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Glossed books breed webs
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)
Glossed books breed webs. 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 century in a single line of descent. Contamination is thus not noise but a curriculum signature: an editor's despairing verdict of an open recension should be predictable from whether medieval teachers assigned the text.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Score the per-author transmission essays in a standard survey for explicit editorial declarations of contamination or open recension. Primary clause: among core school authors (Ovid, Juvenal, Persius, Horace, Lucan, Statius, Boethius, the Distichs of Cato), at least 80 percent are declared contaminated. Secondary: among thin-tradition prose authors surviving in five or fewer primary witnesses, at most 30 percent are. The verdict follows the 80 percent clause.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the per-author transmission entries in Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics (ed. Reynolds, Oxford 1983).
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Generated by a fresh Fable-tier instance (claude-fable-5) at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo reads, no web searches, no DB queries; single packet Write was the only tool use); title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts or dossiers seen (sidecar docs/generated/conjecture_fresh_fable_w01_titlelist_20260708.md); prompt pre-committed in docs/generated/conjectures_1001_wave_ledger.md and docs/generated/conjecture_fresh_fable_w01_prompt_20260708.txt. Wave W01 of docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_1001_CAMPAIGN_20260708.md. Novelty unverified by construction.
Novelty / leakage triage
provisional — model-triaged, shepherd review pending
A provisional first pass authored by the model (Opus), not yet confirmed by the shepherd. It carries the same dated-search requirements as an authoritative verdict but is excluded from every headline figure and cannot underwrite a prediction until a shepherd confirms it. Provisional reading: Leaked (already exists in the literature).
The connection is a foundational principle of textual criticism, not a new join. Since Pasquali, it has been established that heavily-read, much-copied traditions become contaminated / open recensions (horizontal transmission from marginal variants), while little-read texts descend in closed single lines; West's manual states the same. The very kill-dataset makes it visible: Reynolds's Texts and Transmission repeatedly declares 'open recension' / contamination for precisely the school authors (Ovid, Horace, Juvenal, Boethius, etc.). The item's 80%/30% thresholds quantify an already-published relationship between curricular popularity and contamination.
- Giorgio Pasquali, Storia della tradizione e critica del testo (1934) — Contamination/horizontal transmission characteristic of popular, much-copied traditions
- M. L. West, Textual Criticism and Editorial Technique (Teubner, 1973) — Contamination common in widely-read texts; closed stemmata for rare ones
- L. D. Reynolds (ed.), Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics (Oxford, 1983) — The per-author entries already declare open recension for the school authors
Predictions
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