Attribution, authorship, and authority in the middle English Pseudo-Augustinian soliloquies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines the utility of interpolation, translation, and commentary in influencing the relationship between authority, authorship, and attribution in the Middle English Pseudo-Augustinian Soliloquies. This devotional text, extant in two distinct manuscript variants (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University, Houghton Library, MS Richardson 22; London, British Library, MS Cotton Titus C.xix.), guides its reader through a series of recitations and queries intended to assist a meaningful engagement with the reader’s spiritual life. However, significant differences in text, structural arrangement, and visual presentation between the two manuscript variants of the Soliloquies demonstrate how the Cotton text was adapted for a new audience, and evidence the different scribal principles involved in the production of each manuscript text. In my first two chapters, I provide a detailed comparison and analysis of the major distinctions between the two manuscript variants and situate these within the textual and exegetical conventions and concerns of late-medieval devotional norms. In my third chapter, I address the flexibility of the translator-commentator-scribe’s multifold position and examine the way that this role impacts the text’s layered and diffuse relationship to authority. Scribal interventions—and their impact on textual authority structures—provide a space in which we can navigate between the theory and praxis of textual reconfiguration in the hopes of understanding not only how texts participate in the shaping of piety, but the function of co-creative intermediaries in enacting this process. Thus, understanding the relational networks of attribution through which polyvocal, dialogic authority claims are staged in works like the Soliloquies allows us to better understand the variant forms of authorship and attribution present in late-medieval texts
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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 | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".