Medieval Authorship and Canonicity in the Digital Age – an Introduction

Jeroen Deploige and Jeroen De Gussem introduce Cluster 2 of Interfaces 8, on the topic of Medieval Authorship and Canonicity in the Digital Age

Language and thought in Hildegard of Bingen’s visionary trilogy : close and distant readings of a thinker’s development

By combining the methods of distant reading (computational stylistics) and close reading, the authors discuss the development of language and thought in Hildegard of Bingen's visionary works (Sciuias, Liber uite meritorum and Liber diuinorum operum). The visionary trilogy, although written over the course of three decades, raises the impression of a monolithic and seemingly unchanging voice. Moving beyond this impression, the interdisciplinary analysis presented here reveals that the trilogy exhibits interesting differences at the word level which cannot simply be explained through external historical circumstances (e.g. manuscript transmission or different secretaries). Instead, the results raise pertinent questions regarding the trilogy's internal development in didactic method, style, and philosophy

Assessing the stylistic properties of neurally generated text in authorship attribution

Recent applications of neural language models have led to an increased interest in the automatic generation of natural language. However impressive, the evaluation of neurally generated text has so far remained rather informal and anecdotal. Here, we present an attempt at the systematic assessment of one aspect of the quality of neurally generated text. We focus on a specific aspect of neural language generation: its ability to reproduce authorial writing styles. Using established models for authorship attribution, we empirically assess the stylistic qualities of neurally generated text. In comparison to conventional language models, neural models generate fuzzier text that is relatively harder to attribute correctly. Nevertheless, our results also suggest that neurally generated text offers more valuable perspectives for the augmentation of training data

Astronomy and Literature | Canon and Stylometrics

This eighth issue of Interfaces contains two thematic clusters: the first cluster, entitled The Astronomical Imagination in Literature through the Ages, is edited by Dale Kedwards; the second cluster, entitled Medieval Authorship and Canonicity in the Digital Age, is edited by Jeroen De Gussem and Jeroen Deploige

Computational Stylistics and Medieval Texts

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, vectorization and scaling, data analysis and visualization). 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

Animal imagery in statius' Thebaid: a common place for man and woman

This article means to give the reoccurrence of animal imagery in Statius’ Thebaid a satisfying, literary interpretation. Instead of denouncing the poet’s imitation of epic predecessors, we try to uncover his own distinctive voice. It is our argument that in the Thebaid the presence of animal imagery is connected to the transgression of gender-specific qualities or expectations. For men this means the corruption of male virtus, and for women the denunciation of their motherly role and a rebellious infringement of the text. Ultimately, the destabilization of gender boundaries through animal imagery can establish a convergence of the male and female realm, causing the animal imagery to become quite literally a “common place” for man and woman

Larger than life? A stylometric analysis of the multi-authored 'Vita' of Hildegard of Bingen

This article explores by aid of stylometric methods the collaborative authorship of the Vita Hildegardis, Hildegard of Bingen's (auto-?)biography. Both Hildegard and her biographers gradually contributed to the text in the course of the last years of Hildegard's life, and it was posthumously completed in the mid-1180s by end redactor Theoderic of Echternach. In between these termini a quo and ante quem the work was allegedly taken up but left unfinished by secretaries Godfrey of Disibodenberg and Guibert of Gembloux. In light of the fact that the Vita is an indispensable source in gaining historical knowledge on Hildegard's life, the question has often been raised whether the Life of Hildegard is – by dint of contributions by multiple stakeholders – a larger-than-life depiction of the visionary's life course. Specifically the 'autobiographical' passages included in the Vita, in which Hildegard is allegedly cited directly and is taken to recount biographical information in the first-person singular, have been approached with suspicion. By applying state-of-the-art computional methods for the automatic detection of writing style (stylometry), the delicate questions of authenticity and collaborative authorship of this (auto?)hagiographical text are addressed