Wauchier, Is That You? A multi-manuscript authorship analysis of Saint Lambert’s Life

We investigate the possible authorship of the Vie de saint Lambert, an anonymous Old French hagiographic text. Building on previous research that noted a stylistic proximity between this text and the Seint Confessor attributed to Wauchier de Denain, we expand the inquiry across ten manuscripts. Alongside our computational analysis, we provide a brief study of the manuscript tradition and the transmission of the Vita of Saint Lambert within the broader literary genre of hagiography. We work directly with automatic transcriptions from medieval manuscripts, enhancing the tooling for post-processing space errors and lemmatization. We employ the recent Bootstrap Distance Impostors (BDI) approach to improve precision in authorship verification tasks, and propose a methodology for addressing the challenges of massively anonymous corpora in this context. Our results confirm a tendency to attribute the Vie de saint Lambert to Wauchier de Denain, though the stylistic alignment is less marked than in texts firmly attributed to him.