William of Pagula's Speculum Religiosorum and its Background: Law, Pastoral Care and Religious Formation for Monks, c. 1215-c. 1350
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines the intersection of law and monastic literature in the Speculum religiosorum (c.1322), a guide to the monastic life, written by the English parish priest and doctor of canon law William of Pagula (c.1285-1332). William’s Speculum is unique among monastic treatises in that it incorporates a long compendium of monastic law. The introduction provides context for the Speculum through an overview of the history of monastic reform from the mid-eleventh century to the fourteenth. In chapter one, I examine the manuscripts of the Speculum religiosorum, its relationship to William’s other works, and its sources. The non-legal contents of the Speculum come mostly from the Bible, the Fathers, and Cistercian writers, but I show that William’s sources for this material were often more recent compilations, such as Thomas of Ireland’s Manipulus florum. In chapter two I argue that the Speculum belongs to a genre that I call “encyclopedic manuals of monastic formation,” but that the work also has an important relationship with sermons and preaching aids. Chapters three and four cover the legal contents of the Speculum. Chapter three is an overview of monastic law from Gratian’s Decretum to the Clementines (1311), with an emphasis on the English context. Chapter four surveys compendia of monastic law in fourteenth-century England. I argue that William’s legal methodology is more sophisticated than that of similar works. In Chapter five, I demonstrate that wisdom is the governing theme for the Speculum as a whole. I argue that William encourages his audience to treat law as a form of wisdom, and to internalize it through meditative reading. I provide parallel examples from other monastic contexts. William’s conception of wisdom combines elements from Augustine and from monastic exegesis of biblical wisdom literature. I conclude by observing that the Speculum does not allow for a neat division between pastoral, legal, and monastic literature.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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 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".