The middleman retires

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)

Aquinas, like every schoolman, first met most authorities second-hand, through Peter Lombard, Gratian, and florilegia. The surprising claim joins the commercial pecia system to the intimate question of what a master actually read: an authority converts from mediated to direct citation over a career only when its full text became rentable in the Paris exemplar network, so the upgrade from anthology-knowledge to first-hand knowledge was governed by shop inventory, not intellectual priority. The mechanism is cost: masters verified quotations when verification was a short walk and a small fee, and otherwise kept citing the extract they already had. If this holds, the source-profile of the greatest scholastic corpus is partly an artifact of one city's rental stock, and library history acquires a precise causal lever on citation behaviour.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause (verdict follows it): partitioning authorities in the Aquinas citation corpus by whether their full works are attested in the Paris pecia system, the direct-to-mediated odds ratio rises significantly from the early Scriptum on the Sentences to the late works for pecia-available authorities (predict at least a doubling of odds), while remaining statistically flat for pecia-absent authorities of comparable citation volume. Statistical test on the interaction term.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

The Aquinas citation corpus (direct-vs-mediated coding with work chronology) cross-referenced with Giovanna Murano's published census of pecia-diffused works (Opere diffuse per exemplar e pecia).

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 with no file reads, web access, or database queries; all context was supplied inline in the launching prompt.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

That Aquinas's direct vs mediated access to authorities shifted over his career with textual availability is well documented — reliance on the Gloss and florilegia early, Moerbeke's translations and commissioned Greek-father translations (Catena aurea, 'feci transferri') enabling direct citation later. The pecia-availability odds-ratio test is un-run, but availability governing the mediated-to-direct upgrade is the established qualitative direction.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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