One Thousand and One Conjectures

Indulgences — remissions of penance measured in days and years — famously inflated across the later Middle Ages. The conjecture is that the inflation had exactly one source: canon law capped each bishop's grant at forty days, and that cap held, so…

Every relic in a church treasury carried a tiny parchment tag — an 'authentic' — naming the saint. Churches did not label continuously; they labeled when an altar was opened, a shrine translated, or an inventory ordered. The conjecture is therefore that…

Gratian's Decretum, the twelfth century's great canon-law textbook, was augmented after its making with inserted passages called paleae; the next century's decretal collections (the Liber Extra) codified the new case law flowing through the papal courts. The conjecture is that the paleae…

Inquisition registers record vernacular testimony in notarial Latin, but the Latin skin tears in predictable places, letting Occitan words through. The conjecture is twofold: the tear-points cluster in domains where Latin genuinely lacked equivalents — kinship terms, foodstuffs, and the heretics' own…

Byzantine monastic founders wrote typika — charters specifying, among much else, perpetual commemorations for themselves and their donors. Each generation added obligations; none subtracted its predecessors'. The conjecture is that this created a genuine liturgical debt crisis with a paper trail: as…

Early medieval charters routinely ended by cursing violators — anathema, the fate of Judas, eternal fire — while later charters mostly dropped the curses. The conjecture is that the curse was a substitute enforcement technology whose use varied inversely with access to…