AI-generated conjecture · a wager, not a finding
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A census taken by mockery
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)
Twice, the tradition surveyed itself alive. Around 1170 Peire d'Alvernhe's Cantarai d'aqestz trobadors (PC 323,11) marched through a dozen named contemporaries, a stanza of ridicule each; a generation later the Monge de Montaudon updated the joke (PC 305,16) for sixteen more. A satirical gallery has one great evidentiary virtue: its names were chosen for being currently conspicuous - singers worth mocking to a knowing room - not for being transmitted, so the two poems are the nearest thing we own to a field census taken before the archive filtered it. This conjecture claims the mortality visible inside them is severe. Set the galleries' rosters against the surviving corpus and a large share of these once-conspicuous professionals barely exist: names like Peire de Monzo or Gonzalgo Roitz stand in the standard editions with corpora of zero to one piece. If survival had tracked contemporary standing even loosely, poets famous enough to lampoon by name would have decent corpora; if instead the written channel sampled on later canonicity, conspicuousness in 1170 should predict almost nothing about existence in 1300. The galleries let us measure, on a contemporary's own list, what fraction of the working profession the parchment kept - and the answer they give is the tradition's honest survival rate, taken over people rather than over songs.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: taking the rosters of the two gallery poems as identified in the critical editions of Peire d'Alvernhe and the Monge de Montaudon, at least one-third of the named poets will have two or fewer surviving attributed pieces in BEdT, including at least two with zero (primary clause: the one-third at-most-two-pieces share of the combined roster; the verdict follows it). Identification disputes follow the editions; a gallery name with no editorial identification counts as zero-corpus. The test voids if the combined identifiable roster runs under 20 names.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the two gallery rosters (critical editions of Peire d'Alvernhe, PC 323,11, and the Monge de Montaudon, PC 305,16) joined to BEdT per-poet corpus counts.
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, troubadour/Old Occitan wave instrument-anchored on the BEdT (Bibliografia Elettronica dei Trovatori, bedt.it - per-song PC identities, per-chansonnier attestations, per-witness attributions, genres, dates, music fields), with the printed censuses as controls: Pillet-Carstens 1933, Frank's Repertoire metrique 1953-57, the chansonnier sigla corpus (Brunel 1935; Zufferey 1987), Boutiere-Schutz for vidas/razos, Marshall 1969/1972 for the grammars, van der Werf 1984 for melodies. Every Kill names one instrument and one countable/positional/attestation-geometric operation; thresholds far from 1; disambiguation rules and coverage guards pinned inside each prediction; one item (no. 8, the mention-census diff) carries an honest 'Kill (not yet built)'. DISJOINTNESS from owned European lyric ground, checked by grep across all packets: w01 no.30 'Biography replaces the stage' owns vida/razo geography-of-production (this wave never tests vida presence by region); w07 no.2 'The life replaces the tune' owns the vida-melody substitution and the A/B/I/K-vs-G/R/W/X contrast (this wave's melody items run different arithmetic - per-poet text-mass concentration in no.1 and R's internal empty-stave audit in no.16, both flagged adjacent); w07 no.38 'Anthologies are funerals' owns the composition-to-witness time-lag operation, so that steer was DROPPED here and replaced by the home-vs-export archiving order (no.10, a different geometry, flagged adjacent); w07 no.49 'Hymns steal from love songs' owns melody-concordance contrafacture direction (no.6 here is metrical, within-Occitan, a Frank-scheme ghost-model census, flagged adjacent); w07 no.41 owns Dante-vs-Franco-Italian epic (no.12 here is the De vulgari eloquentia citation channel, a different claim). Honesty flags: melody totals (roughly 250) and the trobairitz roster vary by edition and are pinned to named instruments inside each prediction; gallery-roster identifications follow the critical editions; no in-house BEdT extract exists yet, so 'immediately resolvable' means the instrument is live and public while the harvest itself is a small build.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Both galleries and the obscurity of several mocked names are classic ground: Riquer treats the two poems with the identification debates, and the editions discuss names like Peire de Monzo that stand with corpora of zero to one; but the combined-roster survival arithmetic - the share with at most two surviving pieces - has never been run as a measurement, hangs on contested identifications, and with the Monge's more canonical sixteen in the pool the one-third threshold is genuinely uncertain.
- M. de Riquer, Los trovadores: historia literaria y textos, 3 vols. (Barcelona, 1975)
- A. Del Monte (ed.), Peire d'Alvernia: Liriche (Turin, 1955)
- M.J. Routledge (ed.), Les poesies du Moine de Montaudon (Montpellier, 1977)
Predictions
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