Book One swallows the Sentences

Claim (verbatim)

Book One swallows the Sentences: the Sentences-commentary genre drifted from pastoral coverage to speculative concentration on a measurable schedule. Disputational prestige, not curricular duty, set the incentives, and prestige lived in Book I's frontier problems — divine knowledge, future contingents, intension of forms — so between 1250 and 1400 commentaries should progressively hypertrophy Book I and abandon Book IV (sacraments), until many stop reaching Book IV at all. The genre's own tables of contents form a clock of scholasticism's speculative turn, decidable from coverage records alone without reading a line of doctrine.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Using per-book coverage recorded for each commentary in the standard repertory, group dated commentaries into half-century cohorts from 1250 to 1400. Primary clause: the proportion of commentaries treating all four books falls monotonically across the three cohorts, with a total drop of at least 30 percentage points; the verdict follows this clause. Secondary clause: among complete commentaries, Book I's share of total length rises across the same cohorts.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Stegmuller's Repertorium Commentariorum in Sententias Petri Lombardi (published, recording per-book coverage for each commentary), with Doucet's supplement.

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).

The speculative turn is a recognized narrative: later-medieval Sentences commentaries increasingly concentrated on Book I's frontier questions (divine knowledge, future contingents) and abandoned Book IV, many never reaching the sacraments (Rosemann; incomplete Book-I-only commentaries such as Walter Chatton's Lectura). Not located: the item's coverage-clock quantification -- the proportion of commentaries treating all four books falling monotonically by >=30 points across the 1250-1400 half-century cohorts, with Book I's length-share rising -- computed from Stegmuller's per-book coverage records.

• Philipp W. Rosemann, The Story of a Great Medieval Book: Peter Lombard's Sentences (University of Toronto Press, 2007) — The narrowing of the commentary genre toward Book I's speculative questions
• Friedrich Stegmuller, Repertorium Commentariorum in Sententias Petri Lombardi (with Doucet's supplement) — The kill dataset recording per-book coverage of each commentary

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.