AI-generated conjecture · a wager, not a finding
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Her feast is kept, her file is thin
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)
Medieval sainthood admitted women at roughly a sixth of the roster - the Weinstein-Bell and Schulenburg counts converge near there - but the library served them on different terms than the calendar did. The great virgin martyrs sit among the largest dossiers in the BHL, and a few queens and abbesses got the full treatment; Radegund even got two vitae, Venantius Fortunatus's (BHL 7048) and the nun Baudonivia's (BHL 7049), the rare life of a woman by a woman. The claim is that outside this celebrated head, female cult ran disproportionately textless: commemorated in the martyrologies, painted, invoked - and unwritten, because texts were commissioned by institutions, and the institutions that commissioned for women (convents above all) were fewer, poorer, and later than the male houses that turned every abbot-founder into a dossier. The geometry to expect is a bimodal skew: women over-represented among the giants (the virgin-martyr canon every legendary needed) and among the textless (cult without dossier), under-represented in the respectable middle where the ordinary confessor-bishops live. Attestation censuses against text censuses can see this directly: the martyrology-to-BHL subtraction, cut by gender, is the instrument.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: in a 200-commemoration sample from Usuard drawn as in the martyrology-to-BHL test (grammatical gender taken from the entry's own forms - sanctae, virginis, matronae - group entries excluded), commemorations of women will resolve to zero BHL entries at no less than 1.5 times the male rate (primary clause; the verdict follows it); secondary clause: in the BHL index letters A-C, the female share among one-item saints and among saints of ten-plus items will both exceed the female share among two-to-nine-item saints. The test voids if the sample yields fewer than 30 female commemorations.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: Usuard (Dubois's edition, Subsidia Hagiographica 40) gender-marked sample against the BHL index sanctorum, plus the letters A-C items-per-saint histogram re-cut by the headword's grammatical gender.
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 roster-level gender ratios are printed - Weinstein-Bell and Schulenburg both count women near a sixth of medieval sainthood - and the thinner documentation of female cult is a standing theme of that literature, but the pinned instrument (Usuard's commemorations gender-cut and subtracted against the BHL, plus the one-item/ten-plus bimodality histogram) has never been run. Both the 1.5x textless ratio and the bimodal shape are unmeasured, and the virgin-martyr canon could genuinely push an Usuard-sized sample either way: the gendered subtraction is un-run.
- D. Weinstein & R.M. Bell, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000-1700 (Chicago, 1982)
- J.T. Schulenburg, Forgetful of Their Sex: Female Sanctity and Society, ca. 500-1100 (Chicago, 1998)
- J. Dubois, Le martyrologe d'Usuard (Subsidia Hagiographica 40, Brussels, 1965), as the sampling instrument
Predictions
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