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No I find it credible. The "ecological model" is really a statistical model, see "The German tank problem". It seems to have pretty solid foundations.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem

Really cool article, thanks for the link!

Ye I guess there has to be a nice random distribution for the model to work, where as some manuscripts probably were more protected and replicated than 1100s shovelware.

40000 manuscripts over a period of centuries is very strange. That’d be less than a manuscript a day for the whole continent.

I know literacy was low, but that’s just unreasonable. “People only use 10% of their brains” territory.

The estimate is not for all manuscripts, but a specific niche of them - "Instead of focusing on all medieval manuscripts, many of which are religious texts, the study focused on narrative and chivalric fiction".

If we include the larger categories (like the religious texts) then it would be higher, but not that much higher, given the many man-months of work each copy required.