The fourth degree overwrites the seventh

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)

Until 1215 the Church banned marriage within seven degrees of kinship; the Fourth Lateran Council cut the ban to four. Old canonical and penitential texts kept being copied after the change. The conjecture is that scribes silently repaired the law in transit: post-1215 copies of pre-1215 texts should emend 'seventh' to 'fourth' at a high and one-directional rate, while no pre-1215 manuscript ever reads 'fourth' — giving philologists a clean dating trip-wire hidden inside a single numeral. Copyists did it because a service book or manual quoting a repealed prohibition was pastorally dangerous, not merely obsolete. If it holds, thousands of undated canonical manuscripts acquire a terminus from one word, and we gain a rare direct measurement of how fast working clergy updated repealed law.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause: in the collated traditions of pre-1215 canonical and penitential texts stating the seven-degree rule, the reading 'fourth' occurs only in manuscripts datable after 1215, and among post-1215 copies the emended reading appears in a substantial share (a third or more) within two generations; the asymmetry (no pre-1215 'fourth') is the verdict. Secondary: emendation rates are higher in pastoral manuals than in library copies of old collections.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Critical apparatus of penitential and canonical collections in the MGH and CCSL editions, plus Friedberg's apparatus to Gratian on the consanguinity canons.

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 1215 reduction from seven to four degrees and the messy manuscript transmission of canonical texts are both well documented, and editors do use updated readings as dating evidence ad hoc, but the systematic one-directional numeral-emendation tripwire across collated traditions has not been assembled or tested.

Fourth Lateran Council canons and consanguinity reduction

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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