Rewritten for winter, spared by summer

Claim (verbatim)

Around 980-1000 Symeon Metaphrastes and his atelier rewrote the standard menologion: 148 saints' lives recast in approved high style and arranged along the liturgical year from September. The set was a triumph of standardization - Albert Ehrhard's survey of the Greek hagiographical tradition (Ueberlieferung und Bestand der hagiographischen und homiletischen Literatur der griechischen Kirche, 3 vols, 1937-1952) tracked its diffusion through some seven hundred manuscripts - and, like every successful standard, it cannibalized its inputs: once the metaphrastic version of a saint existed, the pre-metaphrastic Life fell out of the copying stream, a die-off Ehrhard himself observed in the post-1000 fate of the older collections. But the Menologion carries an internal control that has never been cashed out as a survival test: its coverage of the calendar is lopsided, dense for the winter months from September onward and progressively thin toward summer, a gradient Ehrhard's own tables quantify. Where Symeon's coverage was dense, the old Lives faced a replacement; where it was thin, they kept their liturgical niche. The calendar is thus a natural experiment on the question every standardization poses - does the standard kill the variants? - with the month-by-month intensity of the standard supplied by the instrument itself and the fate of the variants countable in Pinakes as dated witnesses of pre-metaphrastic BHG versions.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: for saints possessing both metaphrastic and pre-metaphrastic Greek Lives (version identities per BHG numbers, Halkin's third edition of the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca with the Novum Auctarium), saints whose commemorations fall in the top half of months ranked by metaphrastic text count will show at most half the rate of post-1100 Pinakes attestation of their pre-metaphrastic versions compared with saints in the bottom-half months (primary clause: the >=2x post-1100 retention differential across calendar-density halves; the verdict follows it); disambiguation: month assignment follows the Menologion's own placement; retention means at least one Pinakes witness of a pre-metaphrastic version dated after 1100; coverage guard: void if either half holds fewer than 30 qualifying saints. Constructionally distinct from the register's seal-conditioned retention item: the partition variable here is the Menologion's own calendar density, not institutional dedications.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: BHG version registers joined to in-house Pinakes dated witnesses, with per-month metaphrastic text counts from Ehrhard's tables - a retention-rate comparison across the Menologion's own coverage gradient.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

Ehrhard prints both ingredients separately - the Menologion's lopsided month-by-month coverage in his tables, and the post-1000 die-off of the pre-metaphrastic collections - and Hogel's monograph restates the displacement and the calendar imbalance; but the cross has never been made: treating the calendar-density gradient as a natural experiment and measuring post-1100 BHG-version retention differentials in dated Pinakes witnesses is an un-run join whose 2x threshold is genuinely open.

• A. Ehrhard, Ueberlieferung und Bestand der hagiographischen und homiletischen Literatur der griechischen Kirche, 3 vols (Leipzig, 1937-1952)
• C. Hogel, Symeon Metaphrastes: Rewriting and Canonization (Copenhagen, 2002)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.