MARBAS in collaboration with the Center for Digital Humanities is excited to host a talk by Mike Kestemont, Full Research Professor of Literature at the University of Antwerp:

Despite the considerable loss of material sources, medieval literature has managed to survive in a colorful diversity of forms. Scholars believe that the number of extant manuscripts tells us something about the historic popularity of works. But what happens when we subject the surviving corpus of chivalric romances to large-scale computational analysis? This talk takes inspiration from the field of ecology to model the abundance of medieval literature. This approach not only offers principled methods to tackle the complex issue of lost medieval texts but also sheds light on the broader aspect of latent cultural diversity.