Jeroen Deploige

Collaborative authorship in the twelfth century: A stylometric study of Hildegard of Bingen and Guibert of Gembloux

Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) is one of the most influential female authors of the Middle Ages. From the point of view of computational stylistics, the oeuvre attributed to Hildegard is fascinating. Hildegard dictated her texts to secretaries in Latin, a language of which she did not master all grammatical subtleties. She therefore allowed her scribes to correct her spelling and grammar. Especially Hildegards last collaborator, Guibert of Gembloux, seems to have considerably reworked her works during his secretaryship. Whereas her other scribes were only allowed to make superficial linguistic changes, Hildegard would have permitted Guibert to render her language stylistically more elegant. In this article, we focus on two shorter texts: the Visio ad Guibertum missa and Visio de Sancto Martino, both of which Hildegard allegedly authored during Guiberts secretaryship. We analyze a corpus containing the letter collections of Hildegard, Guibert, and Bernard of Clairvaux using a number of common stylometric techniques. We discuss our results in the light of the Synergy Hypothesis, suggesting that texts resulting from collaboration can display a style markedly different from that of the collaborating authors. Finally, we demonstrate that Guibert must have re- worked the disputed visionary texts allegedly authored by Hildegard to such an extent that style-oriented computational procedures attribute the texts to Guibert.

Manuscript and Memory in Religious Communities in the Medieval Low Countries. An Introduction

The special issue ‘Manuscript and Memory in Religious Communities in the Medieval Low Countries’ aims at critically questioning how memorial practices, developed through and shaped by the medieval manuscript culture, contributed to strengthening religious communal life between the tenth and the early sixteenth centuries. The introductory article briefly examines the research traditions that have informed this collection of essays. On the one hand there is the tradition of memory studies, which since the late 1980s has become increasingly important in many humanities disciplines, particularly in medieval studies with its significant interest in the impact of the religiously-inspired memoria culture on medieval society. On the other hand, since the 1990s the same field of medieval studies has also been marked by the rise of material philology, which has not only fuelled many theoretical debates about the way in which our textual heritage should be understood and edited, but has also resulted in a renewed ap...

'Van groeter bannicheit hoers herten': de conditionering van de alledaagse gevoelswereld in vrouwelijke gemeenschappen uit de laatmiddeleeuwse Moderne Devotie

The Devotio Moderna was one of the most important movements of religious reform in the late Middle Ages, especially in the Low Countries and the northern parts of the Rhineland. The new devout attached particular importance to the daily process of spiritual progress through good deeds, meditations, spiritual exercises, and continuous building of the self via self-examination and mutual correction. In accordance with their belief in the importance of self-fashioning, devouts also developed a remarkable interest in the emotional life of the individual. They aimed at detaching themselves completely from their own natural and intuitive emotions in order to lead a truly virtuous life. In this article we focus on the conditioning of the emotional life in three houses of devout women belonging to the Devotio Moderna through the lens of so-called sister books written in these communities. These sources allow us to deal with the emotional vocabulary deployed by the sisters, with how different emotions were assessed in specific situations, and with their physical expression. Finally, we analyse the narrative power of the many anecdotes recounted in the sister books. These stories not only conveyed to the younger sisters models for exemplary emotional behaviour, but must also have functioned as spiritually sound emotional triggers among the ones who read or heard them.

Time modelling in digital humanities : challenges posed by the development of a database of Medieval charters

Abstract Information management systems aimed at fully exploiting imperfect temporal data require advanced data modelling and data querying facilities. In this paper, we study how novel computational intelligence techniques can help to develop such facilities. More specifically, we describe how possibility theory can be used to model and handle the uncertainty that is inherent to vague, linguistic time specifications in a mathematically sound way. These mathematical time representations can then be stored in a database and advanced query evaluation techniques, for adequately coping with the represented uncertainty, can be used. Medieval charters are a typical example of documents on which related temporal information is often imperfect. To show the applicability of our technology, we illustrate how the development of the Diplomata Belgica database, a database describing medieval charters, can benefit from this novel technology. The added-value of the technology for future research in the humanities, in our case medieval history, is demonstrated by means of several illustrative query examples.

United or Bound by Death? A Case-Study on Group Identity and Textual Communities Within The Devotio Moderna

From its origins in the IJssel valley in the Netherlands, the Devotio Moderna developed into one of the most important Northwest European reform movements of the late Middle Ages. A constant concern for the Four Last Things — death, the Last Judgment, heaven, and hell — is often considered as one of the main characteristics of its spirituality and as an important aspect of the New Devout’s cultivation of the practice of self-examination. This essay offers a comparative study of two highly relevant texts of the movement’s devotional preoccupations, namely the Latin De spiritualibus ascensionibus of Gerard Zerbolt of Zutphen and the Middle Dutch Collatien of Johannes Brinckerinck. Both authors belonged to the very first generation of New Devout. Their texts, however, became seminally important at an interval of about half a century and were used at different moments and in different contexts as testimonies to the earliest, charismatic period of the movement. A close analysis of these treatises shows how the...

Remedying the obsolescence of digitised surveys of medieval sources. Narrative Sources and Diplomata Belgica

High level and original basic research in the field of medieval studies is extremely dependent upon reliable heuristic instruments as well as easy access to primary source materials. Within the Humanities, it is the medievalists in particular who have pioneered the use of IT for the editing, description and analysis of primary sources. The projects Narrative Sources and Nouveau Wauters – the latter today called Diplomata Belgica – thus very early on resulted in the development of innovative electronic databases which have proved their usefulness and reliability for more than a decade, and which have had a significant impact on the progress of the study of the medieval Low Countries. An argument which was often used in the 1990s, when scholars and publishers chose to publish new heuristic instruments electronically – whether on CD-Rom or on the Internet – was that in this way the ageing of such instruments could be prevented because of the possibility of continuous updating. Paradoxically, it now seems that electronic publications are among the first to suffer from problems of sustainability due to the rapid evolution of electronic media. Today, both Narrative Sources and Diplomata Belgica are seriously subject to what the Dutch historian Jan Romein has termed the ‘law of the retarding lead’. 2 The two databases are not, however, facing exactly the same problems of obsolescence. Narrative Sources, which was very recently moved under the auspices of the Belgian Royal Historical Commission, has been subjected to a project in which completely new software has been developed. The main challenge to this database is therefore the question of how to make and keep its contents up to date. Diplomata Belgica, on