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Glossed books breed webs
Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).
“Anticipated in print” means the direction of this claim already appears in scholarship, while this exact test has never been run — it records prior art, not proof; nothing here counts as supported or falsified until a registered resolution says so.
Claim (verbatim)
Glossed books breed webs. Connects the classroom habitus of glossing to stemmatic topology: a schooltext lived its life open beside other copies, its margins stuffed with variants and explanations that the next copyist promoted into the text, while a rarely read historian was copied once a century in a single line of descent. Contamination is thus not noise but a curriculum signature: an editor's despairing verdict of an open recension should be predictable from whether medieval teachers assigned the text.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Score the per-author transmission essays in a standard survey for explicit editorial declarations of contamination or open recension. Primary clause: among core school authors (Ovid, Juvenal, Persius, Horace, Lucan, Statius, Boethius, the Distichs of Cato), at least 80 percent are declared contaminated. Secondary: among thin-tradition prose authors surviving in five or fewer primary witnesses, at most 30 percent are. The verdict follows the 80 percent clause.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the per-author transmission entries in Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics (ed. Reynolds, Oxford 1983).
In the kill-dataset registry:
Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
On Inferpedia
This conjecture is linked to the following pages on Inferpedia, an encyclopedia of the missing — working atlas pages, some still early scaffolding.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Generated by a fresh Fable-tier instance (claude-fable-5) at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo reads, no web searches, no DB queries; single packet Write was the only tool use); title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts or dossiers seen (sidecar docs/generated/conjecture_fresh_fable_w01_titlelist_20260708.md); prompt pre-committed in docs/generated/conjectures_1001_wave_ledger.md and docs/generated/conjecture_fresh_fable_w01_prompt_20260708.txt. Wave W01 of docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_1001_CAMPAIGN_20260708.md. Novelty unverified by construction.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
The link between school/vulgate circulation and contaminated, open traditions is a cornerstone of Latin textual criticism (Pasquali's tradizione aperta; the per-author verdicts scattered through Texts and Transmission), but nobody has systematically scored those transmission essays and tested curriculum membership as a predictor of declared contamination. The scoring operationalization is un-run.
Sources cited by the triage
- L. D. Reynolds (ed.), Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics (1983)
- Giorgio Pasquali, Storia della tradizione e critica del testo (1934)
Predictions
No prediction registered yet.
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