AI-generated conjecture · a wager, not a finding
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An Austrian ark for orphan lives
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)
In the last third of the twelfth century, houses in the Salzburg orbit assembled the Magnum Legendarium Austriacum - the Great Austrian Legendary, a calendar-ordered collection of over five hundred saints' texts surviving in the codex sets of Admont, Heiligenkreuz, Zwettl, Lilienfeld, and Melk, and now under census by Diarmuid O Riain's project at the Austrian Academy (Analecta Bollandiana 133, 2015). The claim: a mega-legendary of this appetite is an ark, and its distinctive cargo is the otherwise unhoused - texts of local, minor, and out-of-fashion saints that boarded no other vehicle. A measurable fraction of the MLA's texts should be unica, transmitted nowhere outside the five houses' sets; and the unica should concentrate among saints the later abbreviation economy ignored - precisely those with no Legenda aurea chapter, whose full texts the bottleneck of the 1260s would otherwise have stranded without descendants. Single-collection survival is usually told as anecdote - this codex saved that text. The MLA sample is big enough to make it a stratum: a census of how much of the surviving corpus rides on one collection's decision to be comprehensive, in one province, in one generation.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: at least 5% of the Magnum Legendarium Austriacum's texts (some 25 or more items) will prove to be MLA-family unica, with no witness outside the Admont-Heiligenkreuz-Zwettl-Lilienfeld-Melk transmission recorded in BHLms or the BHL's own witness notes (primary clause: the >=5% unica rate; the verdict follows it); secondary clause: the unica's saints will lack Legenda aurea chapters at more than twice the rate of the MLA's non-unica saints. The test voids as a coverage failure if outside-transmission cannot be settled for more than a quarter of the MLA's items.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the Austrian Academy's Magnum Legendarium Austriacum census (O Riain's project) joined item by item to BHLms witness lists, with Legenda aurea membership from Maggioni's edition as the secondary cut.
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
O Riain's Analecta Bollandiana study and the Austrian Academy census establish the MLA's scale, its five-house transmission, and its date, and note rare cargo, but print no unica percentage; the >=5% MLA-family-unica rate and the Legenda-aurea-membership cross-cut are unrun joins against BHLms and Maggioni's edition. Dolbeau's and Philippart's legendary scholarship supplies exactly the frame the item names: single-collection survival known as anecdote, never counted as a stratum.
- D. O Riain, 'The Magnum Legendarium Austriacum: A New Investigation of One of Medieval Europe's Richest Hagiographical Collections', Analecta Bollandiana 133 (2015)
- F. Dolbeau, 'Notes sur l'organisation interne des legendiers latins', in Hagiographie, cultures et societes, IVe-XIIe siecles (Paris, 1981)
- G.P. Maggioni (ed.), Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda aurea (Florence, 1998; 2nd ed. 2007), as the membership instrument
Predictions
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