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Mismatched parts mark the factory
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Claim (verbatim)
A book of hours contains several components that each betray a local liturgical 'use' — the calendar's feasts, the litany's saints, the office variants. In a bespoke book made where it would be prayed, these parts agree. The conjecture is that internal disagreement between calendar and litany is a signature of commercial export production: Flemish and Parisian workshops assembling books for foreign markets combined a customer-facing calendar (localized to the buyer) with in-stock quires of litany and offices (localized to nobody), and the mismatch rate therefore rises as production commercializes. If it holds, a purely philological inconsistency becomes an economic instrument, measuring the industrialization of devotion book by book and decade by decade.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Primary clause: among localized and dated books of hours, the rate of use-mismatch between calendar and litany rises from under 10% in pre-1350 books to over 40% in post-1450 books attributable to Flemish export production for the English market. Secondary: mismatched books cluster on a small number of repeated litany profiles (workshop stock).
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Books-of-hours catalogue descriptions with use assignments in Digital.Bodleian and BnF Gallica, supplemented by printed catalogues of dated horae.
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Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
This packet was produced in a single blind Write from model-internal knowledge only, with no repository reads, web access, database queries, or any tool call other than this Write.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Calendar and litany are standard localization evidence and catalogues explicitly note Flemish-market books whose calendars/litanies disagree with their intended English use, so the mechanism is anticipated; the quantified rise of mismatch rate as an index of commercialization (under 10% pre-1350 to over 40% post-1450) is un-run.
Predictions
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