Bibliographic record
Abstract
Medieval Literature and Culture The Scribes for Women's Convents in Late Medieval Germany. Cyrus, Cynthia J. The Scribes for Women 's Convents in Late Medieval Germany. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. 432 pp. $75.00 cloth. In this innovative study, Cynthia Cyrus offers a history of scribes for women's convents in late-medieval Germany and places monastic manuscripts - previously studied mainly in a codicological context - in their broader social environment. Cyrus draws upon manuscripts from over 450 convents and, with meticulous care and impressive detail, wrests an impressive prosopographical study of flesh-and-blood men and women who produced written material for women's houses. She does so not only through detailed examinations of extant manuscripts, but also via imaginative use of extensive manuscript databases (many online), such as Sigrid Kramer's Handschriftenerbe des deutschen Mittelalters and her Scriptores codicum medii aevi, as well as collected online catalogs of Manuscripta Mediaevalia, among others. As Cyrus argues in her conclusion, it is not just manuscripts, but people themselves who matter to us. Cyrus sees hand-written codices as tangible relics that connect medieval scribe to present, and this focus gives her study a particular vitality. This study is not then simply one for bibliographical or codicological scholars alone; it is enriched by art history, liturgy studies, musicology (Cyrus is an associate dean in Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University), and will interest those concerned with social and gender history, as well. Cyrus explores these multiple themes in six chapters. After looking at scribal culture in late-medieval women's monasteries in chapter one - need for books, and resulting agency enjoyed by religious women able to commission material of their own choosing - chapter two moves outside convent to examine social networks that connected women's houses to intellectual and political currents of day. The first two chapters provide a valuable background to in-depth study of genre and individual works offered in chapter three. Chapters four and five consider the scribal point of view. Together, they examine what sort of information might be gleaned from medieval colophons, what colophon was designed to do from point of view of its writers, and, in chapter five, what overall goal of scribal activity was thought to be by those who practiced it. …
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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 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".