The nave arms race

Claim (verbatim)

The nave arms race. This joins Gothic cathedral construction to the economics of competitive escalation — the same arms-race dynamics seen in armament races and advertising wars. A cathedral's height was a prestige signal aimed at specific rivals, and the relevant rivals were local: the sees a pilgrim or bishop could directly compare, those within a diocesan radius. Each new nave therefore needed to exceed its neighbours visibly but affordably, which predicts escalation by roughly fixed increments rather than by arbitrary jumps. Such a race cannot run forever; it terminates only where masonry reaches the material frontier, the point at which stone and buttress can carry no more. Beauvais, whose record-breaking choir collapsed in 1284, sits exactly at that frontier — the arms race's natural endpoint made visible in rubble. Dated heights, plotted against local rivals, should show stepwise escalation toward that limit.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

For each major Gothic cathedral in a height/date/distance panel, record vault height, construction date, and the tallest rival nave standing within a diocesan radius (take 150 km) at groundbreaking, then compute each new build's height increment over that local rival. Primary clause: at least two-thirds of new record builds must exceed their nearest local rival by a positive increment whose distribution clusters within a factor of two of the median increment, with the sequence of regional maxima terminating at or below Beauvais's attempted height; if increments show no dependence on local rivals, the claim fails. The verdict follows the primary clause.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

height/date/distance panel.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The core join is the textbook narrative: successive French Gothic cathedrals escalating vault heights against rivals (Paris, Chartres, Amiens, Beauvais), with Beauvais at 47.5 m as the frontier case whose 1284 collapse is engineering-analyzed — competitive escalation ending at the material frontier is the established story, rivalry with neighboring cathedrals included. The harvest adds only the quantitative panel (height/date/diocesan-distance, fixed increments), which was not located as built.

• 'Beauvais Cathedral: The Ambition, Collapse and Legacy of Gothic Engineering', Heritage (MDPI) — Height rivalry + collapse-at-frontier account
• CTBUH, 'The Analysis on the Collapse of the Tallest Gothic Cathedral' — Engineering analysis of the frontier failure

Predictions

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