AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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The gap widens downhill
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).
Claim (verbatim)
The standard picture holds that a few exceptional empresses commissioned books in an otherwise male field; the conjecture sharpens this into a gradient with a shape. Across rank tiers in the Byzantine book epigrams, the gender gap in patronage should be smallest at the top and widen monotonically downward: near-parity among imperial and court-rank patrons, women almost absent among the untitled. The mechanism is that high rank overrode gender by supplying women with independent property, separate households, and confessors who brokered commissions, while every one of those channels was rationed through husbands further down the ladder. If this holds, female patronage was a top-heavy phenomenon rather than a thin sprinkle over society, and any inference from famous patronesses to women in general overstates ordinary women's access to book production by an estimable factor.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
In DBBE dedication epigrams whose patrons carry rankable titles, the female share of patrons decreases monotonically across at least three rank tiers, indicatively at least 30% at imperial/court rank, around 15% at middling rank, and at most 10% among untitled patrons. Primary clause: the monotone decrease confirmed by a trend test across tiers; the indicative tier values are secondary.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
DBBE: patron epigrams stratified by title tier and patron gender; a Cochran-Armitage or equivalent statistical trend test decides.
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
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Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Composed blind by claude-fable-5 in zero-tool mode with no external information ingress, and emitted directly as a single text message.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
The literature on Byzantine female patronage is heavily weighted toward imperial and aristocratic women (Hill; Connor), implicitly anticipating top-heaviness; the monotone rank-tier trend test on DBBE patrons is un-run.
Predictions
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