What Bede could find, we still have

Claim (verbatim)

Bede, listing his works at the end of the Ecclesiastical History (V.24), describes his martyrology with a librarian's precision: he noted down all the martyrs he could find, and not just the day but the manner of their combat and the judge under whom they conquered. That clause - all I could find - makes the book a findability census: Bede wrote a narrative entry only where a passio had physically reached his desk, and Henri Quentin's Les martyrologes historiques (1908) reconstructed which hundred-odd entries are authentically his, most of the year standing blank. The claim joins the census to the modern shelf: what could reach Northumbria around 725 travelled the main Roman book-artery through Gaul, and that artery is precisely the channel survival ran on - so Bede's haul should be almost perfectly still extant, matchable entry by entry to surviving BHL passiones bearing the same judges and torments, while the Hieronymian's bare names, the census of cult rather than of findable text, resolve to dossiers at less than half that rate. The two martyrologies bracket the loss economy from its two ends - what one well-connected library could locate versus what was merely commemorated - and the gap between their survival rates measures how early the great sorting had already happened.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: of Bede's authentic narrative entries as delimited by Quentin, at least 90% will match an extant BHL passio agreeing in the entry's own particulars (judge, torments, mode of death) (primary clause: the >=90% match rate; the verdict follows it), the unmatched residue constituting a short, nameable census of passiones lost since about 725; contrast clause: the zero-BHL rate for a matched draw of bare-name commemorations from Usuard's Hieronymian-derived layer exceeds the Bedan residue rate by an odds ratio above 5. The test voids if fewer than 60 authentic narrative entries are enumerable.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Quentin's Les martyrologes historiques (1908) reconstruction of Bede's entries, matched entry by entry against the BHL - particular-by-particular agreement with an extant passio, the residue listed by name.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

Quentin already ran this join: his Bede chapter delimits the authentic entries and identifies, entry by entry, the written source behind each narrative notice - overwhelmingly extant passiones, plus Rufinus's Eusebius and the Liber pontificalis - and the Dubois-Renaud practical edition repeats the per-entry identifications; Bede's 'all I could find' clause stands in Historia ecclesiastica V.24. The primary clause's answer - near-total matchability of Bede's haul to surviving texts, with a short nameable residue - is therefore already tabulated in the 1908 source-apparatus, leaving only percentage arithmetic plus a registration ruling on entries sourced from Rufinus or the Liber pontificalis rather than a BHL passio. Only the secondary contrast clause (the Usuard bare-name odds ratio) is genuinely un-run.

• H. Quentin, Les martyrologes historiques du moyen age (Paris, 1908), the Bede chapter with its entry-by-entry source identifications
• J. Dubois & G. Renaud, Edition pratique des martyrologes de Bede, de l'Anonyme lyonnais et de Florus (Paris, 1976)
• B. Colgrave & R.A.B. Mynors (eds.), Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Oxford, 1969), V.24

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.