Venerating saints and constructing cults in an age of reform: male and female monastic communities and their saints in late tenth- and early eleventh-century England
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Why was there a proliferation of saint-making in late tenth- and early eleventh-century England? New saints, ancient saints, universal saints, and obscure saints were venerated with striking vigour. Litanies, calendars, prayerbooks, and Latin and vernacular hagiographical collections attest to a remarkable and devoted interest in the saints of Christian history in this period. The answer to this striking development lies with those responsible for the care of the saints: monasteries and nunneries. While not the unique owners of saints’ relics, both male and female monastic congregations nonetheless presented themselves as uniquely qualified custodians. They achieved this representation by capitalising on an ideology of reform monasticism which began to develop in the second half of the tenth century. Traditionally labelled the ‘Benedictine Reform,’ this period in English history has been studied primarily from the perspective of three episcopal leaders who promoted the reform of monastic life. This thesis foregrounds congregations, rather than the bishops, and reveals that ‘reform’ operated dynamically and outside the control of these reformers. The ideology crafted by the reformers elevated monastic men and women to an exceptional status. Sensitive to the potential of this ideology, new male and female congregations integrated the rhetoric of reform into their cults. They created new cults and revived ancient ones with the rhetoric of reform and monastic exceptionalism. Over the course of the late tenth and early eleventh century, monastic virtue and the language of sanctity became blended as male and female congregations embedded themselves in a scheme of Christian history and an increasingly diverse religious landscape.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".