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Literary and Linguistic Computing 1998 13(2):77-87; doi:10.1093/llc/13.2.77
© 1998 by Association for Literary & Linguistic Computing
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The Provenance of De Doctrina Christiana, attributed to John Milton: A Statistical Investigation

FIONA J. TWEEDIE1, DAVID I. HOLMES2 and THOMAS N. CORNS3

1University of Glasgow UK
2The College of New Jersey USA
3University of Wales Bangor, UK

This report describes an objective, stylometric investigation into the provenance of De Doctrina Christiana, a theological treatise attributed to John Milton since its discovery in 1823. The question of attribution was re-opened in 1991, provoking a series of papers, one of which makes a plea for analysis of the kind we offer. Frequently occurring words are found to be effective authorial discriminators betweenMilton and the control texts. A clear difference is found between texts from polemic and exegetical genres, and samples from De Doctrina Christiana form into two groups. This heterogeneity forms the last part of the amanuenses, but the Epistle appears to be markedly more Miltonic than does the rest. In addition, postulated insertions into Chapter 10 of Book 1 appear more typical of Milton.


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