One Thousand and One Conjectures

Medieval painters had almost no access to antique painting or free-standing portrait sculpture, but Roman coins passed through their world by the thousand. If coinage was the operative model medium for picturing antiquity, ancient rulers should be drawn in strict numismatic profile…

In Byzantium the coin was the fastest image medium the court controlled: dies were recut within months, while mosaics, ivories, and books ran on multi-year project cycles. Innovations in imperial iconography — new crown forms, loros arrangements, newly court-adopted Christ and Virgin…

Chrysography and gold-leaf image grounds drew on the same budget line, the same material stock, and the same specialist hours, and they address different audiences — the reader and the beholder. The naive luxury model says richer books have more of both;…

Byzantine book epigrams praising gold letters, silver covers, and purple leaves are conventionally read as rhetorical topoi. But the verses were commissioned as part of the same donation package as the decoration, and a donor recording a gift before God has audit…

Rubbed-out faces in Persian and Arabic figural manuscripts are usually narrated as diffuse pious attrition accumulating across many readers. If that were so, defacement per manuscript would spread smoothly with use. But if defacement is typically one owner's single campaign through the…

Al-Sufi's Book of Fixed Stars transmits each constellation in two mirror parities — as seen in the sky and as on the celestial globe — and copies differ in how the pairing survives. Painters copy their exemplar's pictures, so parity should be…

Double-page Qur'an frontispieces are designed as mirror twins but executed in sequence by the same team, and fatigue plus deadline land on whichever page came second. If workshops shared a standard order of operations — something no surviving treatise records — then…

Insular interlace obeys strict under-over alternation, and its rare violations are treated as random lapses. The conjecture: the slips are structural — they concentrate where the drawing process broke off, at panel joins, pigment-field boundaries, and day-work seams — so error positions…

Steppe animal-style motifs crossed gold, openwork bronze, felt, wood, and tattooed skin. What a mobile craftsman memorizes is the armature — which limb crosses which, how the coil closes, how many contact points — while proportions are re-fitted to every object. Topology,…

Romanesque corbel tables read as carnivalesque miscellany, but carving proceeded bay by bay from scaffolds, one carver working consecutive blocks with whatever type he was fluent in that week. Subject types should therefore show strong serial autocorrelation around the eaves — runs…

Gothic Passion diptychs were serial products of Parisian workshops. If scene selection were devotionally bespoke, observed combinations would spread across the combinatorial space of available scenes; if workshop-standardized, they collapse into a few fixed menus, and menu identity should track workshop groups…

Ornament in stained glass — border types, diaper grounds, grisaille foliage — is studied inside glass scholarship, but glaziers stocked their cartoon chests from painters' books. Ornament families should therefore appear in dated manuscripts before dated glass of the same region, with…

The deluxe illuminated copy and the textually best copy of a work are systematically different books: illumination routes production through commercial ateliers optimizing appearance, schedule, and a lay patron's ear — smoothing hard readings as they go — while plain copies made…

Bas-de-page drolleries look like free invention scattered at whim, but the planner's and patron's attention concentrated at the liturgical divisions, where the opening had to perform. If marginal invention is budgeted attention rather than a programme, drollery density and inventiveness should decay…

Donor portraiture is one genre under two theologies of presence. Latin donation imagery kept renegotiating scale as lay patronage broadened and purgatorial accounting personalized the stakes; the Byzantine proskynesis format was liturgically frozen. The handbook impression that donors get bigger is not…

Chinese connoisseurship separates traced copies (mo) from freehand copies (lin) by brush quality — a judgement call. But tracing is mechanical transfer and locks absolute dimensions, while freehand copying rescales freely. Catalogue metadata alone should therefore bifurcate attested copy-pairs into a size-locked…

Collector seals accumulate on Chinese paintings for centuries, and their placement is discussed as taste. The conjecture: placement obeys an interstitial packing rule — each collector takes the best remaining slot in a stable preference order, corners of the image proper first,…

Sheets and scrolls of stamped Buddhas look like space-filling repetition, but the devotional act was arithmetic: vows specified counts. If the count, not the sheet, was the unit of work, totals should cluster at canonical numbers and their multiples, and completed items…

That Japanese handscroll action tends right-to-left is a specialist commonplace; the unestablished claim is the full mechanism test across cultures. If lateral bias comes from the reading technology — the image must hand the eye onward to the next scene — then…

When western Indian manuscript production moved from palm leaf to paper, pages kept palm-leaf proportions and painted vestigial string-hole medallions — that much is known. The unestablished structure is the shedding schedule: vestiges should die in a fixed order, the functional trace…

Mixtec screenfold painters worked along red guide-lined boustrophedon registers laid out before painting. If composition ran on a short planning horizon, spacing should compress as the painter approaches each register turn — the same crowding-at-the-end signature papyrologists read in line justification —…

Whether Maya codex production divided glyphic and pictorial labour is unresolved. The conjecture: it did not — each glyphically identified scribal hand painted its own deity images, so a hand's iconographic micro-habits (the drawing of God B's eye, ear-ornament forms, foot rendering)…

Imitation coinages degrading over copy-generations — Celtic staters from Philip II's gold, sceattas from Roman types, Indian imitations of Kushan issues — are a numismatic classic. The unestablished universal is an order of decay: under illiterate copying, legend legibility collapses into pseudo-letters…

At Dunhuang, painted banners and woodblock prints of the same deities circulated in the same decades. Prints from one matrix are identical trivially; the conjecture is cross-matrix: variance across different woodblocks of one deity should still be far below painted variance, because…

The great Old French epic cycles — the dozens of chansons de geste about Guillaume d'Orange or the rebellious barons that circulate welded together in huge thirteenth-century codices — are usually explained as literary projects: poets and compilers deliberately building a saga.…

