The exemplar system chokes on numbers

Status: Anticipated · untested

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).

This is a proposed connection between two domains, generated by a language model. It is not an article and not evidence: it sits below the evidence/publication boundary. A quantitative prediction and a named kill-dataset are attached (when registered) so the claim stays falsifiable rather than merely evocative.

Claim (verbatim)

The university pecia system rented out exemplar quires for piecework copying and is credited with standardizing the scholastic book. The surprising connection is that it moved prose but choked on tables: astronomical codices produced under pecia show split ancestry, their prose affiliating with the university exemplar stemma while their table sections descend from separate, often older, non-pecia lineages, because stationers' piecework rates and correctors' checks were built for words, and tables were slow, error-prone, and left to be supplied from whatever table manuscript the buyer could borrow. The persistent within-codex mismatch between text version and table version that editors call contamination is instead the fingerprint of the book trade's division of labour. If this holds, every stemma of a table-bearing university text must be drawn twice — once for the words, once for the numbers.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Among thirteenth- and fourteenth-century university-produced astronomical codices documented in PAL and DISHAS, witnesses bearing pecia marks will show stemmatic discordance between prose and table sections in at least 50% of cases, versus at most 20% among non-pecia monastic copies of the same works. Primary clause: the 50%-versus-20% contrast; the verdict follows it.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Ptolemaeus Arabus et Latinus codicological descriptions (including pecia marks) together with DISHAS table-witness variant data.

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. Kills and priors are credited here, by name, as they come in.

In the atlas

This conjecture is bridged, as an L1 lead, onto these Inferpedia subject pages.

Provenance

Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5

Composed blind by claude-fable-5 with zero tool use of any kind; the packet was generated entirely from the model's own knowledge and emitted as a single text message.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

The pecia system's mechanics and corrector regime are well studied, and editors of table traditions (Pedersen on the Toledan corpus) already observe that canons and tables travel in partly independent versions within the same codices; but the specific pecia-conditioned split-ancestry claim — prose following university exemplars while tables descend from separate lineages, quantified against pecia-marked vs monastic copies — is unproposed and un-run.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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