Using statistical smoothing to date medieval manuscripts

Abstract

We discuss the use of multivariate kernel smoothing methods to date manuscripts dating from the 11th to the 15th centuries, in the English county of Essex. The dataset consists of some 3300 dated and 5000 undated manuscripts, and the former are used as a training sample for imputing dates for the latter. It is assumed that two manuscripts that are “close”, in a sense that may be defined by a vector of measures of distance for documents, will have close dates. Using this approach, statistical ideas are used to assess “similarity”, by smoothing among distance measures, and thus to estimate dates for the 5000 undated manuscripts by reference to the dated ones.