in 1428. Damage to the manuscript has been attributed to violent handling in times of war, and as such, the front cover was lost, two quires are loose, and a number of folios are missing (Thorpe I). Eventually, Silence ended up in the hands of Lord Middleton at Wollaton, where it would later be discovered by W.H. Stevenson. The translator of the Old French to English edition, Sarah Roche-Mahdi, describes the text as being written by “a single, rather careless scribe,” and notes the inclusion of fourteen miniatures, seemingly by the same artist (xxiiii). Moreover, she notes that the language is “a mixture of francien and picard,” and “includes several unusual vocabulary items” (xxiii). This, perhaps, provides an explanation as to why there have only ever been two published English translations of the text: Roche-Mahdi’s translation, and an earlier edition, edited by Lewis Thorpe in 1972.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
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".