(Fe)male Voices on Stage: Finding Patterns in Lottery Rhymes of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Low Countries with and without AI

Marly Terwisscha van Scheltinga; Sara Budts; Jeroen Puttevils

doi:10.51769/bmgn-lchr.13872

Author(s)

Marly Terwisscha van Scheltinga University of Antwerp
Sara Budts University of Antwerp
Jeroen Puttevils University of Antwerp

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.51769/bmgn-lchr.13872

Abstract

Dit artikel onderzoekt de patronen in loterijrijmpjes uit de laatmiddeleeuwse en vroegmoderne Lage Landen, met een focus op de rijmpjes geschreven door vrouwen. Loterijen waren een populaire methode om geld op te halen, en de loterijrijmpjes, persoonlijke boodschappen die werden neergeschreven op de loten, zijn een waardevolle bron voor historici. We verzamelden meer dan 11,000 gedigitaliseerde korte teksten afkomstig van vijf loterijen die plaatsvonden tussen 1446 en 1606. In de analyse maakten we gebruik van GysBERT, een taalmodel voor historisch Nederlands, om kenmerkende discoursen voor mannelijke en vrouwelijke auteurs te identificeren. Hoewel GysBERTs resultaten ons op het spoor brachten van enkele interessante patronen, lieten ze ook zien dat de rijmpjes geschreven door mannen en vrouwen niet radicaal van elkaar verschillen. Dit is in lijn met inzichten uit de historiografie over vroegmoderne vrouwen, waarin wordt benadrukt dat vrouwen functioneerden binnen maatschappelijke, en in dit geval ook literaire, conventies. Soms werden deze conventies door vrouwen ondermijnd, soms aangepast, maar soms ook zonder verandering overgenomen.

This article explores the patterns in lottery rhymes produced in the late medieval and early modern Low Countries, with a focus on the rhymes written by women. The lottery was a popular fundraising event in the Low Countries. Lottery rhymes, personal messages attached to the lottery tickets, provide a valuable source for historians. We collected more than 11,000 digitised short texts from five lotteries held between 1446 and 1606. We have used GysBERT, a language model of historical Dutch, to identify distinctively male and female discourses in the lottery rhymes corpus. Although the model pointed us to some interesting patterns, it also showed that lottery rhymes written by men and women do not radically differ from each other. This is consistent with insights from premodern women’s history which stresses that women worked within societal, and in this case literary, conventions, sometimes subverting them, sometimes adapting them, sometimes adopting them unchanged.

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Author Biographies

Marly Terwisscha van Scheltinga, University of Antwerp

Marly Terwisscha van Scheltinga studied Comparative Literature and Medieval Studies in Utrecht, before taking up a PhD position at the University of Antwerp. She is currently finishing her PhD project ‘A Woman’s Lot’, which investigates public speech by early modern women by looking at lottery rhymes. Her research interests are late medieval and early modern women’s history and women’s writing. Her article discussing the first surviving lottery rhymes, ‘Iets of …? De Brugse loterijprozen van 1446’, appeared in Madoc in the spring of 2022. E-mail: marly.terwisschavanscheltinga@uantwerpen.be.
Sara Budts, University of Antwerp

Sara Budts is a postdoctoral researcher in early modern history at the Centre for Urban History at the University of Antwerp. A computational historical linguist by training, Sara’s specialisations include the application of artificial intelligence techniques to historical data. As part of the Back to the Future research project, her current research aims to uncover how people in the past envisioned their future by means of a largescale, partly digital analysis of early modern English merchant letters. E-mail: sara.budts@uantwerpen.be.
Jeroen Puttevils, University of Antwerp

Jeroen Puttevils is associate professor in late medieval history at the Centre for Urban History at the University of Antwerp. He is the project leader of ‘Back to the Future. Future expectations and actions in late medieval and early modern Europe, c.1400 - c.1830’. His research topics include histories of the future, risk, gambling, lotteries and digital historical methods. He has published several articles on the topic of lotteries and lottery rhymes, among which ‘Invoking Fortuna and Speculating on the Future: Lotteries in the 15th and 16th-century Low Countries’, Quaderni storici 52:3 (2017) 699-725. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1408/90446. E-mail: jeroen.puttevils@uantwerpen.be.