Peter Comestor's Lectures on the Glossa ‘ordinaria’ on John (ca. 1165): An Historical Introduction with a Critical Edition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis encompasses the first partial critical edition and specialised study of a series of lectures from the cathedral school of Notre-Dame, Peter Comestor’s Glosae super Iohannem glosatum. Delivered in Paris in the mid-1160s, Comestor’s lecture course on the Glossa ‘ordinaria’ on the Gospel of John has survived in seventeen manuscript witnesses, being preserved in the form of continuous transcripts taken in shorthand by a student-reporter (reportationes). Following a careful census of the manuscript tradition, I have selected ten of the best witnesses dating from between ca. 1175 and 1225 to produce a critical edition of the prothemata and the first chapter of Comestor’s lectures. In addition to the text of the original lectures, I provide two appendices containing subsequent accretions to the lecture materials contributed by Comestor and his students, as well as a third appendix containing an edition of the corresponding portion of the Glossa ‘ordinaria’ from which Comestor lectured. The second part of this thesis, comprised of five chapters, represents a critical study of the historical and intellectual context of Peter Comestor’s biblical teaching. Chapter One presents an outline of Comestor’s scholastic career and known works, a survey of the scholarship on his biblical glosses, and a general introduction to the text of the edition: its date, genre, and title. Chapter Two charts the intellectual landscape of Comestor’s lectures: namely, the tradition of biblical teaching originating at the School of Laon, preserved in the Glossa ‘ordinaria,’ and subsequently developed in the classroom by Peter Lombard and a succession of Parisian masters. Chapter Three examines more closely the portion of the Glosae presented in this thesis, encompassing: an overview of its structure and narrative sequence, an examination of Comestor’s teaching method and scholastic setting, an outline of the sources behind the master’s biblical scholarship, and a survey of his engagement in contemporary doctrinal controversies. In Chapter Four, I provide a detailed description of the manuscripts selected for this edition together with a stemmatic analysis of their relations. Finally, Chapter Five sets forth the editorial principles observed in the edition, its various apparatus, and the appendices.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.037 | 0.011 |
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".