AI-generated conjecture · a wager, not a finding
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The abridgement starves its parent
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)
Around 1260 Jacobus de Voragine finished the Legenda aurea, and the economics of hagiographic copying changed state. Barbara Fleith's census (Subsidia Hagiographica 72, 1991) catalogues 1,042 surviving manuscripts - a transmission that dwarfs every text it abridged. The abbreviated legenda was cheap, complete, and preachable: one volume replaced a shelf of passionals. The claim is that this convenience became a bottleneck for the parent texts: after the legendae novae spread, the ancient full-length passiones largely stopped being recopied, surviving on their accumulated stock of old copies rather than on new production. The fingerprint is an age-profile inversion. Manuscript survival in general is savagely late-heavy - the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries dominate extant books because loss compounds with age - so any text whose surviving witnesses are mostly early is a text whose production collapsed. The Passio Perpetuae's nine-odd Latin manuscripts are the extreme case, but the pattern should hold across the classic martyrs' dossiers: median witness before 1200, against a background curve that peaks two centuries later, while Fleith's Legenda aurea census peaks exactly where the passiones die. The abridgement did not destroy a single exemplar; it merely stopped the parent's heartbeat of recopying and let time do the rest.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: for the pinned panel of ten ancient dossiers - Agatha, Agnes, Anastasia, Cecilia, Lucy, George, Lawrence, Sebastian, Vincent of Saragossa, and Clement of Rome, each with a pre-800 passio and a Legenda aurea chapter - the median dated witness of the principal ancient passio in BHLms (principal version fixed as the BHL number with most witnesses) will fall before 1200 for at least two thirds of the panel (primary clause; the verdict follows it), against the late-heavy background of manuscript survival; control clause: Fleith's census puts the Legenda aurea's own median witness after 1300. A panel member voids if BHLms lists fewer than ten dated witnesses for its passio; the test voids if more than four members void.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: BHLms dated witnesses per BHL number for the ten pinned passiones, against the Legenda aurea age profile in Fleith's 1991 census (Subsidia Hagiographica 72).
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 control clause is leaked outright - Fleith's census of the 1,042 Legenda aurea manuscripts prints the late age-profile - and the displacement mechanism is stated in Philippart's chronology of legendary production, with Heffernan's nine Latin witnesses for Perpetua anchoring the extreme case. What remains un-run is the primary clause itself: per-dossier median witness dates from BHLms for the ten pinned ancient passiones against the late-heavy background; no published age-profiles exist for that panel, and the verdict follows the panel, not the control.
- B. Fleith, Studien zur Uberlieferungsgeschichte der lateinischen Legenda aurea (Subsidia Hagiographica 72, Brussels, 1991)
- G. Philippart, Les legendiers latins (Typologie des sources 24-25, Turnhout, 1977), on the chronology of legendary production
- T.J. Heffernan, The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity (New York, 2012), on the nine Latin witnesses
Predictions
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