Alphabetical piety travels

Status: Anticipated · untested

Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).

This is a proposed connection between two domains, generated by a language model. It is not an article and not evidence: it sits below the evidence/publication boundary. A quantitative prediction and a named kill-dataset are attached (when registered) so the claim stays falsifiable rather than merely evocative.

Claim (verbatim)

After confession became obligatory in 1215, Europe needed reference books for confessors, and two designs competed: systematic summae organized by theological order, and alphabetical ones organized like dictionaries. The conjecture is that alphabet beat system in the survival record by a wide, measurable margin: alphabetical pastoral manuals should show roughly double the surviving copies of systematic rivals of the same period, because a parish confessor under time pressure needs lookup, not architecture, and books that get used get recopied. The friars who wrote these tools were, in effect, running a field trial of information retrieval. If it holds, the alphabetization of moral theology was driven from the confessional queue upward, and copy counts record a user-interface victory.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause: the median surviving witness count of alphabetically organized pastoral summae (e.g., the Summa Pisana and its family) is at least twice the median of systematically organized confessors' manuals composed within the same half-century. Secondary: later systematic manuals acquire alphabetical indexes at a rising rate, converging on the winner's interface.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Bloomfield's Incipits of Latin Works on the Virtues and Vices witness lists, with Kaeppeli's Scriptores Ordinis Praedicatorum copy counts.

Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior. Kills and priors are credited here, by name, as they come in.

In the atlas

This conjecture is bridged, as an L1 lead, onto these Inferpedia subject pages.

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

The victory of alphabetical order in confessors' summae is described qualitatively (the Summa Pisana discarding systematic arrangement; Boyle's work on pastoral manuals), but the survival-count comparison — alphabetical works at double the median witnesses of systematic contemporaries — is un-run.

Bartholomeus de Sancto Concordio, Summa de casibus conscientiae (Les Enluminures description citing Boyle)

Predictions

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