Plague saints stamp the date

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)

Books of hours ended with suffrages — short memorials to chosen saints — and the choice tracked what owners feared. The conjecture turns two plague intercessors into a precision dating instrument: Sebastian's suffrage frequency should double within a generation after the Black Death of 1348-49, and Roch — whose cult formed only in the fifteenth century — should be absent from books made before about 1420, so that any book of hours containing a Roch suffrage carries a hard terminus post quem. Buyers voted with their commissions, and epidemic terror moved the vote within years, not centuries. If it holds, tens of thousands of undated books of hours can be sorted by their saints, and devotional contents become as chronologically sharp as watermarks.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause: among dated books of hours, presence of a Roch suffrage implies production after 1420 in at least 95% of cases — this terminus clause carries the verdict. Secondary: Sebastian suffrage frequency at least doubles between books dated 1320-1348 and books dated 1350-1380.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Dated and datable books of hours described in Digital.Bodleian and BnF Gallica catalogues, with their suffrage lists.

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

Sebastian's post-1348 surge and Roch's strictly fifteenth-century cult are documented (Roch 'rocketed to success as an efficacious plague protector in the late-fifteenth century'), and catalogers informally use these saints for dating, but the calibrated instrument — 95% post-1420 terminus for Roch suffrages, quantified Sebastian doubling — is un-run on dated horae corpora.

'St Roch and the Angel in Renaissance Art' (2020)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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