The price list never forgets

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)

The university taxatio was administratively additive: titles entered the stationers' price list when demand appeared, but were rarely struck off when demand died, so successive lists accreted a fossil layer of dead stock. This conjecture joins regulatory economics to the two surviving Paris lists of 1275 and 1304, claiming a measurable fraction of the 1304 list was already commercially and intellectually inert, kept on the books because deletion required a decision nobody was paid to make. If this holds, a standard evidentiary practice breaks: the taxatio cannot be read as a snapshot of the living curriculum, as it routinely is, but as cumulative sediment needing a decay correction, and comparing list composition against dated citation currency calibrates exactly that correction. The evidence base is documentary, the account-and-regulation record of the book trade itself.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause (verdict follows it): at least 20 percent of titles on the 1304 Paris taxatio show collapsed citation currency, meaning no or declining contacts in dated scholastic corpora of 1290-1320 and flat FAMA attestation curves, while remaining listed. Secondary clause: essentially no high-currency title of the 1275 list is dropped by 1304. Documentary; tested as a composition audit.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

The Paris taxatio lists of 1275 and 1304 (Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis), audited against the Aquinas citation corpus era frequencies and FAMA dated attestations.

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

The source-critical caution that the taxatio lists cannot be read as clean snapshots is anticipated: Rouse & Rouse and Ray analyze the relationship and overlap of the 1275 and 1304 lists and the administrative character of their compilation. The 20% dead-stock audit against dated citation currency and FAMA curves is un-run, but the documentary direction is established.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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