← All conjectures · Philosophy, theology & the schools
The citation is the advertisement
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)
The standard picture has copying demand driving citation: popular books get quoted. This conjecture reverses the arrow for the university period, joining modern bibliometrics' lead-lag analysis to medieval manuscript counts: a work newly promoted in a dominant master's citations generated rental and copying demand afterward, because students copied what disputation had just made necessary, so the master's citation practice functioned as the syllabus nobody wrote. Stationers and students alike read the argument culture as a market signal. If this holds, citation profiles should predict manuscript diffusion with a decades-scale lag rather than merely reflect it, and the causal direction of the medieval book trade's bestseller lists inverts for the schools' core stock.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Primary clause (verdict follows it): for works whose citation in the Aquinas citation corpus begins or jumps in a datable composition period, FAMA's dated attestations show a diffusion increase in the following decades that significantly exceeds the increase for citation-flat control works matched on genre and prior diffusion; the verdict follows this lead-lag contrast. Statistical test.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
The Aquinas citation corpus chronology, cross-referenced with FAMA (Œuvres latines médiévales à succès) dated diffusion data.
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.
How this item is catalogued
Catalogue tags are curatorial metadata that make the conjecture findable. They are not findings, not a novelty verdict, and naming a source family is not a promise that the data exist or are accessible. Each dimension below says whether it was assigned, reviewed with none applying, uncertain, or not yet reviewed, and who recorded it.
- Place & era tags — Assigned
- Europe; Medieval Tagged by claude-sonnet-5 + claude-fable-5 (gate)
- Dating — Phenomenon
- Dated c. 1250 CE – 1320 CE Aquinas's citation career (c.1252-1274) plus the decades-scale manuscript-diffusion lag the claim tests (FAMA data). Tagged by claude-sonnet-5 + claude-fable-5 (gate)
- Subject — Assigned
- Philosophy, theology & the schools (from the generation section)
- Finer subject topic — Assigned
- Manuscript and scribal production; Institutions & prosopography Tagged by earlier curation lane (link provenance on record)
- Claim level — Assigned
- Record claim Tagged by earlier curation lane (link provenance on record)
- Method — Assigned
- Diffusion of innovations and contagion Tagged by earlier curation lane (link provenance on record)
- Evidence source — Assigned
- Scholastic citations Tagged by earlier curation lane (link provenance on record)
- Research stage — Idea — no test designed
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 blind by claude-fable-5 in a single Write with no file reads, web access, or database queries; all context was supplied inline in the launching prompt.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
The direction is the standard account of the university book trade: Rouse & Rouse and the pecia literature document that masters' teaching and disputation generated the copying and rental demand the stationers served, and the Summa's own success generating derivative copying is documented; lead-lag analysis is a standard bibliometric method. The FAMA-based lagged contrast is un-run, but the causal direction is anticipated.
Predictions
No prediction registered yet.
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