The bones arrive before the biography

Claim (verbatim)

In the ninth century Rome exported its underground. Paschal I's marble inscription at Santa Prassede records 2,300 bodies raised from the catacombs in one program (817-819); Hilduin brought Sebastian to Soissons in 826; Einhard had Marcellinus and Peter carried over the Alps a year later and wrote the century's most candid relic memoir about it. The receiving houses got bones, a name, and a feast day - and usually nothing else, because for the minor catacomb dead no passio had ever existed. So the Frankish dossiers of these saints are built backwards: they begin with a translatio, grow miracula as the shrine performs, and acquire a vita or passio late, secondhand, or never. Genre stratigraphy, which the BHL's own item labels record, thus preserves the deep asymmetry of the relic economy: hagiography follows possession, and where possession preceded biography the dossier says so in its genre order. The translationes are not supplements to the saint's literature; for a whole class of cults they are the literature, and the missing vitae were never lost at all - they belong to the majority of biographies that were never written.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: for a panel of at least a dozen Roman-catacomb martyrs whose cult north of the Alps begins with a documented ninth-century translation (panel drawn from the translation accounts edited in MGH Scriptores XV, Einhard's Translatio SS. Marcellini et Petri at their head), at least two thirds of the dossiers will show a Frankish-composed translatio or miracula stratum with no Frankish-composed vita or passio at all - any passio present being the old Roman one or absent entirely (primary clause: the >=2/3 translation-first rate; the verdict follows it); composition place assigned per the MGH editions and the BHL's notes; the test voids if fewer than 12 qualifying dossiers can be assembled.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: BHL genre labels (vita, passio, translatio, miracula, inventio) along each panel dossier, with the ninth-century translation accounts in MGH Scriptores XV fixing the panel and the composition dates.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

The ninth-century catacomb traffic is among the best-documented episodes in relic history - Heinzelmann's Typologie fascicle inventories the translationes as a genre, Geary supplies the economy, and Waitz's MGH volume prints the accounts, Einhard's at their head - and that the imported minor martyrs arrived without biographies is stated there qualitatively. What has never been tabulated is the genre-stratigraphy census: the >=2/3 rate of translatio-plus-miracula dossiers lacking any Frankish-composed vita or passio, read off BHL genre labels across a pinned twelve-saint panel.

• M. Heinzelmann, Translationsberichte und andere Quellen des Reliquienkultes (Typologie des sources du Moyen Age occidental 33, Turnhout, 1979)
• P.J. Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton, 1978)
• Einhard, Translatio et miracula SS. Marcellini et Petri, ed. G. Waitz, MGH Scriptores XV.1 (Hanover, 1887)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.