The council's bookmark

Claim (verbatim)

The council's bookmark: conciliar florilegia were canonization machines for individual works, not authors. A patristic work excerpted in the acta of an ecumenical council acquired a permanent copying premium over its author's other works, because the acta circulated empire-wide as authoritative proof-text maps and later catenists, librarians, and controversialists copied along the council's bookmarks. Authority in Greek theology attached at work level through a datable bureaucratic event — and the premium should still be legible a millennium later in raw witness counts.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Take the patristic works excerpted in the dogmatic florilegia attached to the acta of Chalcedon and Constantinople II. Primary clause: the median Pinakes witness count of the excerpted works is at least twice the median of the same authors' non-excerpted works of the same genre; the verdict follows this clause. Secondary clause: the premium is proportionally larger for minor authors, for whom the conciliar excerpt is the main claim to fame, than for first-rank authors whose whole corpus was copied regardless.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the in-house Pinakes works-by-witnesses counts, crossed with the florilegium contents lists in Schwartz's Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum (public).

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: Adjacent (closely related prior work exists).

That conciliar excerption conferred work-level authority -- dogmatic florilegia embedded in council acta circulated empire-wide as authoritative proof-text maps, and several patristic works survive chiefly through such florilegia -- is recognized (patristic-anthology scholarship; Alexakis on the dogmatic florilegia of the acta). Not located: the item's measured copying premium -- the median Pinakes witness count of works excerpted in the Chalcedon/Constantinople-II florilegia running >=2x that of the same authors' non-excerpted works of like genre, the premium larger for minor authors -- as an executed cross of Pinakes against Schwartz's ACO contents lists.

• 'Patristic anthology', Wikipedia (dogmatic florilegia incorporated in conciliar acta; works surviving only in florilegia) — Conciliar florilegia as authority-conferring, empire-wide proof-text maps
• In-house Pinakes counts crossed with the florilegium contents in Schwartz's Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum — The kill dataset for the excerpted-vs-non-excerpted witness-count premium

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.