AI-generated conjecture · a wager, not a finding
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The companions lose their names
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)
The Hieronymian martyrology carries whole crowds - on many days a dozen or more names, the wreckage of entire African and Syrian church calendars caught in its fifth-century net. The martyrologies that medieval churches actually read pared the crowds down. Bede kept a fraction; Florus and Ado retold fewer saints at greater length (Quentin showed that Ado went so far as to forge his own venerable-looking source, the so-called Parvum Romanum); and Usuard, cutting for the practical rhythm of daily chapter reading, compressed hardest, swallowing companions into et-sociorum formulas. The Roman Martyrology of 1584 then froze the compression as law. This was loss by editing, not accident: names without narratives were dead weight to a liturgy that wanted one commemoration string per morning, so each generation of abridgement shed the textless dead - the same saints the martyrology-to-BHL subtraction shows never had dossiers. Most of the recorded martyrs of antiquity left the working memory of the Latin church this way: not burned, not censored, just abbreviated out, name by name, in the interest of a shorter morning office. And because the three instruments stand in a documented line of descent, the shedding is directly countable, day by day, across seven centuries.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: for the pinned sample of the first seven days of January, April, July, and October (28 day-lists), among commemorations shared between the Hieronymian martyrology and Usuard, Usuard will retain fewer than 30% of the Hieronymian's individual names (primary clause: the <30% retention rate; the verdict follows it), the shed names ending in et-socii formulas or silence; secondary clause: the 1584 Roman Martyrology retains no more names than Usuard on the same days. Retention means the same name (Dubois's and Delehaye's equations allowed) on the same or an adjacent day; the test voids if the pinned days yield fewer than 60 shared commemorations.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: a per-day name-retention ledger across the three instruments - the Hieronymian (De Rossi-Duchesne, Acta Sanctorum Novembris II.1), Usuard (Dubois, Subsidia Hagiographica 40), and the 1584 Martyrologium Romanum - for the 28 pinned days.
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 descent line and the compression are Quentin's printed subject - Les martyrologes historiques establishes Bede to Florus to Ado (with his forged Parvum Romanum) to Usuard - and Dubois's Typologie fascicle tabulates the martyrologies' comparative entry statistics, his Usuard edition describing the et-sociorum cutting policy. But no per-day name-retention ledger from the Hieronymianum through Usuard to the 1584 Martyrologium Romanum exists in print; the <30% retention rate on the 28 pinned days is un-run.
- H. Quentin, Les martyrologes historiques du moyen age: etude sur la formation du Martyrologe romain (Paris, 1908)
- J. Dubois, Les martyrologes du moyen age latin (Typologie des sources du Moyen Age occidental 26, Turnhout, 1978)
- J. Dubois, Le martyrologe d'Usuard (Subsidia Hagiographica 40, Brussels, 1965)
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