Stylometry for Noisy Medieval Data: Evaluating Paul Meyer's Hagiographic Hypothesis
This research provides a method for stylometric analysis of medieval texts, which is crucial for medievalists and literary historians working with noisy, anonymous corpora.
This paper addresses the challenge of stylometric analysis in noisy medieval texts by combining handwritten text recognition (HTR) with stylometry. The authors apply this workflow to hagiographic works in MS BnF, fr. 412 to evaluate Paul Meyer's hypothesis on hagiographic groupings and identify potential authorial groups in an anonymous corpus.
Stylometric analysis of medieval vernacular texts is still a significant challenge: the importance of scribal variation, be it spelling or more substantial, as well as the variants and errors introduced in the tradition, complicate the task of the would-be stylometrist. Basing the analysis on the study of the copy from a single hand of several texts can partially mitigate these issues (Camps and Cafiero, 2013), but the limited availability of complete diplomatic transcriptions might make this difficult. In this paper, we use a workflow combining handwritten text recognition and stylometric analysis, applied to the case of the hagiographic works contained in MS BnF, fr. 412. We seek to evaluate Paul Meyer's hypothesis about the constitution of groups of hagiographic works, as well as to examine potential authorial groupings in a vastly anonymous corpus.