Plague churns the flyleaf

Claim (verbatim)

Plague churns the flyleaf. This connects book provenance with demographic catastrophe. Every owner's death sends a book to the estate division and often to the market; mass mortality is therefore legible as accelerated turnover on flyleaves. The Black Death and its recurrences in the Mamluk lands should compress the intervals between successive dated ownership notes for roughly two generations, because books were changing hands on mortality's schedule rather than scholarship's, and the used-book market of Cairo and Damascus was flooded with dead men's libraries precisely when the pool of buyers had also thinned, accelerating resale chains further.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

For manuscripts circulating in Egypt and Syria, the median interval between successive dated ownership and transaction notes falling in 1350-1430 CE is at least 30% shorter than the median interval for notes falling in 1250-1340 CE, with the compression fading by 1450-1500. Primary clause: the 30%-or-greater median interval compression in 1350-1430; the verdict follows it.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: FIHRIST and Chester Beatty Library catalogue provenance fields, which transcribe dated ownership notes on Mamluk-provenance codices, with Süleymaniye records as a second sample.

Novelty / leakage triage

no prior located yet (provisional)

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.

[Independent blind re-audit 2026-07-08 (2nd pass, generator-independent), confidence medium. Double-confirmed: both the provisional pass and this re-audit located no prior formulation of the specific operationalized claim.] The building blocks are well studied: the Mamluk/used-book market and ownership-note diplomatics (Hirschler's work on the written word and reading certificates), the Black Death in the Middle East (Dols), and the practice of dated ownership/transaction notes on flyleaves. But I located no study that measures book TURNOVER via the interval between successive dated ownership notes and tests the specific demographic-shock prediction: that the median inter-note interval for notes dated 1350-1430 CE (Egypt/Syria) is >=30% shorter than for 1250-1340, fading by 1450-1500, reading plague as accelerated flyleaf churn. The plague is studied through chronicles and literary maqamas, not through ownership-note interval compression.

• Konrad Hirschler, 'The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands' / book-culture & ownership-note studies (Damascus/Cairo)
• Michael W. Dols, 'The Black Death in the Middle East' (1977) — Mamluk mortality
• FIHRIST / Chester Beatty provenance fields transcribing dated ownership notes on Mamluk codices

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.