Bulls freeze, chapters version

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)

The Franciscan Rule was locked into a papal bull in 1223; the Dominican constitutions were deliberately kept amendable by annual general chapters. The conjecture is that these two legal fixation modes produced two opposite textual physiologies, measurable in the manuscripts: the bulled Rule should show almost no substantive variance across hundreds of copies but an enormous halo of commentary (since change could only happen outside the text), while the Dominican constitutions should survive as a stack of dated redactional layers with substantive variance between them and comparatively little commentary (since change happened inside the text). Friars produced exactly the literature their legal machinery allowed. If it holds, the density of commentary around a normative text indexes how frozen the text is — a general law of legislated literature testable across religious orders.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause: collation shows the Regula bullata's substantive variant rate per thousand words to be an order of magnitude below that across dated redactions of the early Dominican constitutions, while counts of medieval expositions run the other way (Franciscan Rule commentaries outnumbering Dominican constitutional commentaries several-fold). Secondary: Franciscan textual energy concentrates in papal declarationes rather than variants.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Esser's critical edition of the Opuscula of Francis of Assisi and Thomas's edition of the earliest Dominican constitutions, with commentary censuses in the Franciscan and Dominican bibliographic repertories (Kaeppeli).

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

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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

The two legal fixation modes are separately well studied (Esser's edition of the bulled Rule; Thomas's edition of the layered Dominican constitutions), but the comparative textual-physiology law — variant rate vs commentary density as a function of legal frozenness — has not been proposed or measured across orders.

Rule of Saint Francis, textual history of Regula bullata

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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