Computational Stylistics and Medieval Texts
Jeroen De Gussem · 2022
This entry gives a survey of the application of computational stylistics to medieval texts. Computational stylistics, alternatively stylometry, is an umbrella term for a set of computer algorithms that quantify and statistically harvest a document’s stylistic features in order to make statistically informed deductions concerning authorship, dating, influence, provenance, and/or stylistic-literary characteristics. The entry firstly traces the history of the method from proto-stylometric ancestors such as the sixteenth-century humanist Lorenzo Valla to modern twentieth-century founding fathers Frederick Mosteller and David L. Wallace. Secondly, it traces the broad diversity of research aims that scholars of the Middle Ages have when making use of this method, e.g. authorship attribution, the impact of time on style (stylochronometry), the influence of copyists and scribes, assessing dependencies between manuscripts, tracing reliances on same source texts or school models, literary collaboration, scriptological and dialectological questions, translingual influence, the impact of genre, etc. Thirdly, the entry surveys some of the most common techniques applied to medieval texts (preprocessing, feature extraction, and selection, vectorisation and scaling, data analysis, and visualisation). In conclusion, an attempt at an adequate summary is made of the future(s) which practitioners of stylometry for medieval texts envision for this relatively young field.