One Thousand and One Conjectures

The chansons de geste are famously careless with geography — Saracen kingdoms float, rivers move — yet pilgrims and jongleurs walked real roads, and the two facts have not been squared. This conjecture proposes the epics carry accurate geography exactly where their…

The jeu-parti was a staged verse debate between two named poets, and Arras in the thirteenth century produced hundreds of them. Arras also kept the membership necrology of its jongleurs' and burghers' confraternity — an actual roster of the town's organized performance…

Thousands of Middle English lyrics survive in one manuscript only, while a few circulate widely, and beauty does not predict which. This conjecture proposes the engine of lyric survival was reusability in prose: poems containing proverb lines or detachable sententiae were copied…

Late medieval English households kept miscellany books — romances, recipes, bawdy tales, prayers, all sewn together. This conjecture claims those books have a systematic architecture of respectability: the first item is religious at a rate far above the book's overall religious content,…

Middle English scribes translated dialect as they copied — except, this conjecture claims, when the author outranked them. Copies of Chaucer preserve alien authorial forms at rates that copies of Lydgate or anonymous romances do not, and not because Chaucer's scribes were…

Europe preserves discarded Hebrew books in two great accidental archives: the Cairo Genizah, where a community deposited its own worn texts, and the bindings of Christian books, where confiscated Hebrew manuscripts were cut up as wastepaper by binders. This conjecture claims the…

Hebrew poets in al-Andalus wrote muwashshah-style strophic poems to fit existing Arabic melodies, often naming the model song in a heading. This conjecture claims the named tune functioned as a quality-control device with measurable force: poems whose headings cite a melodic model…

After the Fourth Crusade planted French lords across Greece, Byzantine literature produced vernacular verse romances full of Frankish color. This conjecture claims the French loanwords in those romances are confined to a specific semantic theater: tournament, armor, feast, and feudal ceremony —…

A curious class of early Christian and Byzantine texts survives only in Old Church Slavonic although composed in Greek — the Greek originals are gone. This conjecture claims that loss was genre-targeted: the Slavonic-only survivals are overwhelmingly apocalypses, visionary tours of heaven…

Irish scribes are beloved for their marginal complaints — cold fingers, bad ink, wandering thoughts. This conjecture claims the grumbles are not evenly sprinkled: they cluster at codicological seams, the points where the scribe changed exemplar, resumed after an interruption, or handed…

The Four Branches of the Mabinogi, medieval Wales's greatest prose fiction, and the Welsh lawbooks were written down in the same era and copied in the same milieus, yet are read as unrelated genres. This conjecture claims the Four Branches are structured…

The books that preserve medieval Europe's lyric traditions — the four Old English poetic codices, the great troubadour chansonniers, the Minnesang anthologies — are treated as products of their traditions' vitality. This conjecture claims they are products of death: large-scale lyric anthologization…

When fifteenth-century Burgundian workshops turned old verse epics into prose for noble buyers, they did more than change the medium. This conjecture claims prosification was genealogical capture with measurable onomastics: the prose versions inflate the proper-name inventory of their sources by adding…

The fabliaux — Old French comic tales of adultery and trickery — survive almost entirely in miscellanies, and this conjecture claims their placement inside those books follows a rule: a fabliau is disproportionately shelved next to a didactic or moral item, and…

Northern Italy around 1300 hosted a flourishing industry of Franco-Italian literature — French epics copied, remade, and newly composed in the Veneto for Italian audiences. Within two generations it was dead. This conjecture blames the Commedia: Dante's poem, spreading explosively through the…

The Cantigas de Santa Maria, Alfonso X of Castile's four-hundred-song Marian miracle collection, drew on international miracle books but also on many local Iberian shrines, and the local choices look arbitrary. This conjecture claims they track the king's own itinerary: shrines got…

Some Middle High German romances open by naming the patron who commissioned them; others circulate patronless. This conjecture claims the named patron measurably restricted the text's travels: patron-named romances survive in witnesses spanning fewer dialect regions than anonymous or unpatroned works of…

Medieval schoolboys learned Latin on a fixed menu of texts — Cato's Distichs, Avianus, the Auctores octo — and their copies are choked with interlinear glosses. This conjecture claims the gloss layer was the launchpad of vernacular literature in a measurable way:…

European drama was reborn inside the liturgy: the Visitatio sepulchri, the little sung Easter scene at the empty tomb, appears in hundreds of service books across Latin Christendom — but patchily, and the patchiness is unexplained. This conjecture claims the play spread…

The firsts of French-language literature cluster oddly: the earliest verse historiography, the earliest romances, some of the earliest saints' lives in the vernacular appear in twelfth-century England and northern France with women named as patrons or dedicatees strikingly often. This conjecture turns…

Icelandic bishops' sagas embed long lists of miracles at the shrines of Thorlak and Gudmund — and those lists read differently from the surrounding saga prose: dated, witnessed, formulaic. This conjecture claims the difference is imported bureaucracy: after the papacy formalized canonization…

Medieval page layout carried meaning: Latin classics and university texts came in two stately columns, while humbler works ran in single column or long lines. This conjecture claims layout tracked canonization with a measurable lag for vernacular literature: a vernacular work's first-generation…

Medieval song traffic between sacred and secular ran through contrafacture — fitting new words to an existing melody — and pious history assumed the church lent and the tavern borrowed. This conjecture claims the measurable flow ran the other way: where a…

Medieval inventories and estate valuations price books, and they let us watch the first European market in fiction behave like a market. This conjecture claims secular literature was the first book class to depreciate with age: in valuations, romances and secular verse…

