Paper short abstract:

How can digital methods help to identify scribes and production dates of manuscripts, or even clarify the relationships between them? This presentation will demonstrate this with the help of statistical character frequency analysis in several Genji monogatari manuscripts.

Paper long abstract:

The hentaigana (also dōon iji, characters of the same phonetic value written with variant characters) differ from one Genji monogatari manuscript to the next. Until now, predominantly the content of the manuscripts - the text - has been studied. Its variant readings and similarities have been highlighted and used to develop a typology that shows the relation between the individual physical objects. However, research on variants of hentaigana which do not influence the content of the text has not been deemed important as yet and is therefore still in its infancy.

In the last years a great number of manuscripts have been published off- and online, facilitating the comparison of characters among them, and opening up new possibilities for research on variant characters. One way to determine relationships between different manuscripts that could not be determined by traditional methods like paleography is the statistical frequency analysis of hentaigana, especially the source characters they are based on, so-called jibo. This method has in the past been used successfully to identify scribes and production dates.

This presentation will focus on several Genji monogatari manuscripts. It will present the results of a statistical comparison of jibo and correlate it to earlier hypotheses. Firstly, assorted manuscripts written by Fujiwara Teika, his poetry collections, monogatari and diaries will serve as an example to explain the research method. Secondly, the method will be applied, and some scribes and suspected production dates of several Genji monogatari manuscripts will be pointed out.