Abstract
Jan van Boendale (c. 1280-1351?) was a highly influential Middle Dutch author in the 14th century, combining a job as city clerk in Antwerp with writing didactic literary works. Despite being the first Dutch author on whom we have substantial biographical information, few studies have systematically (1) assessed the influence of his historical positionality on his author function or (2) considered his oeuvre as a whole. This is due to the complex issue of authorship in the texts of the so-called 'Antwerp School', which makes the delineation of Boendale's oeuvre a notorious 'cold case' in Dutch literary history. This project will first delineate Boendale's oeuvre using computational authorship verification methods. Next, it will use those works to assess how Boendale's positionality influenced his author function. It will approach his positionality from three distinct angles: Boendale as a clerk, as a city dweller, and as a man. These angles feed directly into my research questions: how his positionality regarding the three aspects influenced his literary writings. Each research question will have a distinct methodology (computational text reuse detection, topic modeling and word field analysis respectively), advancing the application of computational research methods in medieval literature studies. Key to this project is the awareness that the historical Jan van Boendale need not always have been congruent to his narrators, an aspect that has been overlooked in the past.
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