Duplicates mark the classroom

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 a medieval library's duplicate ratio is an institutional signature legible without reading a single statute: houses that taught bought throughput, multiple copies of the same core texts for simultaneous users, while contemplative houses bought coverage, one copy of many things. The join is between inventory theory, where service rate dictates stock depth, and catalogue composition across mendicant convents, colleges, and monasteries. Librarians made it so because a friary lector with twenty students needed five copies of the same Sentences more than one copy of five chronicles. If this holds, duplicate fraction becomes a census instrument for detecting teaching activity at houses whose educational role left no other record, and the reconstructed catalogues turn into an institutional map of medieval schooling. The evidence base is documentary, the surviving catalogue lists themselves.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause (verdict follows it): in reconstructed catalogues, the duplicate fraction, titles held in two or more copies, is higher in mendicant convent and college collections than in Benedictine and Cistercian collections of matched size and date by at least a factor of 1.5, significant under a matched comparison. Secondary clause: within any house the duplicated titles are disproportionately taxatio-listed school texts. Statistical test.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

MLGB3 and the Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues.

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

Humphreys's foundational studies of mendicant book provisions document the friars' pragmatic, teaching-oriented collections built for study and preaching, in explicit contrast to monastic collection profiles. The duplicate-fraction factor-of-1.5 matched comparison is un-run, but the direction (teaching houses stocked working copies of core texts) is established in this literature.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

Weigh in

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