One Thousand and One Conjectures

Joins the chronology of Thomas Aquinas's writing career to the arrival curve of the new Greek-Latin Aristotle: early on, Aquinas met much of Aristotle through florilegia, commentary lemmata, and older versions, quoting at second hand; as William of Moerbeke's literal translations and…

Connects the disputatio's argumentative architecture to the material sources of quotation: the objections a scholastic author stages are the tradition's stock counter-texts, harvested from commonplace collections and classroom memory, whereas the constructive respondeo forces the author back to the authority's actual wording…

Connects the runic acrostic signatures of Cynewulf — a poet who engineered personal credit into his verse — to oral-formulaic theory's central variable: a poet composing for written attribution has an incentive not to sound like everyone else, while anonymous traditional composition…

Connects the classroom habitus of glossing to stemmatic topology: a schooltext lived its life open beside other copies, its margins stuffed with variants and explanations that the next copyist promoted into the text, while a rarely read historian was copied once a…

Joins the cataloguer's oldest headache — incipit drift — to prosody as an error-correcting code operating exactly where texts are most vulnerable: openings, which suffer lost first leaves, added prologues, and scribal throat-clearing. A verse work's first lines are locked by rhyme…

Connects the world's longest translation chain — Kalila and Dimna from Sanskrit through Middle Persian and Arabic into Syriac, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and Castilian — to a two-speed model of what a book is to its transmitters: chapters are detachable assets that…

Joins skaldic poetry's survival to a citation-driven preservation model: drottkvaett stanzas were too dense to read for pleasure once the courts that paid for them dissolved, but sagas and kings' lives needed them as evidence — quoted testimony anchoring prose claims —…

Connects frame-tale morphology to accretion dynamics: some frames advertise a number — seven sages telling set tales, ten narrators times ten days — and some advertise only survival-by-storytelling, an open valve. A counted frame makes every insertion a visible breach of contract…

Connects the invention of the troubadour vidas and razos — the prose lives and song-explanations in the chansonniers — to an export-market failure: at home in Occitania the songs circulated inside a living performance scene that supplied all needed context, but the…