One Thousand and One Conjectures

Connects the runic acrostic signatures of Cynewulf — a poet who engineered personal credit into his verse — to oral-formulaic theory's central variable: a poet composing for written attribution has an incentive not to sound like everyone else, while anonymous traditional composition…

Joins Maya vase literacy to the sociology of workshop imitation: the Primary Standard Sequence — the dedication formula rimming elite drinking vessels — was ordered, slotted, and rhythmic, and patrons wanted its look even from painters who could not read. If pseudo-glyph…

Joins skaldic poetry's survival to a citation-driven preservation model: drottkvaett stanzas were too dense to read for pleasure once the courts that paid for them dissolved, but sagas and kings' lives needed them as evidence — quoted testimony anchoring prose claims —…

Connects the invention of the troubadour vidas and razos — the prose lives and song-explanations in the chansonniers — to an export-market failure: at home in Occitania the songs circulated inside a living performance scene that supplied all needed context, but the…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…