The Hand of Antwerp: A Dataset of Middle Dutch Deeds (1300-1355) connected to Jan van Boendale
Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: This abstract introduces a dataset containing images and transcriptions of 470 Middle Dutch deeds, written in Antwerp between ca. 1300 and 1355, the period during which Jan van Boendale was active as a municipal clerk. It includes metadata, digital facsimiles, manual diplomatic transcriptions, and a Handwritten Text Recognition model trained on the corpus. The dataset supports a systematic investigation into whether Boendale's literary works display features of an administrative register, using computational methods to detect intertextual overlap between the deeds and his literary oeuvre. The dataset will be published in the near future, but can already be explored and downloaded via: https://mikekestemont.github.io/deeds-of-antwerp/#/collection/1
Institutions: University of Antwerp, Research Foundation - Flanders
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7154937814
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