The homeland wrote itself down last

Claim (verbatim)

The oldest dated chansonnier, D (Modena, Biblioteca Estense), was copied in Italy in 1254; V, Catalan-copied, is dated 1268; A, I and K came out of the Veneto in the later thirteenth century. The homeland's own great books - C (Paris, BnF fr. 856, some 1,200 pieces, Narbonne region) and R (BnF fr. 22543) - arrive only around 1300 and after. This conjecture claims the pattern is structural, not accidental: where the art still lived, songs stayed in professional performing memory and writing was redundant; export audiences needed books precisely because they had no access to the performance tradition. So the archive of the troubadours was built from the outside in - diaspora first, homeland as late salvage - and the corpus we call 'the troubadour tradition' is weighted toward what the export market selected, with the home repertories underrepresented in exactly the proportion that they were still being sung. Two consequences are countable in the instrument: the production dates of the books order foreign-before-home, and the attestation mass - song-copies rather than volumes - sits mostly in books copied outside Occitania. The missing majority, on this view, is not evenly missing: it is concentrated in the local repertories that stayed oral at home while Italy was writing the canon down.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: in BEdT's manuscript table, with origins and datings per the standard descriptions (Brunel's 1935 bibliography and Zufferey's researches as controls), the median production date of chansonniers localized to Occitania will be at least 25 years later than the median for Italian-made chansonniers, and at least 60 percent of all per-song attestations across the corpus will sit in books copied outside Occitania (primary clause: the 25-year home-lag of median production dates; the verdict follows it). Fragments and manuscripts without an assigned origin are excluded; the test voids if origin assignments cover under 70 percent of witnesses.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: BEdT's manuscript origin and dating table plus per-song witness lists - median-date comparison by region of copying, and attestation-mass shares.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The table this clause runs on is published: D's 1254 colophon, V's 1268, the Veneto confection and later-thirteenth-century dates of A, I and K, and the circa-1300-and-after dates of the Occitan-made C and R are the standard descriptions in Brunel, Zufferey and Avalle, and the Italy-first, homeland-last construction of the written tradition is stated doctrine in Avalle's account of the manuscript tradition. The median comparison is arithmetic on those published datings; only the secondary attestation-mass share would add a new number.

• C. Brunel, Bibliographie des manuscrits litteraires en ancien provencal (Paris, 1935)
• F. Zufferey, Recherches linguistiques sur les chansonniers provencaux (Geneva, 1987)
• D'A.S. Avalle, I manoscritti della letteratura in lingua d'oc, ed. L. Leonardi (Turin, 1993)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.