Kept as title, not as literature

Claim (verbatim)

Men's medieval letters were anthologized for their style; the conjecture is that women's letters survived instead as paperwork — disproportionately transmitted through cartularies, dossiers, and records of donations and disputes rather than through literary letter-collections. The join is between transmission vector and gender: monastic archivists filed instruments, and a benefactress's letter was an instrument securing property, whereas the stylistic letter-book — the male survival channel — rarely admitted her. The mechanism is the archive's filing logic, which kept a woman's words when they were title and discarded them when they were merely eloquent. If this holds, the businesslike, transactional tone long attributed to medieval women's letters is a selection effect of filing rather than a female prose habit, and the lost stratum of women's writing is precisely the eloquent one.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

In Epistolae, the share of women's letters transmitted via cartulary, archival, or documentary copies rather than literary letter-collections is at least twice the corresponding share for men's letters. Primary clause: the twofold-or-greater vector ratio; the verdict follows it.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Epistolae: transmission context coded for each letter as documentary versus literary, compared across sender gender.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

That women's letters survive through documentary rather than literary channels is noted qualitatively in the survival literature around Epistolae and collections of practical women's letters; the twofold transmission-vector ratio has never been measured.

• Epistolae: Medieval Women's Latin Letters, 'About'
• A. Crawford, Letters of Medieval Women

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.