The One and Only? Authorship Verification on Jan van Boendale and the Middle Dutch Antwerp School

This study investigates the authorship of the so-called Antwerp School, a cluster of eleven interrelated historiographic and didactic Middle Dutch texts produced in early fourteenth-century Antwerp. Although traditionally attributed at least in part to Jan van Boendale, the extent of his contribution remains contested. To assess whether these texts (or a subselection of them) could have been written by a single author, computational authorship verification methods are applied. To this end, lemmatised rhyme-word bigrams are represented as TF-IDF vectors, and their stylistic similarity is measured using cosine distance. The analysis combines four complementary approaches: threshold-based authorship verification, dimensionality reduction, authorship ranking in the form of a bootstrapped nearest neighbour evaluation, and intertextual similarity detection. Across all approaches, consistent stylistic patterns emerged within the Antwerp School — especially between Brabantsche yeesten and Van den derden Eduwaert, as well as between Melibeus and Dietsche doctrinale — supporting the maximalist hypothesis of single authorship.