The local saint keeps the old Life

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)

In the tenth century Symeon Metaphrastes issued a stylistically standardized menologion that swept older saints' Lives out of circulation — mostly. This conjecture says the survivors of that sweep map institutional muscle: pre-metaphrastic versions of a Life keep being copied after 1100 chiefly where the saint had dedicated institutions — sees, monasteries, offices invoking the saint on their lead seals — in the region of copying. Institutions defended the version their liturgy, relics, and privileges had been built on; textually unattached saints yielded to the capital's standard. If it holds, resistance to textual standardization becomes predictable from the sigillographic map of local devotion, and the survival of old hagiography is revealed as property defense.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

For saints in the metaphrastic corpus, retention of post-1100 witnesses of the pre-metaphrastic version in Pinakes is significantly more frequent when seal-attested institutions dedicated to that saint existed in the copying region than when they did not. Primary clause: the retention differential; the verdict follows it.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Pinakes witnesses of pre-metaphrastic versus metaphrastic versions, joined to institutional dedications in the Dumbarton Oaks seals catalogue.

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 by claude-fable-5 in a single Write from the inline prompt and existing-title list only, with no file reads, web access, or database queries.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

The Metaphrastic sweep and the partial persistence of pre-metaphrastic versions are mapped in detail (Ehrhard's inventory of 90 pre-metaphrastic menologia; Høgel on the collection's dominance), so differential retention is a recognized phenomenon; predicting retention from seal-attested local institutional dedication is un-run.

C. Høgel, Symeon Metaphrastes: Rewriting and Canonization (2002)
A. Ehrhard, Überlieferung und Bestand der hagiographischen Literatur (1937-52)

Predictions

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