The pecia is a packet

Status: Prior

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 pecia is a packet. Packet-switched content distribution meets the medieval university book trade: the pecia system chunked exemplars into pieces copied in parallel and reassembled, so stemmatic affiliation should switch at known pecia boundaries — an error signature that continuous-exemplar copying cannot produce.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

In collated pecia traditions (Aquinas, Peter Lombard), >= 40% of surviving copies change nearest stemmatic relative at one or more attested pecia boundaries, and the probability of an affiliation switch at a boundary exceeds the within-pecia switch probability by a factor >= 5, while non-pecia control traditions show boundary alignment at chance; no boundary effect kills it.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Leonine Commission's critical apparatus for Aquinas cross-indexed with Destrez's pecia-boundary tables.

Provenance

Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5

Generated by a fresh Fable-tier instance at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo/web/DB access); titles-only knowledge of existing items, embedded in titles_supplied per the batch-2 lane rule; prompt pre-committed in docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_BATCH3_20260705.md (b043140). Novelty unverified by construction. titles_supplied stripped to the committed sidecar conjecture_fresh_fablemax_batch3_titles_supplied_20260705.md at import (schema additionalProperties:false; relaxation queued).

Novelty / leakage triage

Adjacent (closely related prior work exists)

Pecia mechanics are well documented and a related phenomenon is OBSERVED (scribal hand-changes at pecia boundaries within single codices of Sentences-commentary traditions); the conjecture's distinct claim — stemmatic nearest-relative switching between complete copies at boundaries, against non-pecia controls — was not located as tested.

'Quod Exemplaria vera habeant et correcta: the distribution and purpose of the pecia system' — The institutional mechanics

Predictions

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