Stylometry for Noisy Medieval Data: Evaluating Paul Meyer’s Hagiographic Hypothesis

Stylometric analysis of medieval vernacular texts is still much of a challenge: the importance of scribal variation, be it graphic or more substantial, as well as the variants and errors introduced in the tradition, complicates the task of the would-be stylometrist. Basing the analysis on the study of the copy from a single hand of several texts can partially be a way around this issue (Camps & Cafiero, 2012), but the limited availability of complete diplomatic transcriptionmight make it difficult. In this paper, we use a workflow combining handwritten text recognition and stylometric analysis, and apply it to the case of the hagiographic works contained in MS BnF, fr. 412. We seek to evaluate Paul Meyer's hypothesis about the constitution of groups of hagiographic works, as well as to examine potential authorial groupings in a vastly anonym corpus.