Annette von Stockhausen: Establishing the Corpus Severianum with computer-assisted approaches

While only three or four homilies are directly attested by at least one manuscript as written by Severian of Gabala (and some more by indirect attestation), there are more than 100 homilies for which modern research has proposed (or denied) Severian authorship.Among others, Zellinger, Uthemann, and Voicu have made approaches to develop criteria to determine Severian authorship, mostly based on stilistic and linguistic deliberation, and sometimes also on the content of the homilies.In this paper I'd like to propose and evaluate a computer-assisted approach to establish the Corpus Severianum (using a comparative corpus of more than 600 more or less contemporary homilies with more than 5 million words). Methods used (among others) are stilometry and an examination of the peculiarities of biblical quotations.