Troubadour songbooks preserve two kinds of context for a song: musical notation, and the short prose biographies (vidas) and anecdotes (razos) that tell you who the poet loved and why he sang. This conjecture holds that the two were substitute goods, not…

The German Minnesang anthologies, most famously the Codex Manesse, arrange the love poets by social rank — emperor first, then kings, dukes, counts, knights, commoners. Many individual stanzas are attributed to different poets in different manuscripts, and this conjecture claims those disputes…

In the fifteenth century, hundreds of Old French verse romances and epics were rewritten as prose (the mises en prose), especially at the Burgundian court. The standard story is stylistic modernization for readers who found verse old-fashioned. This conjecture says the prose…

The Icelandic family sagas are prose, but they constantly pause to quote single skaldic stanzas spoken by their characters. Critics treat these verses as ornament, characterization, or fossilized oral tradition. This conjecture claims they are distributed like evidence, not like decoration: stanzas…

Across the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, French and English verse saints' lives were massively rewritten as prose — the standard modernization story again. This conjecture claims the conversion was systematically incomplete in one place: the miracle scenes. Prosifiers flattened travel, genealogy, and…

The oldest scraps of written vernacular lyric in the medieval West — Old High German charms and love-lines, early Romance snatches, the odd English couplet — turn up disproportionately as marginal and flyleaf additions. This conjecture specifies where: in grammar books (Priscian,…

Macaronic poetry — verse that switches between English, French, and Latin mid-line — flourishes in late medieval England and is usually read as learned play or preaching technique. This conjecture ties it to a duller, stronger cause: trilingual bookkeeping. The clerks who…

The English Corpus Christi plays — York's forty-odd pageants, Chester's twenty-four — are literary monuments, but their sizes differ wildly between towns and nobody agrees why. This conjecture makes dramaturgy a function of urban topography: the number of pageants a town's cycle…

Exempla — the short illustrative tales preachers dropped into sermons — were collected first by monks (Caesarius of Heisterbach's leisurely dialogues) and then, in the thirteenth century, by friars in alphabetized handbooks. This conjecture quantifies a selection pressure: mendicant collections cut median…

The great Eastern frame-tale collections — Kalila and Dimna, the Seven Sages, Barlaam and Josaphat — reached Europe through chains of translation: Arabic to Hebrew or Greek, then to Latin, then to the vernaculars. This conjecture claims each border crossing planed off…

Twelfth-century Greek-to-Latin translators are notorious for slavish word-by-word literalism, usually blamed on incompetence or philosophical caution. This conjecture reads literalism as a professional signature: the translators who calqued Greek word order (Burgundio of Pisa, James of Venice) were judges and notaries, men…

Middle English scribes routinely translated the dialect of what they copied into their own — a Norfolk scribe made a Kentish poem sound like Norfolk. This conjecture locates the one place the translation reliably failed: rhyme position. Line-internal words could be converted…

Medieval authors dedicated works to patrons, and a surprising number of works survive in more than one dedication state — the same text re-aimed at a new name. This conjecture claims the traffic is one-way: re-dedications move up the social scale, almost…

Books of Hours are the most-surviving books of the Middle Ages, and women are their most famous owners. This conjecture makes the link causal and general: manuscripts with documented female ownership survive with longer, denser provenance chains than equivalent male-owned books, because…

The Wycliffite Bible — the banned English translation associated with the Lollard heresy — survives in about 250 copies, an astonishing number for a forbidden book. The known oddity is that its polemical General Prologue survives in barely a tenth of them.…

Byzantine men of letters left two great paper trails: orations, the public speeches that made reputations, and letters, the private notes that maintained friendships. This conjecture claims the two genres travelled through the manuscript tradition in opposite vehicles: orations moved as singles…

Byzantine scribes closed their books with verse colophons — little poems in which the copyist compares himself to a sailor reaching port, begs prayers, and sometimes hints at payment and exhaustion. This conjecture ties the tone of the epigram to the economics…

Many Byzantine book epigrams name a specific person — the scribe John, the patron Theodora — and instinct says a named, personal poem is a one-off, while an anonymous formula is the reusable one. This conjecture inverts that: epigram types built around…

Thomas Aquinas quotes the Bible constantly and Aristotle almost as much, and we assume the sacred text got the greater care. This conjecture predicts the opposite pattern in the letter of his citations: Aquinas's biblical quotations deviate from the Vulgate more than…

Every article of a scholastic disputation stacks objections, then plays one authoritative quotation as the sed contra — the citation that turns the argument — before the master resolves. This conjecture claims the two positions draw on different libraries: objections range across…

Barlaam and Josaphat, Kalila and Dimna, the Seven Sages — the frame tales Europe consumed as edifying entertainment — came west out of Eastern Christian and Islamic bookshelves. This conjecture claims the two worlds filed the same books under opposite headings, with…

Byzantine saints' lives love to embed documents — petitions, imperial rescripts, letters — and critics treat these as free invention. This conjecture claims the hagiographers were forgers of the careful kind: the documents embedded in lives set in late antiquity reproduce the…

Byzantium produced a large literature of anti-Latin polemic — treatises on the errors of the Franks, the azymes, the filioque. Instinct says such writing surges when Latins do their worst, above all after the sack of Constantinople in 1204. This conjecture says…

Iceland wrote two great saga genres: the sober family sagas, dense with genealogy and land boundaries, and the legendary fornaldarsogur, full of dragons, berserks, and ancient kings. This conjecture links their relative copying rates to the legal value of memory: the family…

Skaldic poets described gold with kennings — riddling compounds like Sif's hair or serpent's bed — and they went on praising chieftains as gold-givers for centuries. This conjecture ties the creativity of a kenning family to the physical presence of its referent:…