Middle age travels by anthology

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)

This conjecture claims the mediated share of citations is not a rising function of an authority's age but an inverse-U: the very oldest authorities (Scripture, Aristotle, Augustine) were owned and read whole as curriculum texts, near-contemporaries circulated as fresh complete works, but authorities dead roughly 300 to 800 years, the Greek fathers, the minor Latins, the Carolingians, reached thirteenth-century desks almost entirely as florilegium extracts. The mechanism is a hump-shaped transmission regime: the middle of the Christian past was old enough for its full codices to be scarce, but not canonical enough for the schools to keep them in print-like circulation. If this holds, direct patristic learning in the golden age of scholasticism was concentrated at the age extremes, and the entire middle of tradition arrived pre-chewed, a quantitative correction to the picture of the scholastic as a reader of the fathers.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause (verdict follows it): in the Aquinas citation corpus, mediated share as a function of authority age at citation follows an inverse-U, peaking in the 300-to-800-year band, with a quadratic or spline fit significantly outperforming monotone alternatives. Secondary clause: the peak flattens in late works as new translations and compilation projects backfilled full texts. Statistical test.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

The Aquinas citation corpus direct-vs-mediated coding with authority dates.

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

It is documented that Aquinas and contemporaries read Scripture, Aristotle, and Augustine whole while receiving Greek fathers and the middle tradition through the Gloss, florilegia, and new translation projects (Catena aurea) that backfilled full texts late in the century. The inverse-U spline fit is un-run, but the age-band transmission pattern it operationalizes is established.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

Weigh in

No community feedback yet.

Add your take

Posted immediately (spam is removed). Community feedback is never an adjudicated verdict and never changes this conjecture's triage label or status above.