Anthologies are funerals

Claim (verbatim)

The books that preserve medieval Europe's lyric traditions — the four Old English poetic codices, the great troubadour chansonniers, the Minnesang anthologies — are treated as products of their traditions' vitality. This conjecture claims they are products of death: large-scale lyric anthologization happens one to three generations after the performance culture stops producing, and typically in a different place or class than the singing happened, because a living song culture stores itself in performers and only a dying one needs parchment — the anthology is the tombstone a successor culture erects over an art it can no longer perform. Salvage, not celebration, makes the big book. If this holds, the gap between a lyric corpus's composition dates and its manuscript dates is not accidental loss but a law-like mourning period, and any tradition anthologized while demonstrably still productive would break the model.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Across four corpora — troubadour lyric (BEdT chansonnier datings versus poet floruits), Minnesang (Handschriftencensus datings), Old English verse (the four codices versus composition ranges), and skaldic court poetry (skaldic.org) — at least 70 percent of surviving lyric witnesses will postdate the end of the tradition's productive period by more than 50 years; primary clause: the pooled 70 percent threshold, with the troubadour case (BEdT) as the named decisive corpus.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: BEdT manuscript datings against troubadour floruit dates, with parallel checks in Handschriftencensus and skaldic.org.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

Searched the chronology of lyric anthologization. The specific finding is published for the core corpora: the first chansonniers date from when classic troubadour song was drawing to a close, with gaps of up to two centuries between performance and written preservation, and often in another place and class (Italy; Zurich patricians for Manesse). The cross-corpus 70% quantification merely aggregates published per-tradition findings.

• J. Haines, Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouvères: The Changing Identity of Medieval Music (CUP)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.