One Thousand and One Conjectures

An astronomical table carries a radix — a set of starting positions computed for a chosen epoch date, the zero point from which all its numbers count. The surprising connection is that radix dates are political artifacts, not scientific ones: they cluster…

Sexagesimal digits were written in Arabic abjad letter-numerals, in Hindu-Arabic ciphers, and in various Latin conventions, and each system has its own characteristic confusions — which letter melts into which when a diacritic drops, which cipher flips into which under a tired…

A copied astronomical table inherits every error of its exemplar; a recomputed table refreshes them. Whether a given copy was recomputed or merely transcribed is usually treated as scribal temperament, but the surprising connection is that it is infrastructure: recomputation requires a…

An incipit — the opening words by which a medieval text was cited, catalogued, and sold — behaves like a fossilizing tag, but not all genres fossilize at the same rate. The surprising connection is that astronomical incipits mutate far more slowly…

The Almagest, the central book of ancient astronomy, rarely travels alone in its manuscripts. The surprising connection is that each translation version travels with its own characteristic convoy of satellite texts — introductions, canons, star-lists — stable enough that a codex's translation…

Mappae mundi look like pictures copied from pictures, and their genealogies are usually drawn accordingly. The surprising connection is that their place-name errors are textual, not graphic: omissions cluster in runs of names that are adjacent in written geographies but scattered on…

Copyists of world maps worked outward from the ideologically loaded centre, and their attention decayed with radius. The surprising connection is that copying fidelity on mappae mundi is therefore a radial function: error and omission density rises with distance from the map's…

Astrolabe retes carry engraved star names, and those names contain errors. The surprising connection is that the errors match the copyist errors of specific manuscript star-list recensions: engravers worked from written lists at the bench, not from other instruments or from the…

Pharmacological recipe collections grew by accretion as owners added what they acquired — this is agreed. The surprising connection is positional: the shared ancestral core of a collection sits at the HEAD, while witness-specific additions cluster at the tail and margins, because…

The Toledan Tables were the most copied astronomical dataset of the Latin twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and their witnesses contain identifiable corrupt entries. The surprising connection is that these corruptions form geographic clades: bundles of shared errors mark descent from common exemplars,…

A mappa mundi has two inheritable layers: the drawn and written content, and the construction geometry laid down before any ink — compass-hole centres, ruled circles, division angles. The surprising connection is that these layers travel separately: physical workshop templates passed between…

The precision of a copied astronomical table was set not by science but by carpentry: the ruled grid of the page. When a scribe copied a table into a grid ruled for fewer or narrower columns than his exemplar used, the final…

The twelfth-century Sicilian translations of Greek astronomy directly from the Greek were textually superior to their Arabic-Latin rivals, yet barely circulated — the fact is known, the shape of their survival is not. The surprising connection is that where the Greek-Latin versions…

The uroscopy wheel — the circular diagram of graded flask colors that is medieval medicine's most recognizable image — normally appears embedded in a treatise, and editors assume image and text descended together. The surprising connection is that the wheel travels on…

The university pecia system rented out exemplar quires for piecework copying and is credited with standardizing the scholastic book. The surprising connection is that it moved prose but choked on tables: astronomical codices produced under pecia show split ancestry, their prose affiliating…