One Thousand and One Conjectures

the Hebrew translations of Judeo-Arabic philosophy were not diffusion but evacuation across a script frontier. As Arabic competence died out among the Jews of Christian Europe, translation was the only way the tradition could survive there at all, so the two versions'…

the Mithila school's teaching monopoly in early Navya-Nyaya was a copying monopoly too, and it left a permanent physical signature. Works of the monopoly period should circulate almost exclusively in eastern scripts, while pre-monopoly Nyaya classics show pan-Indian script spread — institutional…

Jain manuscript libraries preserved their opponents better than the opponents preserved themselves. Jain debate pedagogy required possession of rival texts, and the temple bhandaras had the institutional continuity that Brahmanical family-and-school transmission lacked; Brahmanical lines copied their own school, Jain libraries copied…

in the Syriac schools, logic was not a discipline but a fixed propaedeutic block welded to theological training, so it was copied as a single curricular object for over a millennium. Porphyry's Eisagoge, the Categories, and De interpretatione should move together; the…

In Eastern Christian monastic libraries, two genres lived different physical lives: service books were handled daily, worn out, and replaced by fresh local copies, while patristic theology sat on the shelf, consulted but not consumed. The conjecture is that this splits every…

A book of hours contains several components that each betray a local liturgical 'use' — the calendar's feasts, the litany's saints, the office variants. In a bespoke book made where it would be prayed, these parts agree. The conjecture is that internal…

The portable breviary compressed the monastic office into a book a friar could carry, and something had to be cut. The conjecture is that compression was systematically confessional in its priorities: hagiographic lessons (saints' lives read at matins) were slashed first and…

Books of hours ended with suffrages — short memorials to chosen saints — and the choice tracked what owners feared. The conjecture turns two plague intercessors into a precision dating instrument: Sebastian's suffrage frequency should double within a generation after the Black…

Medieval book curses, the anathemas scribbled on flyleaves against thieves, are usually read as generic piety; this conjecture reads them as targeted insurance and joins them to the second-hand book market. A curse is worth writing where theft is likely, and theft…

This conjecture claims subject classification in medieval library catalogues is a scale-triggered technology rather than an intellectual fashion: below a threshold collection size the librarian's memory is the catalogue, and lists are kept by donor or accession, but above the threshold memory…

This conjecture claims a medieval library's duplicate ratio is an institutional signature legible without reading a single statute: houses that taught bought throughput, multiple copies of the same core texts for simultaneous users, while contemplative houses bought coverage, one copy of many…

This conjecture claims the physical shelf order of a house's books acted as a retrieval prior on its authors' minds: works stored adjacently, in the same armarium division or press-mark run, were consulted in the same working sessions and therefore co-cited, so…

Late medieval catalogues identify a manuscript by the opening words of its second folio, a practice usually filed under anti-theft prudence; this conjecture claims it is a collision-driven invention in the strict identifier-engineering sense. Title alone distinguishes books until a house holds…