It takes a village to write a book: Mapping anonymous contributions in Stephen Langton's Quaestiones Theologiae

Abstract

While the indirect evidence suggests that already in the early scholastic period the literary production based on records of oral teaching (so-called reportationes) was not uncommon, there are very few sources commenting on the practice. This paper details the design of a study applying stylometric techniques of authorship attribution to a collection developed from reportationes -- Stephen Langton's Quaestiones Theologiae -- aiming to uncover layers of editorial work and thus validate some hypotheses regarding the collection's formation. Following Camps, Clérice, and Pinche (2021), I discuss the implementation of an HTR pipeline and stylometric analysis based on the most frequent words, POS tags, and pseudo-affixes. The proposed study will offer two methodological gains relevant to computational research on the scholastic tradition: it will directly compare performance on manually composed and automatically extracted data, and it will test the validity of transformer-based OCR and automated transcription alignment for workflows applied to scholastic Latin corpora. If successful, this study will provide an easily reusable template for the exploratory analysis of collaborative literary production stemming from medieval universities.