Bibliographic record
Abstract
The present study explores representations of the female reproductive body in medieval written sources, with an emphasis on the figurative language that was used to describe pregnancy, childbirth, menstruation, and lactation when these phenomena take place in the female body and, symbolically, in male bodies. This examination of what are herein labeled “maternal metaphors” in men, that is a comparison between a male subject and an attribute specific to women’s reproductive bodies, reveals how anatomical and physiological characteristics exclusive to the female reproductive body were used to convey descriptive meaning, and considers why and in what contexts such comparisons were made. This study looks at ancient and medieval medical writing, biblical and medieval Christian religious sources, and various other texts taken from medieval secular and popular literature, where maternal metaphors were used to describe other anatomical and physiological phenomena that were not specific to women, physical and behavioural characteristics of male subjects, and intangible qualities of divine persons. This thesis argues that the female body was the site of diverse conceptual associations in medieval medical and religious traditions, and that, as a result, it proved to be a significant source for figurative analogies that could convey similarly wide-ranging meanings. When pregnancy, childbirth, menstruation, and lactation were used metaphorically to describe male subjects, the variety of connotations that were transferred reflects the range of possible meanings; however, the complexity is not transmitted. Maternal metaphors in men convey meanings that are either good or bad, or occasionally neutral, depending on the context and subject.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".