AI-generated conjecture · a wager, not a finding
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Martin travels in a convoy
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)
Manuscript scholars have a name for the book that carried Martin of Tours across Europe: the Martinellus - the standard codicological convoy that bundled Sulpicius Severus's Vita with his letters and dialogues and then took on later cargo, Gregory of Tours's Virtutes above all. Hundreds of surviving manuscripts are Martinelli. The convoy explains how giant dossiers grow: a new text about a major saint does not have to win its own readership; it boards a vehicle that is already being copied, and from then on it travels at the convoy's speed. Preferential attachment in literature is usually a metaphor; here it has a physical mechanism - the multi-text booklet - and a paper trail. If the convoy model is right, the minor members of a giant dossier should almost never travel alone: their witnesses should overwhelmingly be codices that also carry the flagship text. And the minor texts of minor saints, which have no convoy, should show no such fixed traveling companion - they survive scattered through miscellaneous legendaries, each copy an independent accident. Dossier size and transmission geometry are then two views of the same engine, and the second is directly measurable in the Bollandists' manuscript catalogues, codex by codex.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: in the BHLms manuscript index, at least 70% of the recorded witnesses of the minor Martiniana (Sulpicius's Epistulae and Dialogi and Gregory of Tours's De virtutibus sancti Martini) will occur in manuscripts that also contain Sulpicius's Vita sancti Martini (BHL 5610) (primary clause: the >=70% same-codex rate; the verdict follows it); control clause: for a control panel of ten one-item saints' texts (the first ten alphabetically under BHL letter A whose single text predates 900), no single companion text co-occurs with them in as many as 30% of their witnesses. The test voids if BHLms records fewer than 40 witnesses for the minor Martiniana combined.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: BHLms (the Bollandists' online index of hagiographic manuscripts, built on their published Catalogi codicum hagiographicorum) - per-codex content lists, from which the co-occurrence rates of the Martin dossier and the control panel are computed directly.
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.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Fresh blind generation by claude-fable-5, 2026-07-17, hagiography wave anchored to the Bollandist instruments: every kill names BHL/BHLms, the Acta Sanctorum, a martyrology edition (Dubois's Usuard, De Rossi-Duchesne/Delehaye-Quentin Hieronymian, Quentin's Bede), or the comparative repertoria (BHG/BHO, Pinakes), with a countable operation - attestation-vs-text subtraction, items-per-saint inequality, codex co-occurrence, witness-count asymmetry along version chains, witness age-profiles, unica censuses, genre stratigraphy, cross-repertorium translation tallies, corruption and name-retention ledgers, edition-date gradients, sole-edition and sole-witness counts. Disjointness from the owned w08 medieval-religion ground checked by grep and by hand: w08 #17 owns the BHL-version-count-vs-translationes correlation - items 5 and 9 here reuse BHL/AASS as instruments but under different operations (original-vs-rewrite witness asymmetry; Frankish genre stratigraphy without any relic-mobility correlation); w08 #18 owns miracle-type distance mixes (untouched); w08 #35 owns breviary lesson-length compression - item 6 here measures witness age-profiles across the Legenda aurea bottleneck instead; w11 #24/#27/#28 own the Greek-side Synaxarion/Metaphrast operations - item 10 here stays on repertorium cross-references (translation direction), not witness sweeps; w23 #13 owns female patronage via DBBE - item 8 here is a Latin attestation-vs-text subtraction. No other packet names Usuard, the Hieronymian, Voragine/Fleith, Mombritius, BHG/BHO-as-instruments, Gregory's Gloria martyrum, the MLA, or the AASS calendar cliff (grep across all fresh packets, 2026-07-17). Candidates considered and dropped: suppressed-cult text fates (no countable pre-print corpus - Guinefort-type cults are known precisely through inquisitors, not dossiers); a BHL never-printed-backlog census (folded into items 14-15); a Latin parallel to the Metaphrastic sweep (too close to w11 #28's mechanism). Honesty flags: MODERATE on the Gloria martyrum 63 Patroclus chapter number and anecdote detail (story standard in the cult-and-text literature via Van Dam, but the census clause depends only on Krusch's index, not on this example); MODERATE on item 7's 5% unica rate and item 15's 4% sole-edition rate (deliberately risked far-from-zero thresholds; the operations stand regardless); MODERATE on the exact count of Bede's authentic entries ('hundred-odd', guarded by the void clause) and on the Saint-Pere-en-Vallee attribution of the burned Chartres legendary (color, not load-bearing). Coverage guard held throughout: BHLms indexes the Bollandist-catalogued collections (Belgium-France-Rome skew), so all witness-count clauses are read as counts-in-BHLms, never as absolute survival; items 4 and 16 carry 'Kill (partly not yet built)' because their decisive joins (dated-version tables; destroyed-shelfmark concordances) are real published scholarship not yet assembled into datasets.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
The Martinellus is an established codicological object - Fontaine's Sources Chretiennes introduction surveys the convoy transmission of the Sulpician corpus, and Philippart treats the multi-text vehicle as hagiography's normal carrier - but the pinned geometry (a 70% same-codex rate for the minor Martiniana in BHLms, against a no-fixed-companion control panel of one-text saints) has never been computed from the Bollandist catalogues. The claim's 'hundreds of surviving manuscripts are Martinelli' runs ahead of anything the literature states as a count and needs checking at registration, but the primary clause itself is un-run.
- J. Fontaine (ed.), Sulpice Severe, Vie de saint Martin (Sources Chretiennes 133-135, Paris, 1967-1969), introduction on the transmission
- G. Philippart, Les legendiers latins (Typologie des sources 24-25, Turnhout, 1977), on multi-text hagiographic carriers
Predictions
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