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Friars shrink the story
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)
Exempla — the short illustrative tales preachers dropped into sermons — were collected first by monks (Caesarius of Heisterbach's leisurely dialogues) and then, in the thirteenth century, by friars in alphabetized handbooks. This conjecture quantifies a selection pressure: mendicant collections cut median tale length roughly in half relative to monastic ones, because the friar was itinerant and his book had to fit a satchel and his sermon slot, while the monastic exemplum lived in a stable house with time to talk. Alphabetization and abbreviation are the same event: the story becomes a retrievable unit priced by the word. If this holds, the famous narrative impoverishment of the later exemplum — flat characters, no scenery — is logistics, not declining talent, and tale length becomes a proxy for the compiler's institutional transport costs.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Median exemplum length in mendicant alphabetical collections (Arnold of Liege's Alphabetum narrationum, the Tabula exemplorum) will be at most 50 percent of median length in monastic dialogic collections (Caesarius's Dialogus miraculorum, the Cistercian Exordium magnum), measured in words on the standard editions; primary clause: that halving. Secondary: within collections, tales sourced from personal experience will be longer than tales recycled from written sources in monastic collections but not in mendicant ones.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: ThEMA (Thesaurus Exemplorum Medii Aevi, GAHOM) collection inventories, with word counts from the named critical editions (Strange's Caesarius; the Alphabetum narrationum in CCCM 160).
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
Blind fresh claude-fable-5 subagent (max effort), single-Write discipline, 2026-07-09. W07, first wave of the operator-directed medieval-European block (W07-W10).
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Searched monastic vs mendicant exempla collections. The transition from Caesarius's dialogic collections to mendicant alphabetical handbooks is well studied (Smirnova; Brémond/Le Goff/Schmitt tradition) and abbreviation is a qualitative commonplace, but no median-word-length comparison across the named collections was found.
Predictions
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