JOHANNES BRUGMAN’S STYLE AND LEXICOSTATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF A COLLECTION OF SERMONS FROM SAINT AGNES CONVENT IN MAASEIK

Abstract

This article is devoted to a stylometric study of Johannes Brugman’s sermons collected in the manuscript Gent UB hs. 1301, created and used by the nuns of the convent of Saint Agnes in Maaseik. The study was an attempt to refute the claim that the 10 most closely related texts of Brugman’s oeuvre would show common patterns that can be detected by lexico-statistical methods. The method of research is the analysis of the most frequent function words in the texts. The analysis of the ten most frequent words leads to the conclusion that nine out of ten sermons demonstrate patterns in the use of conjunctions: ende ‘and’ is the most frequent lemma, followed by die and dat, which can mean ‘which, this, these, that, those’. The probability of a deviation (shifting one of the elements further than third place in the ranking or ende not in the first place) increases in inverse proportion to the volume of the sermon text. The discovery of patterns in the use of service words suggests that the study has failed to refute the assumption that individual stylistic features of Brugman’s sermons can be detected.