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Fiction depreciates first
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Claim (verbatim)
Medieval inventories and estate valuations price books, and they let us watch the first European market in fiction behave like a market. This conjecture claims secular literature was the first book class to depreciate with age: in valuations, romances and secular verse lose assessed value as they get older — last generation's romance is a used novel — while psalters, books of hours, and liturgical books hold value age-flat, because their worth was sacramental and material rather than fashionable. Fashion, the defining economics of modern literature, is already measurable in fourteenth-century price behavior, and only on the secular shelf. If this holds, the medieval book trade contained two distinct asset classes with opposite depreciation curves, and the moment vernacular fiction became fashion-priced can be dated from the inventories themselves.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
In pre-1600 inventories and historic catalogues with itemized valuations, secular vernacular literary manuscripts older than 50 years at valuation will be assessed at no more than half the median value of newer copies of comparable size and decoration, while devotional and liturgical books will show no significant age discount; primary clause: the presence of an age discount for secular literature combined with its absence for devotional books in the same inventories.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts historic-catalogue and inventory entries carrying prices and valuations, filtered to pre-1600 sources with book-age determinable from the records.
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Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Blind fresh claude-fable-5 subagent (max effort), single-Write discipline, 2026-07-09. W07, first wave of the operator-directed medieval-European block (W07-W10).
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Searched medieval book valuations. Price studies exist (Bell's English price series; Merton and Hereford valuations, the latter showing appreciation over a century), but no analysis of age-related depreciation by genre class (secular literary vs devotional/liturgical) was located; the thin book-economics literature makes me unwilling to call it novel.
Predictions
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