Everyone assumes old chant is stable and new chant is loose, because errors accumulate with copying. The reverse should hold across medieval Europe: chants for late, centrally promulgated feasts like Corpus Christi (1264) should be nearly identical everywhere, while the ancient Advent…

Chant scholars know a 'Germanic' melodic dialect exists; linguists know the High German consonant shift drew sharp isoglosses across the same map. The conjecture joins them: the boundary of the Germanic chant dialect should follow vernacular linguistic isoglosses, not the diocesan and…

Every psalm sung in the office ends with a small cadential formula, the differentia, chosen from a local menu; tonaries were written to police that choice. The conjecture is that the menu shrinks on a steady clock: each recopying of an antiphoner…

The litany of the saints is a chanted list — martyrs, then confessors, then virgins — and lists have physics: additions go at the end of their section, because reordering a memorized chant invites error while appending does not. So each category…

The Glossa Ordinaria wrapped the Bible in marginal commentary; the postill was a separate, self-standing commentary that flourished from the thirteenth century. The conjecture: the postill genre was born of page geometry, book by book — where the standard Gloss had already…

University quodlibets were open-microphone disputations held twice a year, in Advent and in Lent, where anyone could ask the master anything. The two sessions sat in different economic seasons: Advent fell at the close of the autumn term amid year-end accounting and…

Aquinas's Summa runs from God (Prima Pars) through human action and morals (Secunda) to Christ and sacraments (Tertia); Gratian's Decretum and the decretals were the Church's law books. The conjecture is that canon law enters the Summa almost entirely through one door:…

Some Greek texts were copied because churches were required to have them (liturgy prescribed by the typikon), others because readers admired them (homilies, theology, classics). These are different economies: prescribed books face a demand set by the number of altars — every…

Byzantine scribes framed their books with verse epigrams, most in the strict twelve-syllable line whose prosody every schooled scribe once commanded. The conjecture: when the same epigram type is recopied across centuries, its metrical faults accumulate at a measurable rate, because later…

In Eastern Christian monastic libraries, two genres lived different physical lives: service books were handled daily, worn out, and replaced by fresh local copies, while patristic theology sat on the shelf, consulted but not consumed. The conjecture is that this splits every…

The nomina sacra — the contracted sacred names like a barred theta-sigma for 'God' — are the most distinctive habit of Christian book hands; ordinary papyrus letters and contracts are the humblest layer of ancient writing. The conjecture is that in everyday…

A book of hours contains several components that each betray a local liturgical 'use' — the calendar's feasts, the litany's saints, the office variants. In a bespoke book made where it would be prayed, these parts agree. The conjecture is that internal…

Early medieval penitentials priced sins in time — days, quarantines, years of fasting — the way mints price value in coins. The conjecture is that penance values are genuinely denominational: they cluster on a small set of canonical quantities (7, 10, 40…

After confession became obligatory in 1215, Europe needed reference books for confessors, and two designs competed: systematic summae organized by theological order, and alphabetical ones organized like dictionaries. The conjecture is that alphabet beat system in the survival record by a wide,…

A thirteenth-century sermon opened with a thema, a scriptural verse chosen from the day's readings, from which the whole discourse was unfolded. In principle a preacher could pick any verse of the pericope; the conjecture is that the market for model sermons…

Saints' bodies moved — stolen, translated, elevated to new shrines — and saints' lives were rewritten, sometimes five or six times (each version earning its own number in the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina). The conjecture welds the two series together: rewriting events are…

Medieval miracle collections record two great genres of wonder: the sick healed at the shrine, and the distant devotee — the drowning sailor, the chained prisoner — saved by invocation alone. The conjecture is that the mix is a strict function of…

The little Easter drama of the visit to the empty tomb (Visitatio Sepulchri) is famous as a monastic invention, yet drama needs an audience, and reformed monks increasingly did without one. The conjecture is that over time the ceremony sorted by institution…

The earliest medieval annals are laconic year-entries, and many survive physically attached to Easter tables — the computistical grids monks kept for finding the date of the feast. The conjecture makes the attachment causal and testable: annal-keeping began as marginal annotation of…

A Byzantine kanon is sung to model stanzas, heirmoi, which fix its meter and melody; early hymnographers composed new heirmoi freely. The conjecture is that heirmos creation shut down like a mint closing: after about 900 the repertory of models was effectively…

A halakhic responsum is a rabbi's answer to a concrete question — often naming the town, the widow, the disputed courtyard. Later law codes and digests harvested these answers. The conjecture is that the harvest selected against particularity: responsa that later authorities…

Latin churches acquired staff notation from the eleventh century; synagogue poetry (piyyut) and most vernacular religious song never had it in the Middle Ages. The conjecture ties melodic borrowing to that single technological difference: traditions without pitch-writing must anchor new texts to…

Indulgences — remissions of penance measured in days and years — famously inflated across the later Middle Ages. The conjecture is that the inflation had exactly one source: canon law capped each bishop's grant at forty days, and that cap held, so…

Every relic in a church treasury carried a tiny parchment tag — an 'authentic' — naming the saint. Churches did not label continuously; they labeled when an altar was opened, a shrine translated, or an inventory ordered. The conjecture is therefore that…

Gratian's Decretum, the twelfth century's great canon-law textbook, was augmented after its making with inserted passages called paleae; the next century's decretal collections (the Liber Extra) codified the new case law flowing through the papal courts. The conjecture is that the paleae…

Until 1215 the Church banned marriage within seven degrees of kinship; the Fourth Lateran Council cut the ban to four. Old canonical and penitential texts kept being copied after the change. The conjecture is that scribes silently repaired the law in transit:…