Caroline-Vandyck/authorship-boendale
Caroline Vandyck · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
A School of One? Assessing Jan van Boendale’s Contribution to the Antwerp School through Authorship Verification and Intertextuality Abstract Jan van Boendale is the name that echoes through the Antwerp School, yet his precise contribution has remained elusive. The Antwerp School comprises eleven interrelated historiographic and didactic Middle Dutch texts produced in early fourteenth-century Antwerp. The texts have long been associated with the Antwerp clerk and prolific literary author, but the precise scope of his contribution forms a long-standing open question in Middle Dutch literary history. While his authorship of several texts is well established, scholars are divided between a minimalist position, attributing only a handful of works to him, and a maximalist position, ascribing the entire corpus to his hand. This study addresses that question using methods from the field of computational authorship verification and text reuse detection. The first three analyses focus on the most substantial Antwerp School texts and rely on TF-IDF vectors of lemmatised rhyme-word bigrams. Stylistic similarity is measured through threshold-based authorship verification, dimensionality reduction, and a bootstrapped nearest neighbour evaluation. The fourth analysis relies on TF-IDF vectors of all lemmatised words, with additional weight assigned to rhyme words to retrieve parallel verses between the works. This vector representation allows for the shortest Antwerp School texts to be included in the fifth analysis. This novel method is based on an overlap coefficient analysis between the works. Across all approaches, the Antwerp School emerges as a stylistically coherent and tightly intertextual corpus, with particularly remarkable affinities between Brabantsche yeesten and Van den derden Eduwaert, and between Melibeus and Dietsche doctrinale. Strikingly, the shorter texts display the same patterns as the longer ones, supporting the maximalist hypothesis of a single author behind the Antwerp School, most plausibly Jan van Boendale. This code accompanies: Vandyck, C. (2026). A School of One? Assessing Jan van Boendale’s Contribution to the Antwerp School through Authorship Verification and Intertextuality. Computational Humanities Research. Vandyck, C. (2025). The One and Only? Authorship Verification on Jan van Boendale and the Middle Dutch Antwerp School. Anthology of Computers and the Humanities, 3, 166–188. https://doi.org/10.63744/hhieMxHypx67 Vandyck, C. (2025, June 4). Authorship Verification in the Antwerp School. DHB2025, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15574043 Funding statement This research is part of the FWO funded project Boendale’s Many Faces: Modelling Historical Positionality in Jan van Boendale’s Oeuvre (c. 1280-1351?) (1133925N) and was conducted by Caroline Vandyck at the University of Antwerp, under supervision of Prof. Dr. Mike Kestemont and Prof. Dr. Remco Sleiderink. License CC-BY-SA