Easter tables recopy the choir

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)

Liturgical books wore out, but this conjecture claims their replacement was scheduled rather than merely occasioned: because service books traveled with computus material whose Easter tables expire on 19-year and 532-year cycles, houses recopied their choir books when their tables ran out, making liturgical book production pulse on calendrical multiples. The calendar was not just content but a built-in obsolescence clock, and scriptoria batched the new antiphoner with the new tables. If this holds, dated liturgical colophons should cluster just before great-cycle expirations in a way non-liturgical colophons do not — the clearest possible signature of the calendar acting as a recopying clock.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause: in the corpus of dated Latin liturgical manuscripts, colophon dates show statistically significant excess (at least 20% above a smoothed baseline) in the decade preceding major Easter-table expirations current in their region (e.g. the ends of widely circulating 532-year and 19-year table runs), while dated non-liturgical manuscripts from the same scriptoria show no such excess; absence of the differential clustering kills the item. Secondary clause: the effect is stronger in books that physically contain calendars than in those that do not.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

The Benedictine catalogues of dated manuscripts (Manuscrits dates series, published for France, Austria, etc.) split liturgical versus non-liturgical, with table-expiration years computed from the published computus literature (Jones, Bedae Opera de Temporibus; the Fried/Declercq cycle chronology) — a rate/clustering statistical test.

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

Generated blind in a single Write from the inline prompt only, with no file reads, web access, database queries, or other tool calls.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

The clock mechanism is documented for computus itself: Easter tables were extended and recopied as they approached expiry (the anonymous 616 continuation of Dionysius, Bede's 725 great cycle), so table-expiry-driven copying activity is established; the claimed colophon-date pulse in liturgical (non-computus) book production is only the un-run statistic.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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