Jan Maliszewski (University of Warsaw)
Can we map anonymous contributions in scholastic corpora — and possibly do this at scale?
In this paper, I will present the design of a stylometric study aimed at analyzing anonymous contributions in medieval Latin university-based literary production. My focus will be on problems related to sources stemming from records of oral teaching, known as reportationes. These notes, authored by university students, were sometimes developed into master’s regular literary works. This process was likely fairly common, but very little is known about the exact roles of student reportatores and later editors. While the direct object of the study is the collection of Stephen Langton’s Quaestiones (c. 1180-1206), the addressed textual phenomena are relevant to a much wider class of sources. I will discuss the philological motivation behind the problem, moving to address two key obstacles hindering the application of stylometric techniques in the context of scholastic corpora: the prevalence of prohibitively short samples, and the limited availability of machine-readable data. I will discuss strategies for managing both issues, arguing that stylometric analysis based on HTR-extracted data can be used as an exploratory technique alongside the customary codicological and stemmatic analysis.
The meeting will be in English and will take hybrid form. To participate online please sign up here: https://forms.gle/4K1MJ7V9JW8MDKmq7