AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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The margin cools after the initial
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Claim (verbatim)
The margin cools after the initial. Bas-de-page drolleries look like free invention scattered at whim, but the planner's and patron's attention concentrated at the liturgical divisions, where the opening had to perform. If marginal invention is budgeted attention rather than a programme, drollery density and inventiveness should decay with folio distance from the nearest major division along a roughly geometric profile — and the same decay shape should recur in books from unrelated shops, because it traces attention, not iconography.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Primary clause (the verdict follows it): in at least 10 digitized psalters and books of hours with continuous marginal programmes, marginal-figure density in the five folios after a major textual division exceeds mid-interval density by at least 50 percent, with monotone decay across at least 70 percent of division intervals. Secondary clause: the unique-type fraction of hybrids and monsters decays in parallel, so invention and density cool together.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the British Library's fully digitized Luttrell Psalter (Add MS 42130) and Gorleston Psalter (Add MS 49622), with further marginal psalters on Digital Bodleian.
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); 278-title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts/dossiers seen; prompt pre-committed in docs/generated/conjectures_1001_wave_ledger.md and docs/generated/conjecture_fresh_fable_w05_prompt_20260708.txt. Wave W05 of docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_1001_CAMPAIGN_20260708.md. Novelty unverified by construction. A platform output-limit resume occurred before the single Write; no additional tool calls or information ingress occurred.
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.] Marginalia/drollery scholarship is rich (Camille, 'Image on the Edge' and 'Mirror in Parchment'; Sandler on Gothic manuscripts; the Luttrell/Gorleston programmes), and it is generally understood that decorative effort concentrates at major textual/liturgical divisions. But I located no work testing the specific ATTENTION-BUDGET decay claim: that marginal-figure density in the five folios after a major division exceeds mid-interval density by >=50% with monotone decay across >=70% of intervals, and that the unique-type fraction of hybrids/monsters decays in parallel, with the SAME decay shape recurring across unrelated shops (tracing attention, not iconography). The concentration-at-divisions intuition is qualitatively present; the geometric-decay profile and its shop-independence are the unlocated, operationalized parts.
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