AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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Feasts travel at letter speed
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).
Claim (verbatim)
New saints' feasts spread across Europe's service books over decades, and the spread is usually narrated house by house. This conjecture quantifies it against a non-musical benchmark: the lag between a feast's institution and its appearance in a region's antiphoners matches the documented delivery-and-response times of papal correspondence to that region, scaled up by a constant factor — because feasts moved through exactly the administrative mail that carried everything else, not through pilgrimage or rumor. Adoption lag is mail lag times a bureaucratic multiplier, roughly constant across feasts. If this holds, the sanctorale becomes a dated postmark system for medieval communications, and one can date unprovenanced books by which mail-shadow they sit in.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Primary clause: across at least five datable new feasts (e.g. Corpus Christi, Visitation, Transfiguration as regionally mandated), the rank order of regional adoption lags measured in Cantus sources matches the rank order of documented papal-letter round-trip times to those regions, with Spearman correlation at least 0.7; failure of the rank correlation kills the item. Secondary clause: the multiplier (adoption lag over mail lag) varies by less than a factor of 2 across feasts within one region.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Cantus Database / Cantus Index feast fields across dated and localized sources (in-house-adjacent), against published papal register delivery evidence (the dated issue-and-receipt pairs recoverable from the calendared papal registers, e.g. the Registres published by the Ecole francaise de Rome).
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
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Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Generated blind in a single Write from the inline prompt only, with no file reads, web access, database queries, or other tool calls.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Regional adoption lags of new feasts are documented house-by-house and region-by-region (Corpus Christi's staggered adoption 1264-1325 is a standard example), and spread through papal mandate and church administrative channels is the established account; benchmarking those lags against papal-mail round-trip times is the un-run statistic on a known direction.
Predictions
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