Estimating the Loss of Medieval Literature with an Unseen Species Model from Ecodiversity

The century-long loss of documents is one of the major impediments to the study of historic literature. Here we focus on Middle Dutch chivalric epics (ca. 1200-1450), a genre for which little archival records exist that shed light on the survival rates of works and documents. We cast the quantitative estimation of these survival rates as a variant of the unseen species problem from ecodiversity. We apply an established non-parametric method ( Chao1 ) and compare it to a number of common alternatives on simulated data. Finally, we discuss the implications of our results for conventional philolo... Mehr ...