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Coming to Terms With the Author
The inauguration of Herman Brinkman as a professor at the University of Amsterdam in 2009 has been significant for the development of stylometric research. This appointment had been made possible through the generous support of Brinkman’s host institution, the Huygens Institute (The Hague). The institute is not mentioned as an aside, for the Huygens Institute has been positioning itself in recent years as an important protagonist in the Low Countries’ ‘Digital humanities’ initiatives. (In that respect, it does not come as a surprise that both Van Dalen-Oskam and Van Zundert are also active at the Huygens.) Brinkman, who until then had not yet really ventured into the adventure of ‘Digital humanities’, surprised the audience with an excellent presentation entitled: Als de nachtuil. Auteurschap en overlevering van middeleeuwse teksten (‘Like the night owl. Authorship and survival of medieval texts’). In his talk, Brinkman showed that state-of-the-art techniques from stylometry (e.g. hierarchical clustering) were in fact able to support traditional research in a large number of cases of unresolved authorship.
Nevertheless, Brinkman too stressed that authorship attribution for medieval texts is not without problems. Research in medieval authorship attribution first of all shares a number of practical limitations with its present-day counterpart. If one is, for instance, to reliably attribute a text of disputed origin, both this text and the example data for the candidate authors need to be large enough. In addition, Brinkman stressed, medieval scholarship needs to account for a large number of other problems that are unique to medieval philology – the aforementioned scribal problems are the best example of this. In Brinkman’s view, authorship attribution in medieval texts currently has to meet certain restrictions, if it is to be methodologically sound. Brinkman proposed ‘ten commandments’ for authorship attribution in Middle Dutch studies (paraphrased in the box below). For the authorial comparison of texts, commandment 5, 6 & 7, for instance, advocated a unity of genre and date and place of composition. According to Brinkman, this unity had to eliminate the disturbing influence of factors such as discourse, diachronic language change and dialect. Only if one would adhere to these principles, according to Brinkman, an investigation into medieval authorship attribution would be fully methodologically sound.
Brinkman’s Ten Commandments[33] |
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1: Comparisons of authorial style based on word frequency analysis should be restricted to texts surviving in a copy by the same scribe (unity of scribe); |
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2: Authorial style analyses should avoid words that are dependent or indicative of specific content, genre, discourse or authorial perspective; |
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3: Writing samples need to be long enough to represent authorial usage (at least 2000 words); |
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4: One should only compare writing samples of a uniform length; |
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5, 6, 7: One should keep the factors ‘genre’, ‘date of composition’ and ‘region of composition’ stable across writing samples (unity of genre, date and region); |
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8: One needs to ensure a minimal distance between the original author’s exemplar and the manuscript copy used; |
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9: In order to assess the differences between two texts, it is necessary to include a tertium comparationis; |
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10: A text that is to be analyzed in comparison to other texts is best divided into parts of equal length in order to check the stability of the outcome of the test. |
Brinkman in his first commandment expressed the need for a unity of scribe in an authorship attribution experiment: if we compare the authorial style in two Middle Dutch texts, we could in principle only reliably compare them, when they survive in a copy that has been produced by one and the same scribe. Only in that way, we are able to isolate the impact of scribes on these texts. Already during his presentation, however, Brinkman indicated that his commandments are fairly restrictive. Note that if we would always fully adhere to them, we are actually unable to perform an authorial analysis on the bulk of the surviving Middle Dutch literature, since only a handful of texts have survived in a copy by the same scribe. In that respect, we could for instance never establish whether two of our most famous (and recently translated) texts, Karel ende Elegast and Van den vos Reynaerde were in fact written by one and the same author, since no copies of the texts by the same scribe survive.[34] It is clear that – although Brinkman’s commandments will form an important touchstone for years to come – research is needed into ways of easing the criteria imposed by them.