A Milanese printer chose our martyrs

Claim (verbatim)

Around 1477 the Milanese humanist Boninus Mombritius printed the Sanctuarium: two folio volumes of saints' lives set from Lombard manuscripts essentially as they lay - no rewriting, no apparatus, barely any editing at all. That accidental fidelity made it permanent infrastructure: the Bollandists prize Mombritius precisely because he transmits pre-critical states of the texts, and the 1910 Solesmes reprint remains a working tool. But infrastructure is also a filter. For a measurable share of ancient passiones, Mombritius is still the only edition ever printed - the Acta Sanctorum died before their feast day, or printed a different version - so the BHL entry cites Mombritius and nothing else. For five centuries, what one printer's shelf of Lombard legendaries happened to contain has defined which versions of the martyrs' deaths scholarship could conveniently read, cite, and compare; the rest stayed sealed in manuscript. The claim makes the filter countable from the repertorium itself: the sole-edition stratum is real, sizeable, and skewed - concentrated exactly where the Bollandist calendar machine never reached, in the dead weeks after 10 November. A fifteenth-century printing decision and a twentieth-century editorial shipwreck, interlocking to decide what the modern West can read of the Roman martyrs.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: sampling all numbered items under the BHL index letters A and B, at least 4% will cite Mombritius's Sanctuarium (the 1477/78 original or the 1910 Solesmes reprint) as their sole edition (primary clause: the >=4% sole-edition rate, projecting to hundreds of texts corpus-wide; the verdict follows it); secondary clause: the sole-Mombritius items' feast days fall in the Acta Sanctorum's unedited November-11-to-December-31 window at more than twice the calendar base rate. The test voids if the two letters yield fewer than 400 numbered items.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the BHL volumes' per-item edition citations, letters A-B - a sole-edition tally with a feast-window cross-tab, runnable from the public-domain 1898-1901 volumes plus the 1986 Novum Supplementum.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

That Mombritius transmits pre-critical states and remains a working tool is the Bollandists' own printed judgement - the Solesmes reprint of 1910 exists because of it - and Philippart's survey registers how much of the corpus still lacks any modern edition. But the sole-edition stratum has never been tallied: the >=4% Mombritius-only rate over BHL letters A-B and the November-December feast-window skew are unrun counts over the BHL's printed per-item edition citations. The Mombritius-only tally is genuinely un-run.

• B. Mombritius, Sanctuarium seu Vitae sanctorum (Milan, c. 1477; repr. by the monks of Solesmes, Paris, 1910)
• G. Philippart, Les legendiers latins (Typologie des sources 24-25, Turnhout, 1977), on the editorial coverage of the corpus
• Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina (Brussels, 1898-1901) with H. Fros, Novum Supplementum (Subsidia Hagiographica 70, 1986), as the per-item edition-citation instrument

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.