Stylometry for Medieval Authorship Studies: An Application to Rhyme Words

In the digital humanities much research has been done concerning stylometry, the computational study of style. Literary authorship at-tribution, especially, has been a central topic. After a brief introduction, I will discuss the enormous potential of this paradigm for medieval philology, a field that studies so many texts of unknown or disputed origin. At the same time, it will be stressed that stylometry’s application to medieval texts is currently not without problems: many attribution techniques are still controversial and do not account for the specific nature of medieval text production. Throughout this paper, I will tentatively apply two well-established attribution techniques (principal components analysis and Burrows’s Delta) to a number of case studies in Middle Dutch studies. These analyses shall be restricted to rhyme words, since these words are less likely to have been altered by scribes.