Abstract
This paper presents a case of disputed authorship concerning a literary medieval text, the Old French romance Guillaume d’Angleterre, and describes a new attempt to use the mathematical method of authorship attribution called the "method of pattern recognition”. After presenting an overview of previous approaches to the problem of the authorship of this text, I argue for the advantages of a statistical syntactic based method for authorship attribution of medieval texts. The method of pattern recognition consists in the identification of a domain of syntactic parameters and a measurement of the proximity or distance of texts as located in a multi-dimensional syntactic space. I find that the medieval text most likely belongs to Chrétien de Troyes, one of the most famous French authors of the twelfth century. I present for the first time an attempt to apply the method of pattern recognition to determine the authorship of a medieval text written in Old French.
Highlights
The question of the authorship of Guillaume d’Angleterre, a French romance commonly dated to around 1170, has been discussed for more than a century by eminent medievalists in France and abroad
The main reason for this interest is the potential attribution of the text to Chrétien de Troyes, one of the most important French medieval writers and the so-called “father of French romance”
All the five romances by Chrétien de Troyes are found in the Guiot copy which served as a base manuscript for this edition
Summary
The question of the authorship of Guillaume d’Angleterre, a French romance commonly dated to around 1170, has been discussed for more than a century by eminent medievalists in France and abroad. The latest edition of the text of the romance based on the manuscript P was published in 2007 by Christine Ferlampin-Acher.[25] The name of Chrétien de Troyes with a question mark in brackets might make us think that the editor approves the attribution, but this is not the case She supports the opinion that without the name in the prologue, serving as a basis for the authorship, such an idea would never have arisen among scholars. All the five romances by Chrétien de Troyes (but not Guillaume d’Angleterre) are found in the Guiot copy (manuscript P with the number BnF 794) which served as a base manuscript for this edition This manuscript presents the evident advantage of having been copied by the same person, or in the worst case, in the same workshop,[34] using identical modes and procedures, something which neutralizes divergences that could appear if the texts were copied by different copyists. It consists in the creation of an initial data matrix and in the transformation of this matrix into a matrix of Euclidian distances between the objects, as presented below: Romances
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